In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright, and John King contend that organizations succeed or fail on the strength of their tribes—groups of individuals with shared social norms and ways of working. They argue that you can improve your organization by elevating the cultures of those tribes, and if you implement their strategies, the authors say you’ll improve both your bottom line and the happiness of your employees.
Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright bring diverse expertise to the table. Logan is a senior lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business and a business consultant through his company, CultureSync, while King coaches executives in leadership skills. Fischer-Wright is a licensed physician and former business consultant. Tribal Leadership synthesizes their shared expertise in business management, leadership, and cultural transformation.
Our guide begins by presenting the “tribes” framework—what a tribe is, how tribal cultures develop through five stages, and what a tribal leader does. We’ll give an overview of what the stages are and how they work, before detailing each of the five tribal stages’ characteristics and how to level up to the next stage.
The authors explain that humans instinctively form tribes—in other words, we’ve evolved to organize ourselves in medium-sized groups of like-minded people. A tribe is a group of 20 to 150 people who readily recognize one another and generally get along. A tribe is a social network before it’s a work group. For example, the people you instinctively reach out to in crises are part of your tribe. An organization can have multiple tribes.
According to the authors, the strength of an organization’s tribes determines the strength of the organization. In turn, the strength of a tribe depends on its culture—how the members speak, relate to values, and form relationships. For example, if a tribe is made of ambitious, values-driven team players, it’ll contribute positively to the organization.
(Shortform note: While the authors don’t provide a source for this number, the upper bound of 150 matches “Dunbar’s number,” a theoretical upper limit to the number of close relationships that a human can maintain. Dunbar calculated this number by comparing primate brain sizes to group size, and for humans, he found hunter-gatherer communities were “almost exactly 150” members.)
The authors say that tribes develop through five distinct stages:
Additionally, the authors mention a fifth stage, at which teams perform ”world-changing innovation,” but they acknowledge that exploring it was beyond the scope of Tribal Leadership at the time of publication.
The World of Developmental Stage Models
With these five stages, the authors step into the field of adult development, a branch of science that attempts to model how humans develop into young adulthood and throughout life. This field continues the work of psychologists who studied child development, such as Jean Piaget, who pioneered a theory of childhood cognitive stages.
Developmental models suggest that there are distinct, discrete stages that people go through as they age—stages that we can measure, describe, and verify. Theorists also describe different developmental lines, such as cognitive, social, and spiritual development. In The Listening Society, Hanzi Freinacht explains that there are domain-specific and domain-general developmental models. Tribal Leadership is a domain-specific model—it attempts to explain how individuals, tribes, culture, and leaders develop in a business context.
Each of these five stages exhibits several key markers:
Spiral Dynamics and Tribal Leadership
In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan lay out their developmental stage model—a model from which the authors of Tribal Leadership draw. In Spiral Dynamics, each stage corresponds to a “value meme” (differentiated by colors), or a coherent system of values (a worldview).
A person at a given stage expresses their value meme through their characteristic behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, problem areas, and so on. In this guide, we’ve placed the emphasis on how a tribe’s language expresses its values since, unlike Spiral Dynamics, the authors of Tribal Leadership avoid discussing anything “interior” to the person, such as beliefs or attitudes.
According to the authors, the tribal leader upgrades her tribe by coaching individuals one at a time until the whole tribe levels up. She learns to recognize the two key markers of each cultural stage, and she uses them to identify the tribes in her organization and start to upgrade their cultures. Then, a tribal leader coaches people one at a time through the two core coaching opportunities of each stage: Changing the individual’s language and relationships.
The authors assert that when a tribal leader helps enough individuals upgrade their stage, the entire tribe will “tip over” into that next stage. Some tribe members will head toward higher stages before others, but once the leader creates that critical mass of aspiring individuals, the whole culture will level up.
Critical Mass and the Flywheel Effect
The authors’ notions of cultural transformation and of the leader-tribe relationship invoke one underlying principle—build momentum—in two forms:
Create a critical mass: By accumulating enough energy moving toward the next stage up, you create a self-reinforcing feedback loop. In other words, get enough people on board and they’ll continue to fuel the cultural transformation even when you stop actively pushing the tribe along.
Create a flywheel effect: By developing and inspiring her tribe, the leader gains reciprocal goodwill and effort from the tribe members. As she “pushes” the cultural flywheel with her efforts, the tribe “pushes” along as well and, in time, they create a self-sustaining feedback loop that further develops the leader and tribe.
The authors explain that at Stage 1, individuals see the world as a harsh, dog-eat-dog environment. Their lives are generally cruel and punishing, and they become both miserable and tough.
For the individual at Stage 1, things have never been easy. He likely grew up in poverty and has been exposed to criminal influences. Stage 1 individuals often resort to crime or have major vices, such as a drug addiction. Because of this, Stage 1 individuals struggle to hold down work—the authors say that they make up just 2% of the workforce. Stage 1 has two markers:
(Shortform note: Tribal Leadership’s Stage 1 corresponds to the “beige” level or “value meme” from Spiral Dynamics. At beige, a person’s primary concern is survival, and he lives largely from instinct. In general, he aims to meet his physiological needs—food, water, shelter, sex—and can’t spare much thought for self-development. Given this, it makes sense that Stage 1 individuals don’t see life as bright, open, or full of potential.)
The authors explain that a tribal leader can coach an individual from Stage 1 to Stage 2 using the two core coaching opportunities:
According to the authors, three changes mark a successful shift from Stage 1 to Stage 2:
Develop a Coaching Habit
While the authors don’t explain coaching in-depth, Michael Stanier offers a simple solution in The Coaching Habit: Develop a daily habit of coaching your team members. Specifically, Stanier recommends asking good questions and listening more than you speak. Three of Stanier’s questions apply best to Stage 1:
“What’s on your mind?”—This gently opens the conversation.
“Anything else?”—This encourages people to say things that might be difficult to say.
“How can I support you?”—This communicates that you hear, see, and want to help this person.
By using these questions well, you can build a relationship with a Stage 1 individual who’s likely never had support, and you can guide him to a healthier way of living.
The authors explain that Stage 2 culture is an apathetic mood characterized by passivity and disinterest in the work at hand. This culture is common at places such as the post office, chain retail stores, and other menial jobs.
