Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

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Chapter One

Corporate Tribes

Every organization is really a set of small towns. If you're from a small town, think of the people there. If you're not, think of, as Don Henley sings, "that same small town in each of us." There are the business executive and the sheriff. There's the town scandal—the preacher's wife and the schoolteacher. There's talk of who will be the next mayor, who will move away, and the price of grain (or oil or the Wal-Mart starting wage). There's the high school, where the popular kid, the son of the town's sheriff, throws a party the weekend his father is away. There are the church crowd, the bar friends, the single people, the book club, the bitter enemies. There are also the ones who are the natural leaders, who explain why the party at the sheriff's house seemed like a good idea at the time and how sorry they are for the beer stains on the carpet.

The people are different in every town, and the roles are never exactly the same. But there are more similarities than differences, and the metaphor itself always holds, from companies in Nebraska to ones in New York or Kuala Lumpur.

We call these small towns tribes, and they form so naturally it's as though our tribe is part of our genetic code. Tribes helped humans survive the last ice age, build farming communities, and, later, cities. Birds flock, fish school, people "tribe."

A tribe is a group between 20 and 150 people. Here's the test for whether someone is in one of your tribes: if you saw her walking down the street, you'd stop and say "hello." The members ofyour tribe are probably programmed into your cell phone and in your e-mail address book. The "150" number comes from Robin Dunbar's research, which was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. When a tribe approaches this number, it naturally splits into two tribes.

Some of the corporate tribes we've seen include the high-potential managers of one of the world's largest financial ser-vices companies; the doctors, nurses, and administrators of one of America's most respected healthcare institutions; the research and development division of a mammoth high-tech firm; the operational executives of a major drug company; and the students of the executive MBA program at the University of Southern California.

Tribes in companies get work done—sometimes a lot of work—but they don't form because of work. Tribes are the basic building block of any large human effort, including earning a living. As such, their influence is greater than that of teams, entire companies, and even superstar CEOs. In companies, tribes decide whether the new leader is going to flourish or get taken out. They determine how much work gets done, and of what quality.

Some tribes demand excellence for everyone, and are constantly evolving. Others are content to do the minimum to get by. What makes the difference in performance? Tribal Leaders.

Tribal Leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe—or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as the leaders, giving them top effort, cultlike loyalty, and a track record of success. Divisions and companies run by Tribal Leaders set the standard of performance in their industries, from productivity and profitability to employee retention. They are talent magnets, with people so eager to work for the leader that they will take a pay cut if necessary. Tribal Leaders receive so many promotions in such a short time that people often spread buzz that they will be the next CEO. Their efforts seem effortless, leaving many people puzzled by how they do it. Many Tribal Leaders, if asked, can't articulate what they are doing that's different, but after reading this book, you will be able to explain and duplicate their success.

A Tribal Leader many of us know from history is George Washington. His single major contribution was in changing thirteen diverse colonies into one people. If we look into what Washington actually did, he built a single identity (measurable by what people said) to a series of networked tribes. One was the affluent class in Virginia society, perhaps fewer than a hundred people. Another was the Continental Congress, originally fifty-five delegates. The third was the officer class of the Continental Army. Each time, Washington led the group to unity by recognizing its "tribalness," by getting its members to talk about what unified them: valuing freedom, hating the king's latest tax, or wanting to win the fight. As he built the common cause in each tribe, a mission gelled and they embraced "we're great" language. Washington's brilliance in each case was that the man and the cause became synonymous, with the leader shaping the tribe and the tribe calling forth the leader. This is how Tribal Leadership works: the leader upgrades the tribe as the tribe embraces the leader. Tribes and leaders create each other.

Before we move on, a few words about our method. We're at the end of a ten-year set of research studies that involved twenty-four thousand people in two dozen organizations, with members around the world. We derived each concept, tip, and principle in this book from this research. What moved us, and what we hope moves you, is not the statistical side of the analysis but the people we met along the way—people who live the principles, who make life better for millions of employees, customers, and residents of their communities. As a result, we've written this book around the individuals who moved us.

Our guiding metaphor is this: most popular business books are like log cabins, cozy and warm with a blazing fire. They're comfortable, life affirming, and filled with snapshots of people and moments. They're fun to read, and the principles in them resonate within our experiences as true. The log cabin is built on anecdotes, however, and as we look back to fifty years of them, many have . . .