I picked up Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by David Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright at Half Price Books the other day, and it was a very interesting read. The authors argue there are five stages for employees:
- Stage 1 is aggressive hostility (“life sucks”, needless to say most of those people don’t last long, or are unemployed more than they’re employed),
- Stage 2 is apathetic passivity (“my life sucks” where people don’t put in their best effort for the company that employs them for various reasons),
- Stage 3 is “lone warrior ethos (“I’m great… but you’re not”)
- Stage 4 is the stage to aim for (“we’re great”, where a company doesn't name a rival as an adversary but, say, a disease it wants to eradicate, like cancer or poverty)
- Stage 5 is basically worldwide enlightenment or what the authors call innocent wonderment (“life is great”).
I liked a lot the advice the authors give to help managers guide employees toward a higher stage. To move a Stage 2 person toward Stage 3, introduce that person to a Stage 3 employee, who will typically enjoy mentoring people to make them more like himself or herself (but won’t want them to become more successful than him/her). In other words, create dyads (groups of two people). To move a Stage 3 person toward a Stage 4, introduce the Stage 3 employee to two people, i.e., create triads. Note that you shouldn’t do that too early, i.e., don’t try that with a Stage 2 person.
I just loved the concept of triads, and started thinking about triads in academia. (The authors say their concepts apply to higher ed, but the two examples they give are USC’s Steven Sample and Stanford’s David Kelley.) Because a tribe is typically 50 to 150 people, a university is often a tribe of tribes, where each school is a tribe and the Deans are the Tribal Leaders.
Traditional higher ed is organized in terms of dyads: for instance, the student comes to see the professor in office hours, or for a research meeting, or even in class the exchange of information is from the teacher to the student even if many students are in class at the same time. It seems that a lot of universities are at Stage 2 or 3. But triads offer the opportunity to do something quite innovative in academia.
An obvious example is team-teaching, but it is more complicated than having Professor 1 teach the first half of a course and Professor 2 the second half (this would be a succession of dyads.) What has to happen is that the two professors interact with each other so that their thinking and teaching is affected by their interaction.
This would be also true of a student double-majoring who is assigned an advisor in each major: the traditional model would be of two dyads, but a triad model would allow the student to get the most benefit from the double major because the two advisors would also interact with each other. Another triad would be of a student with an advisor in the major and an advisor for the core curriculum (the curriculum every student has to take no matter which major he chooses.)
Because each school is basically its own tribe, there would be great value in having triadic relations across schools: for instance, the Dean of the Graduate School introducing two professors from different schools to each other. Some grant programs require at least two principal investigators, each from a different department, but if it is only those two it is a dyadic relationship. Cluster hires are most meaningful when they can introduce people from different departments and schools to each other. Other triadic relationships would include an undergraduate student, a graduate student and a faculty member on a research project. An interesting comment the authors make is that Stage 4 leaders they have met typically only have meetings with 2 or more other employees: they don’t “waste their time” with one-on-one coffee chats anymore, for instance. Instead, they prefer playing “matchmakers”. The authors also argue that Tribal Leaders should first elucidate what the tribe stands for (values) and what it lives for (noble cause).
I do think the authors could have explored some topics in more depth. For instance, what do you do when management thinks the company is at a Stage 4 when most employees are actually at Stage 2? There would have been a good opportunity to explore resonant vs dissonant/delusional leadership. Also, a key concept in the book is tribal pride, but it is not explored in any detail at all. How many managers think of their work as giving their employees a reason to feel proud about their company? It seems to me that a lot of Stage 2 employees are at Stage 2 precisely because they think their job and their company is nothing to be proud of. A manager who doesn’t try to see the situation from his employees’ eyes, thinking “what are they proud of when they come to work?” is probably not excelling at his job, because he’s not thinking about how to get top loyalty from his people.
The book also has a helpful “cheat sheet” in Appendix A that goes over the key features of each stage and the leverage points of managers to upgrade tribal culture.
Overall, a very worthy read!