In a Stage 2 culture, everyone fixates on the negatives, allowing their circumstances to define them. Since negativity is contagious, this creates a downward spiral that yields a perpetually unhappy atmosphere. As with Stage 1, Stage 2 has two key markers:
Robert Kegan’s Developmental Stages
Stage 2 of Tribal Leadership corresponds to Robert Kegan’s model of ethical, social, and cognitive development. For clarity, we’ll refer to it as “the communal mode.” Stage 2 exists in the communal mode, wherein individuals understand themselves based on how others see them. Collectively, people adhere to group norms and avoid taboos.
Since group norms are paramount, people in a Stage 2 office show solidarity when someone complains about work. Kegan’s model illuminates why Stage 2 cultures perpetuate a low bar of mediocrity: In the communal mode, it’s very difficult to break the status quo. Doing so would mean losing many of your relationships and being ostracized.
To coach individuals to Stage 3, find the few who are ready to level up and work with them one-on-one using the authors’ three steps:
Two main changes mark a successful shift from Stage 2 to Stage 3, according to the authors:
Encourage Nonlinear Development
Tribal Leadership presents a linear progression up the stages within one company. But while we’ve long thought of careers as climbing rungs on a ladder, a linear career path doesn’t always make sense. Instead, today’s workers must learn to navigate an unpredictable, ever-changing landscape of opportunities, finding a less direct path to career success and fulfillment.
When using Tribal Leadership’s coaching tactics, help your mentees understand that they don’t necessarily need to pursue a linear career. Encourage them to develop transferable skills, such as writing or productivity skills, so that they have more options when searching for roles. Last, kindle an employee’s ambition by finding what motivates them and giving frequent feedback. This way, you can assign her to tasks that develop her skills and help her clearly see how she’s doing.
The authors describe Stage 3 as the domain of “lone warriors,” where big egos jockey for power and personal accomplishment. It’s the most common culture, and where most professionals spend much of their careers. Stage 3 is highly individualistic, so members don’t see themselves as a tribe. However, they still share a particular culture: Shark-like competition, power politics, and high ambition.
(Shortform note: Recent trends suggest that collaboration is replacing the competitive workplace. About 88% of the millennial workforce reports that they prefer collaboration over competition. To the millennial employee, happiness and overall fulfillment matters more than career success, so many millennials might be jumping right to Stage 4 to avoid the ferocious competition of a Stage 3 work environment.)
The authors explain that Stage 3 has two distinct markers:
(Shortform note: In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan describe an “orange” value meme that corresponds to Tribal Leadership’s Stage 3. “Orange” individuals aspire to improve themselves, and they use rational, strategic thinking to dominate and win. In the workplace, Stage 3 individuals can be antagonistic and difficult, but they recognize that individualism contributes to innovation—think of people such as Steve Jobs, who demonstrated what audacious individual ambition can create.)
The authors describe two key coaching opportunities for helping individuals move from Stage 3 to Stage 4. Work one-on-one with Stage 3 individuals who are ready to make the shift.
(Shortform note: While the authors don’t cohere their coaching tactics into an overall system or framework, consider that you might not need a singular coaching system. Instead, gather a variety of tools and techniques into a coaching “toolkit,” or a repertoire that you can continually add to. For instance, you might combine the authors’ techniques with Kim Scott’s strategies from Radical Candor, in which she argues that bosses can better manage relationships by caring personally and challenging directly. By combining tips and tactics from a variety of sources, you can develop a skill set that’s tailored to your own needs.)
The authors describe three changes that mark a successful shift to Stage 4:
(Shortform note: In Team of Teams, Stanley McChrystal explains how, when you develop people who trust one another and have a shared purpose, you strengthen the small units (such as teams or tribes) that make up your organization. In Navy SEAL training, prospective SEALs spend six months in groups of five to eight, and they learn to communicate clearly, trust and take cues from one another, and operate as a unit. The SEALs’ trust and shared purpose create a strong, unified team, and this same principle can create strong teams or tribes in your organizations too.)
According to the authors, just under a quarter of the modern workforce exhibits Stage 4 culture. Like the previous stages, Stage 4 has two characteristic markers: its language and its relationships.
Marker #1: Tribe-Focused language. In a Stage 4 culture, the prevailing mood is one of camaraderie and authenticity. Tribe members and leaders feel that they’re doing great work, and they openly express it—leaders usually credit their tribe for any success, while tribe members praise the leader. This language also expresses the tribe’s values, which keep members aligned toward a common mission.
(Shortform note: The authors’ description of a Stage 4 tribe evokes the camaraderie of a sports team, wherein the team’s success explicitly depends on how good team members feel about themselves and each other. In this same vein, some collaborative companies use sports-themed retrospectives to review their work and stay aligned, since sports offer a rich array of team-building exercises and wisdom to draw from.)
Marker #2: Strong, networked relationships. To the Stage 4 person, the tribe comes first, so he’s always looking to build strong relationships or introduce people he thinks might work well together. The authors explain that these relationships typically have three members.
(Shortform note: The McKinsey Institute suggests that successful organizational change often comes from focusing on the informal networks within your company, rather than trying to restructure the various departments and teams of a typical organizational chart. They argue that these networks determine what gets done, much like the authors’ view of tribes.)
According to the authors, a tribe must establish and live its core values and find a purpose to stabilize at Stage 4. When the tribe has a solid foundation of values and an inspiring purpose to pursue, they come together and become more effective and innovative at work.
The authors offer these tactics for finding and living your values:
Values Form a Core Philosophy
In Built to Last, Jim Collins explains that companies that achieve lasting success operate on a core philosophy—values that guide the company through thick and thin. To develop a core philosophy, consider Collins’s steps:
Craft your core philosophy with five to seven employees who already exemplify it, as opposed to working with the whole tribe.
Keep it concise. Stating your values plainly clarifies them for everyone.
Limit yourself to three to six core values. Any more, and it’s no longer an essential core so much as a loose list.
After establishing shared values, a Stage 4 tribe must find a worthy purpose—the tribe’s North Star, or overriding direction. The authors recommend making this purpose audacious rather than realistic, since boldness unites people better than an easy, unambitious aim. They give two ways to find a worthy purpose:
(Shortform note: Instead of starting with values, the Harvard Business Review writes that a company’s purpose comes first. They define “purpose” as “your company’s reason for being,” and say it acts as the center of a “compass” that guides a company’s values, strategy, brand, and vision. A purpose should differentiate the company and suggest its values: For instance, a minimalist, sustainable footwear brand might stand for “healthier feet and a healthier planet.”)
The authors describe three main changes that occur when an individual has stabilized at Stage 4.
(Shortform note: In Team of Teams, Stanley McChrystal explains how he transformed the US Task Force in Iraq. Like the authors of Tribal Leadership, he emphasizes building trust and aligning people with a common purpose. Applying these principles to the Task Force, he created a networked organization that had “shared consciousness,” or a unified mindset similar to the tribal unity the authors cite. McChrystal notes that organizational development is an ongoing effort—leaders need to continually fight against complacency and always adapt to the changing business environment.)
In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright, and John King describe how to improve an organization by leveling up its culture. An organization is made of tribes—socially networked groups of 20 to 150 people—and the cultures of those tribes determine the organization’s performance and its members’ happiness.
A tribal leader is someone who builds a higher-level tribe by coaching its members to develop their skills and become team players. As this leader coaches tribe members to higher stages, the tribe’s culture will transform, and the overall organization will perform far better. According to the authors, using the strategies in Tribal Leadership will improve your bottom line, and your employees will become more motivated, productive, and happy.
Logan is a faculty member at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, where he teaches in the MBA program and served as associate dean for four years. He’s the co-founder of CultureSync, a management consulting firm, and he’s written or co-written five books, including Tribal Leadership and The Three Laws of Performance.
Fischer-Wright is president and CEO of Medical Group Management Association, as well as a former physician and management consultant. Fischer-Wright has held numerous leadership positions in the health care industry, and she’s been recognized as a top 100 leader in health care for several years.
King is an executive-level coach and co-author of The Coaching Revolution, as well as a trainer, speaker, and teacher. He has extensive teaching experience at schools including the USC Marshall School of Business, the University of Arizona Eller College of Management, the Central Eurasian Leadership Academy, and the Middle East Leadership Academy. King also facilitates The Samurai Game, an intensive leadership simulation meant to teach leadership in the heat of battle.
Connect with Logan, Fischer-Wright, and King:
Tribal Leadership was first published in 2008 by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins. It’s the single book on which Logan, Fischer-Wright, and King have collaborated.
According to the authors, Tribal Leadership draws from the work of Don Beck and Chris Cowan in Spiral Dynamics, which presents a model of adult development that draws in turn from Clare W. Graves’s theory of emergent cyclical levels of existence. Graves, a professor of psychology at Union College, theorized that adults develop various psychosocial coping mechanisms to deal with existential challenges, such as conforming with group norms to preserve self-esteem.
Following Graves’s lead, Beck and Cowan developed Spiral Dynamics, a model to explain how individuals and value systems develop. Similar to Graves’s model, Spiral Dynamics holds that people develop value systems and corresponding behaviors in response to the demands of their environments—for example, Westerners in a modern society tend to seek individualistic success, pursue “the good life,” and act pragmatically to win.
In The Listening Society, Hanzi Freinacht argues that numerous “domain-specific” models attempt to explain adult development along particular lines. Tribal Leadership presents one such model, aimed at explaining adult professional development and organizational-cultural development within a traditional business context. The authors’ model follows the convention of describing various stages of development, and it uses values, language, and behavior as the metrics with which it delineates stages.
Today, Tribal Leadership is one of a bevy of business books that describe various approaches to culture and leadership, and it may have sparked early movement toward today’s paradigm of collaborative work cultures. At the time of first publication, the authors wrote extensively on Stage 3’s individualism-fueled problems; however, they acknowledge in the afterword of the 2011 edition that millennials resisted Stage 3 and instead demanded collaborative, fair workplaces. A decade later, that trend has unfolded into a sizable shift toward Stage 4, where teamwork predominates.
Additionally, Tribal Leadership may have started the conversation about the power that informal workplace networks have over top-down structures. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize that tribes—which are social networks more than work teams—determine what gets done, and they avoid using traditional org charts to model how a business “should” structure itself. This approach is less precise, so it doesn’t give the comfortable feeling of certainty that comes with neatly boxing things up. However, the authors’ effort to communicate the messy, organic process of discovering and upgrading the tribes within an organization—which are harder to define—has led to network mapping approaches that have various advantages over org-chart-based restructuring.
Online reviewers applaud Tribal Leadership’s clear descriptions of various business cultures, its “aha” moments in its discussion of triad-based networking, and the chapter-by-chapter summaries of key points. Others praise the clear writing and effectively structured chapters.
Critical reviewers dislike the book’s focus on theory over practice, saying that the authors are consultants rather than practitioners. Some readers feel the book is repetitive, and some say that the authors get too caught up in their own model without providing evidence to support their claims.
Tribal Leadership presents a thorough description of various corporate cultures. The authors’ detailed model of tribes and their development makes clear how culture impacts success, though they don’t show plainly that their methods have created any such culture. Instead, they relate anecdotes of cultures that became effective through trial and error—and they acknowledge that many leaders develop their tribes instinctively, rather than by following a model.
The authors offer plenty of actionable tips for coaching individuals to higher levels of productivity and fulfillment. Moreover, the emphasis on tribes as social structures helps to make sense of why the shared mood of an organization determines how well people perform.
The book’s chapters follow a clear progression, from introducing the main concepts to describing each stage in order, and are interspersed with chapters to elaborate on pivotal points in the process. While this organization is broadly effective, each chapter moves between descriptions of the individuals, tribes, and organizations at each stage, so it’s sometimes unclear to which entity the author’s tips and advice apply.
Further, the authors scatter various coaching tips and “technical notes” throughout each chapter. Each chapter ends with a succinct list of key takeaways that helps the reader to recall and retain the ideas.
Our guide presents Tribal Leadership in four parts, focusing on the five stages and how to level up individuals and tribes. We’ll first introduce the key concepts, including what tribes and tribal leaders are, and we’ll then cover each stage:
Since the authors present a developmental stage model, we’ve introduced additional stage models and concepts that make sense of the developmental approach. In particular, we compare their model to Spiral Dynamics, which the authors say influenced their work. Throughout the guide, we’ve also expanded on their perspectives with ideas from business books including Leadership and Self-Deception, What You Do Is Who You Are, and Good Strategy Bad Strategy.
Tribal Leadership is an approach to organizational development that puts culture first. Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright, and John King contend that organizations succeed or fail on the strength of their cultures, and that we can improve our organizations by upgrading our cultures. More specifically, we need to develop the tribes—groups that share ways of thinking, interacting, and working—that make up our organizations.
Implement the strategies of Tribal Leadership effectively, the authors say, and you’ll see improvement to your bottom line. Your employees will also be more motivated, more productive, and happier.
Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright bring diverse expertise to the table. Logan is a senior lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business, and has consulted for over a decade through his company CultureSync, while King coaches executives in leadership skills. Fischer-Wright is a licensed physician and former business consultant whose work aims to create high-performance cultures in health care. Tribal Leadership synthesizes their shared expertise in business management, leadership, and cultural transformation.
In Part 1 of this guide, we’ll explain the “tribes” framing—what a tribe is, how tribal cultures develop through five stages, and what a tribal leader does. We’ll explain what stages are and how they work, and we’ll overview the five stages.
The authors explain that humans instinctively form tribes—we’ve evolved to organize ourselves in groups of like-minded people. A tribe is a group of 20 to 150 people who readily recognize one another and generally get along. Crucially, a tribe is a social network before it’s a work group. For example, the people you instinctively reach out to during crises are part of your tribe.
We also instinctively coordinate large undertakings through our tribes. Working together, a tribe can accomplish things that no one can do alone. Think of the numerous connections between founders, partners, and supportive peers that it takes to launch a successful startup.
(Shortform note: While the authors don’t provide a source for this number, the upper bound of 150 matches “Dunbar’s number,” a theoretical upper limit to the number of close relationships that a human can maintain. Robin Dunbar, the professor who calculated this number, explains that he found it by comparing primate brain sizes to group size. For humans, he found that the communities within hunter-gatherer tribes were composed of “almost exactly 150” members.)
Within large organizations, multiple tribes form, usually within different departments. Thus an organization is a “tribe of tribes,” according to the authors. For instance, Google has tribes within marketing, the Gmail team, and Google AI, all aligned under Google’s overall values.
(Shortform note: While tribes might seem like “teams,” there are a few key differences. A team is usually an official structure created by the organization. In contrast, tribes are informal groupings of people who think, feel, and act alike. The two can overlap: In a small web design firm, the marketing team can be both a team and part of the companywide tribe—that is, they have formal, shared work duties and informal tribal likenesses, such as their values. And while teams exist within an organization, a tribe might include people who don’t hold formal roles in the company—such as the partners who provide templates or quality control to the firm.)
Given that humans coordinate large efforts through our tribes, the authors explain that an organization’s rules and regulations influence its success less than the quality of its tribes. For example, Walmart issues corporate bylaws that technically govern how each store operates, but the tribes within a given store determine how well it actually runs.
Put another way, the strength of an organization’s tribes determines the strength of the organization. If a business attracts ambitious team players who form strong tribes, it’s more likely to succeed. If that business hires mediocre, uninspired workers, it’s more likely to struggle.
This is because the tribes determine the culture, and culture may disregard organizational rules. According to the authors, the stronger the tribe’s culture, the more it contributes to organizational success. A tribe’s culture comprises the way members speak, relate to values, and form relationships.
Do Tribes or Leadership Determine Culture?
In contrast to the authors’ assertion that tribes determine culture, Ben Horowitz argues in What You Do is Who You Are that the leader of an organization determines the culture. In his view, the leader is responsible for setting an example through her behaviors and by how she lives out her values. This example should then cascade downward and communicate to employees how they’re expected to behave.
Further, Horowitz suggests that corporate policies are actually a feature of the culture. This might be true when they communicate the values and strengths of the leader. However, this contrasts directly with the view of Tribal Leadership’s authors that the leader serves her tribes rather than trying to tell them how to behave. In practice, both views likely hold partial truth: A strong leader must lead by example, modeling the virtues that she wants her people to strive for; at the same time, a leader listens to her people and doesn’t try to dominate or control the whole culture.
The authors explain that tribes develop through five stages. As tribes advance through the stages, productivity and employee satisfaction increase.
Most often, an individual defaults to the stage of the tribe she works with. For instance, an ambitious young person who gets a job at a disillusioned Stage 2 workplace will either conform to that culture or find another job. For this reason, a “mixed stage” tribe is unusual.
The World of Developmental Stage Models
With these five stages, the authors step into the field of adult development, a branch of science that attempts to model how humans develop into young adulthood and throughout life. The study of adult development extends from the work of psychologists who studied child development, such as Jean Piaget, who pioneered a theory of childhood cognitive stages.
The central premise of developmental models is that there are distinct, discrete stages that people go through—stages that we can measure, describe, and verify. Prior to the 20th century, prevailing thought held that people were more or less fixed in intelligence, personality traits, and so on. Stage models turn this on its head, arguing that people change several times over the course of life.
Today, some theorists argue that people develop through stages along several different lines. While there’s no consensus, theorists such as Lawrence Kohlberg, Don Beck, Jane Loevinger, and Robert Kegan focus on developmental dimensions including moral development, cognitive development, ego-psychology (development of the individual ego), and spiritual development.
In The Listening Society, Hanzi Freinacht explains that there are domain-specific and domain-general developmental models. In other words, some models attempt to deal with the whole picture, while others take on one aspect of development. Tribal Leadership does the latter, attempting to explain how individuals, tribes, culture, and leaders develop in a business context.
The authors write that a tribe signals its cultural stage through three key markers:
Marker #1: The tribe’s attitude toward values. According to the authors, values are what a tribe or organization holds to be important—for instance, newspapers typically value integrity, honesty, and fact-based reporting. At each stage, the tribe members relate to values differently. The lower stages give them short shrift, while the higher stages see them as crucial to work and life. For example, people at Stage 4 see values as the beating heart of their work, and this attitude leads them to build values into everything they do, from strategizing to hiring.
Marker #2: The tribe’s way of speaking. The authors explain that each stage uses a distinct set of words and phrases that reflect that tribal stage’s worldview. Each member of a given tribal stage will use the language of that stage—for example, Stage 3 individuals use egocentric language: “No no no, let me do it.”
According to the authors, the language you use influences how you perceive reality. For example, someone who says “the world’s actually doing better than it seems” will be apt to interpret everything with an optimistic slant. For a tribe member at a given stage, the language he uses determines how he sees the world.
Marker #3: The tribe’s relationship style, which follows from how they see values and how they speak. At the lower stages, relationships form less often and less deeply, while at the higher stages people form meaningful, interconnected relationships that align with their shared values. For example, people at Stage 3 build two-person relationships because they value power and control, and one-on-one exchanges are easier to dominate.
According to the authors, tribes that build strong relationships between members, aligned by their values, are far stronger than tribes with weak member relationships. In fact, lower-stage tribes (Stages 1 through 3) do not yet recognize themselves as tribes, because they lack a sense of their shared identity.
Spiral Dynamics and Tribal Leadership
In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan lay out their developmental stage model—a model from which the authors of Tribal Leadership draw. In Spiral Dynamics, each stage corresponds to a “value meme” (differentiated by colors), or a coherent system of values (a worldview). A person at a given stage expresses their value meme through their characteristic behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, problem areas, and so on. In our presentation of Tribal Leadership’s stage model, we’ve placed values first to emphasize that here too, a stage’s expressions—language and relationships—follow from its values.
Unlike Tribal Leadership’s stage model, Spiral Dynamics has expanded to discuss numerous features of the people at each stage, including a person’s beliefs, life philosophy or attitude toward the world, needs, wants, life goals, and leadership styles.
The authors of Tribal Leadership avoid discussing anything “interior” to the person, such as beliefs or attitudes in order to build a model based on data they could collect regarding what people say and how they relate to one another.
Crucially, the authors say that a tribe member can only move up one stage at a time. Each stage builds on the previous stage: Stage 3 takes the lessons learned in Stage 2 and expands upon it, further developing the individual. Because of this, no one can skip a stage—you can’t go from the despair of Stage 1 to the high-achieving skillfulness of Stage 3 without first overcoming your despair by moving through Stage 2.
(Shortform note: The notion that you can’t skip a stage also comes from Spiral Dynamics, wherein the authors describe human development as an upward spiral. Starting at the lowest stage as an infant, the individual travels up the spiral to higher stages, progressing according to her efforts to develop herself. Since the stages exist along a spiral, the individual gradually transitions from one to the next. She faces the challenges in her life, learns from them, and reconfigures her values accordingly—gradually rising to the next highest stage.)
The tribal leader’s task is to upgrade her tribe by coaching the individual tribe members, one at a time, until the whole tribe levels up. To do this, she learns to recognize the three markers of each cultural stage, as we discussed above. Then, the authors explain, she can recognize the tribes in her organization and start to upgrade their cultures.
To upgrade a tribe member, the tribal leader uses the two core coaching opportunities of each stage:
Design Attractive Choices
To improve the effectiveness of the authors’ coaching opportunities, consider the thesis of Nudge: That people are influenced by the way a choice is presented.
When coaching someone, you guide them to make new, often difficult, choices. You might ease this process by making the choice more attractive, which can influence that person to make the better decision. In this case, that might mean pursuing a new relationship or changing her language. In Nudge, the authors suggest crafting “nudges,” or choices that take advantage of various cognitive biases to subtly push someone toward the “right” choice.
For instance, you might craft a “default”: Since people often stick with their initial choices, make that default option better. To apply this to relationship building, you might add required social time to a person’s work responsibilities. By default, she’ll engage with her coworkers and find new relationships that help her develop.
The authors explain that when a tribal leader has helped enough individuals to upgrade their stage, the entire tribe will “tip over” into that next stage. Since the leader coaches one tribe member at a time, some tribe members will head toward higher stages before others. But once the leader creates that critical mass of aspiring individuals, the whole culture will conform to the new tribal norms.
As the leader develops her tribe, the tribe members come to support and legitimize her leadership. As the tribe supports the leader, she grows into her own and does better work. As she puts the tribe first, tribe members come to respect, appreciate, and enjoy working with her.
Critical Mass and the Flywheel Effect
The authors’ notions of cultural transformation and of the leader-tribe relationship invoke one underlying principle—build momentum—in two forms:
Create a critical mass: By accumulating enough energy moving toward the next stage up, you create a self-reinforcing feedback loop. In other words, get enough people on board and they’ll continue to fuel the cultural transformation even when you stop actively pushing the tribe along.
Create a flywheel effect: By developing and inspiring her tribe, the leader gains reciprocal goodwill and effort from the tribe members. As she “pushes” the cultural flywheel with her efforts, the tribe “pushes” along as well and, in time, they create a self-sustaining feedback loop that further develops the leader and tribe.
Both of these effects also lead to homeostasis: A state of dynamic equilibrium or balance in a complex system. When you reach homeostasis at each higher stage, it’s more difficult to fall back down because the leader and tribe members support one another in maintaining a high standard in how they show up for work and life.
So far, we’ve explained the “what” and “how” of tribes and tribal leadership. In Part 2, we’ll discuss Stages 1 and 2. For each in turn, we’ll characterize the stage, describe its three key markers, and explain how the authors recommend coaching individuals to the next stage. Last, we’ll describe the indications of a successful stage transition.
The authors explain that at Stage 1, individuals see the world as a harsh dog-eat-dog environment. Their lives are generally cruel and punishing, and they become both miserable and tough.
For the individual at Stage 1, things have never been easy. He likely grew up in poverty and was exposed to crime early in life. That early exposure kicks off a downward spiral that often leads to gang membership or a life of crime. Struggling with the practical and psychological hardships of poverty, he comes to see life as fundamentally unfair. In turn, according to the authors, he realizes that values are worthless—instead, he should do what it takes to survive, regardless of the rules.
Since he lacks experience fitting in with “proper” society, he’ll struggle to hold down a job—you’ll rarely see Stage 1 individuals in the workplace. In fact, the authors say that they make up just 2% of the workforce. Because of this, Stage 1 group culture seldom exists outside of gangs; thus, the authors’ description focuses primarily on Stage 1 individuals.
Spiral Dynamics’ “Beige” Level
Tribal Leadership’s Stage 1 corresponds to the “beige” level or “value meme” from Spiral Dynamics. At beige, a person’s primary concern is survival, and he lives largely from instinct. In general, he aims to meet his physiological needs—food, water, shelter, sex—and has little thought of self-development.
Critically, the authors of Spiral Dynamics emphasize that no level is “right” or “wrong.” Instead, they simply exist. In this sense, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with people at Stage 1—they’re simply operating in a way that meets their immediate needs and keeps them alive.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs also sheds light on Stage 1. Maslow suggests that if meeting your physiological needs is a constant daily quest, you simply can’t concern yourself with “higher” activities, such as personal or spiritual development. When living in the cycle of poverty, things such as food, water, and shelter are daily concerns—so it only makes sense that Stage 1 individuals feel unable to imagine that life could be bright, open, and full of potential.
As we explained in Part 1, each stage has three markers: a view of values, a way of speaking, and a relationship style. According to the authors, Stage 1’s markers are as follows:
Where relationships do form, Stage 1 individuals form Stage 1 tribes—which, most often, are gangs or prison cliques, the authors say. In such groups, individuals have an intense loyalty to the tribe, yet they struggle to form real relationships due to the hostile and alienating environment. Additionally, these tribes tend to commiserate and reinforce the Stage 1 attitude that life fundamentally sucks.
The “Faustian” Value Meme
In The Listening Society, Hanzi Freinacht builds on the Spiral Dynamics model by distinguishing four dimensions of each stage: Cognitive complexity, symbolic world or worldview, psychological depth, and states of being. These four dimensions can vary in their level of development at each stage, allowing for a more nuanced view of the individual.
Freinacht’s “Faustian” value meme corresponds roughly with Tribal Leadership’s Stage 1. At the Faustian value meme, people operate according to “might makes right”—that is, those who can dominate with physical violence are in charge. Survival is still a main concern, and historical societies at this stage—such as the Vikings—spent time farming and time pillaging. As the authors of Tribal Leadership say of gangs, the ethics is honor-based. You must maintain your honor, even if that means doing violence or killing.
One shortcoming of the Tribal Leadership model is that it suggests that people at Stage 1 are incapable of forming meaningful relationships. In contrast, Freinacht suggests that at any stage, you can develop “depth”—a quality of emotional maturity that lends itself to forming healthy relationships. So, even under adverse conditions, people can learn from painful experiences and find ways to help one another. For instance, prisoners trapped in Nazi concentration camps bonded and cooperated as a survival mechanism and as a way to preserve their humanity.
The authors explain that a tribal leader can coach an individual from Stage 1 to Stage 2 using the two core coaching opportunities:
When coaching Stage 1 individuals, always listen and empathize. According to the authors, they often feel discarded and abandoned by society. Expect some hostility and defensiveness, and understand that such individuals are unused to receiving genuine care or help. In addition, emphasize that in every moment, we all have the choice to change our lives.
Develop a Coaching Habit
The authors don’t explain in-depth how to coach your team members. For a reliable method, consider Michael Stanier’s advice in The Coaching Habit: Develop a simple daily habit of coaching your team members, and in that way help them to level up.
Specifically, Stanier recommends asking good questions and listening more than you speak. By listening, you get to know your team members and help them feel heard and respected. By asking good, informal questions, you can help them develop and avoid coming off as overbearing or intrusive. Stanier offers seven questions that open and progress a conversation, and three of them apply best to Stage 1:
“What’s on your mind?”—This gently opens the conversation.
“Anything else?”—This encourages people to say things that might be difficult to say.
“How can I support you?”—This communicates that you hear, see, and want to help this person.
By using these questions well, you can build a relationship with a Stage 1 individual who’s likely never had support, and you can guide him to a healthier way of living.
According to the authors, three changes mark a successful shift from Stage 1 to Stage 2:
Keep Your Models Updated
Above, the authors describe a specific sequence of changes that describe a standard shift from Stage 1 to Stage 2, regardless of the individual. However, note that like any model, developmental stage models have limitations. As Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien explain in The Great Mental Models Volume 1, reality is complex and constantly changing, while models are static and can become outdated.
Given this, note that the authors of Tribal Leadership provide only anecdotal evidence for the shifts they describe. However, anecdotes don’t necessarily prove that everyone will experience these stage changes in the same ways. According to Parrish and Beaubien, we need to constantly update our models according to what actually happens. To do so, start with the insights from Tribal Leadership, put them into action, and update your understanding based on what you experience. You might discover that people develop in various ways, and you’ll come to see each stage with more nuance.
At Stage 2, an apathetic and disinterested mood prevails. According to the authors, Stage 2 individuals are typically passive, disinterested, and disconnected from their work. Because of this, they rarely produce creative ideas or innovate solutions to tough problems. Further, Stage 2 individuals avoid accountability: When a few good ideas do arise, people rarely get around to executing them.
Stage 2 individuals allow their circumstances to define them, and they often fixate on a tangible problem that supposedly prevents them from improving. For example, they might complain that the budget is too small, they lack enough time, or that there’s a bad apple spoiling the bunch. However, the authors explain that resolving Stage 2’s problems won’t fix the complaints because Stage 2 individuals have committed to feeling trapped by their circumstances, and they’ll constantly look for more reasons to complain.
Stage 2 cultures are common at public-facing government offices such as the post office and among low-ladder workplaces like chain retail stores. These jobs, the authors say, give employees little creative license or autonomy, and higher-ups generally treat the employees as replaceable. This causes Stage 2 workers to experience work as a dehumanizing daily grind. Given this demotivating experience, Stage 2 tribes survive by bemoaning their circumstances and working for the weekends.
Robert Kegan’s Developmental Stages
Stage 2 of Tribal Leadership corresponds to Robert Kegan’s model of ethical, social, and cognitive development. For clarity, we’ll refer to it as “the communal mode” when comparing it to Tribal Leadership’s Stage 2 throughout this section.
Stage 2 exists in the communal mode: Individually, people understand themselves based on how others see them. Collectively, everyone follows the group’s norms while avoiding taboos. People form reciprocal relationships, giving and taking more or less equally, and people generally empathize with each other by default.
Since group norms are paramount, people in a Stage 2 office show solidarity when someone complains about work. (Think how uncommon it is that someone would rebuke another who prompts him to agree about “how crappy work is.”) Adding Kegan’s model illuminates why Stage 2 cultures perpetuate a low bar of mediocrity—in the communal mode, it’s very difficult to break the status quo. Doing so would mean losing many of your relationships and being ostracized.
The authors explain that like Stage 1, Stage 2 has three key markers: a view of values, shared language habits, and a characteristic relationship style, as follows:
Marker #1: Apathetic disregard for values. Since Stage 2 individuals let their circumstances define them, they have little integrity. According to the authors, they feel that values have failed them in the past and are therefore worthless.
Often, this happens because management introduces “values” to the workplace in a heavy-handed way. For instance, many organizations pay lip service to values, printing them out and producing the trappings of a values-driven workplace. At the same time, the higher-ups ignore their supposed values and treat employees like cogs in a machine. As the authors explain, this makes employees feel used and unvalued, and it reinforces the notion that “values” are simply a meaningless corporate ploy.
(Shortform note: Another reason values often fail is that top-down plans don’t account for the actual boots-on-the-ground situation. Put another way, planned values reflect leadership’s ideas, but they might completely miss how employees actually feel or behave on a day-to-day basis. This disconnect between espoused values and how people actually behave causes people to doubt the values. To counteract this, support the people who do live your company’s values and don’t be afraid to let go of those who don’t.)
Marker #2: Commiserating language. A Stage 2 tribe acts as an echo chamber for complaints about the workplace. Tribe members fixate on how the higher-ups mistreat them and on similar gripes: the oppressive “system,” getting a bad start in life, or lacking the skills to move up. According to the authors, this commiseration reinforces the tribe’s passive, disinterested mood.
In addition, Stage 2 tribes trash talk their bosses, as in the cartoon “Dilbert,” which captures the relationship between Stage 2 tribes and their “evil bosses.” These bosses treat employees callously, and that reinforces the unmotivated, unhappy Stage 2 atmosphere.
(Shortform note: Psychologists have studied the science of commiseration, which they refer to as co-rumination: problem-focused talk that rehashes and dwells on problems without seeking solutions. While we commonly believe that venting anger over workplace stresses is healthy, research has found that it leads to increased cortisol, a hormone related to stress, and that dwelling on negative thoughts increases your risk of mental illness. Instead of commiserating, find ways to point out the positives and focus on problem-solving rather than griping.)
Marker #3: Tenuous relationships. Since Stage 2 tribes subsist on commiseration, tribe members form tenuous relationships. Without something deeper to unite people, such as meaningful and inspiring work, these relationships don’t grow beyond the shallow support offered by mutual disenchantment with work. According to the authors, since no one quite knows each other, a Stage 2 workplace often feels gloomy and tense.
(Shortform note: If you find yourself in an unhappy Stage 2 workplace, there are several options that might help. The Harvard Business Review suggests that you first face how you feel; by experiencing the feeling of unhappiness instead of avoiding it, you can gain clarity on the problem and why you feel that way. Then, face up to whether or not you can change your circumstances. If you can’t, try finding the positives and practice “radical acceptance” of where you are now, for now. Finally, make a plan to either improve your current situation, or find a new one.)
The authors explain that coaching a Stage 2 individual to Stage 3 centers on sparking her ambition by helping her to see and cultivate her strengths. When she realizes that she can achieve more and become a successful individual, she’ll begin to level up her work and her life.
When coaching individuals to Stage 3, look for those who seem ready to leave Stage 2 behind. Often, these are younger employees who haven’t sunk too deeply into Stage 2’s miserable mire. Work with one employee at a time and use the authors’ two steps:
Encourage Nonlinear Development
While we’ve long operated on the notion of linear career development, Tania Luna of Lifelabs Learning writes in the Harvard Business Review that today, a linear career path doesn’t always make sense. Instead, today’s workers must learn to navigate an unpredictable, ever-changing landscape of opportunities, finding a less direct path to career success and fulfillment.
So when using Tribal Leadership’s coaching tactics, help your mentees understand that they don’t necessarily need to pursue a linear career. For young workers without clear career goals, it can be liberating for them to hear that they can instead develop their skills and find a less traditional path to success. In addition, encourage them to develop transferable skills, such as writing or productivity, so they have more options when searching for roles. Last, use “small experiments” to help employees try out new skills and explore areas in which they might want to develop.
Two main changes mark the individual’s transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3, according to the authors:
(Shortform note: To further kindle an employee’s ambition, find what motivates them and give frequent feedback. By finding what’s intrinsically motivating to an employee, you can assign her to projects or tasks that excite her the most. And by giving frequent, supportive feedback, you help her clearly see how she’s doing and stay on track.)
Having covered tribes at Stage 1 and Stage 2, we’ll now explain Stage 3—the most common of the stages, this is the domain of “lone warriors,” where big egos jockey for power and personal accomplishment. As before, we’ll explain Stage 3 key markers—values, language, and relationships—and we’ll describe how to coach individuals from Stage 3 to Stage 4. Last, we’ll detail how Stage 3 individuals can become tribal leaders by realizing the value of Stage 4 and tribal cooperation.
According to the authors’ research, Stage 3 is the most common culture, and it’s where most professionals spend much of their careers. Stage 3 features shark-like competition, office politics, and high-powered professionals striving to dominate their workplaces.
Stage 3 individuals want to win, and they excel at climbing the ladder of accomplishment. They’re lifelong high-achievers who’ve always strived to be at the top of the class, to get the best recommendations, and to surpass their coworkers. However, the authors explain that beneath the ambitious exterior, each Stage 3 individual fears that he isn’t quite the best. Because he feels insecure about his accomplishments, he hides his weaknesses behind a veneer of self-reliant competence.
Because Stage 3 individuals are highly individualistic, Stage 3 tribes don’t form explicitly. Instead, Stage 3 culture prevails: the tense, competitive atmosphere of a workplace dominated by office politics and ego-centered sharks.
Is the Competitive Workplace Vanishing?
While the authors’ description of a competitive, political workplace is familiar to many, recent trends suggest that collaboration is taking over. With the coming-of-age of the millennial workforce—88% of whom report they prefer collaboration over competition—the competitive, individualistic workplace captured in shows like Mad Men is declining.
Today’s workers prefer transparency, accountability, and a clear sense of how they fit into the team, as well as flexibility in their working hours and location. This is because to the millennial employee, happiness and overall fulfillment matter more than career success.
Given that the competitive workplace is in decline, the authors’ model might need an update: They argue that no individual can skip a stage, but many millennials might be jumping right to Stage 4, where teamwork is the norm. If this is the case, then Stage 3 might not be a concrete reality so much as a temporary cultural phase in an ever-changing work culture.
Marker #1: Personal accomplishment trumps all else. Stage 3 individuals play to win. They feel driven by personal accomplishment, and they tend to strive for increasing power and prestige. The authors emphasize two aspects of this marker:
In accord with their individualistic values, Stage 3 individuals work harder than most others and tend to succeed in their fields. But they also see most colleagues as inferior, and this prevents them from seeking support when they need it. Because of this, they often feel perpetually overworked and under-supported.
The “Orange” Value Meme
In Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck and Chris Cowan describe an “orange” value meme that corresponds to Tribal Leadership’s Stage 3. At the orange value meme, individuals are driven by a desire to improve themselves, accumulate material rewards, and to use rational, strategic thinking to dominate and win. Beck and Cowan argue that “orange” originates from Ancient Greece, where the first stirrings of individualism, rational thought, and virtuous living began.
In the workplace, Stage 3 individuals can be antagonistic and difficult. At the same time, the ambitious individual is an important modern phenomenon: People weren’t always so willing to reach above their peers and accomplish more, and this very ambition drives productive business competition and innovation. In turn, this led to the world of luxuries and sophisticated technologies that the West enjoys today—which, while not without problems, is a form of progress.
Marker #2: Egocentric language. According to the authors, Stage 3 individuals put the focus on themselves, using language that highlights their views, ideas, and accomplishments. A Stage 3 individual might say, “That’s wrong, let me try,” or, “I know best.” This occurs both in formal work settings and among Stage 3 peers in casual situations.
(Shortform note: In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday argues that an overactive ego hinders real success. But because many famous, successful people have large egos, we’ve come to think that ego and success go hand-in-hand. This is wrongheaded, and Holiday recommends instead learning to control your reactive, emotional ego. To do so, he advises that you stop talking and thinking so much about yourself and focus instead on taking decisive, effective action toward your goals.)
Marker #3: One-to-one relationships. To defend and further his ambitions, the Stage 3 individual relies on gossip and spies to gain information and win in office politics. As the authors explain, this is especially true If he feels that his position is insecure, and he’ll do whatever it takes to maintain his power. To do this, he uses several tactics:
The downside of all this, the authors say, is that the Stage 3 individual spends a ton of energy to stay on top of these relationships and the information each person delivers. With too many spies, he risks mixing up what he’s said and to whom—as well as what he’s heard and from whom. In addition, keeping his spies separate can make him feel isolated and disconnected, which may drop him to Stage 2. Meanwhile, he’s often blind to the situation he’s created.
Power Play and Avoiding Manipulation
In The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene argues that the game of power-seeking constantly goes on around us, and there’s no way to opt out of playing. Given this, you can either remain a pawn or become a master player. Greene breaks down an extensive collection of tactics that power-seekers often use, many of which hinge on deceiving the people around you. Greene’s rules span several themes:
Adopt a power mindset: Learn to think strategically and expect manipulators.
Communicate with power: Learn to sense people’s emotions and how persuasion works.
Enhance your power: Learn to act in your own interests while concealing your plans.
Act decisively: Learn how to crush others’ power and act on opportunities.
Avoid pitfalls: Guard yourself against counterplay and maintain your position.
While you might not want to play this Stage 3 game, knowing the laws can help you recognize manipulative people and avoid their machinations. Study the rules in-depth to learn how power players think. Then, you’ll be able to recognize when someone in your life is maneuvering for power and, if necessary, prevent them from harming you.
According to the authors, individuals can get stuck at Stage 3—stuck in the tense, power-seeking dynamics of office politics. These individuals are often managers or bosses, and they often feel superior to their direct reports. As such, they treat lower-level employees with contempt or disrespect.
Such a Stage 3 boss treats his employees poorly because he also feels replaceable and unappreciated—but he’s oblivious to his behavior. Further, he might drive Stage 2 individuals backward by treating them poorly. For example, the authors suggest that he might lower someone’s pay without telling them, or gradually push them out of office social life.
(Shortform note: In Leadership and Self-Deception, the Arbinger Institute calls this state of dumping your stresses on others being “in the box.” In other words, you know how to behave better but take the easier route of blaming someone else for the problem. An individual stuck “in the box” will justify his behavior by rationalizing or making excuses.)
This sort of boss also tends to hire Stage 2 individuals, because candidates who could surpass him in ambition or ability threaten his ego and his position. This allows him to dominate his office, but it exacerbates his feelings that there’s nobody competent to help him out.
The authors explain that this kind of Stage 3 individual hasn’t fully overcome Stage 2. Deeper down, he still feels that his life sucks. To overcome this, he needs to overcome any feelings of powerlessness that perpetuate his mindset.
(Shortform note: The Arbinger Institute also explains in Leadership and Self-Deception that individuals stuck “in the box” see other people as problems, rather than humans. This explains why a Stage 3 individual hires unthreatening candidates—to reduce any future “problems” that person might cause for him. The Arbinger Institute recommends overcoming this limitation by recognizing that everyone is human, and that we all have needs deserving of fair consideration.)
According to the authors, Stage 3 players inevitably hit a wall that they can’t overcome. Sheer willpower and individualistic ambition take them far, but to move beyond that wall they must learn to play on a team. The upside is that such individuals have proven themselves in the crucible of Stage 3. They’ve paid their dues and spent their time working hard and developing skills, strength, and experience—qualities that will matter at Stage 4, too.
In other words, Stage 3 veterans thoroughly understand how Stage 3 works: its benefits, the challenging terrain, and the competitive spirit needed to win. By fully “owning” Stage 3, they ready themselves to move on to Stage 4, where they’ll repurpose the positive parts of Stage 3 and leave behind the negative parts.
(Shortform note: The authors stop short of explaining how an individual can own Stage 3. However, the solution may be as easy as engaging in self-reflection, a key meta-cognitive skill that enables you to understand your internal experiences—thoughts and emotions—so you can make sense of them and improve your conduct. Gregg Henriques, a psychologist and director at James Madison University, recommends using the C.A.L.M. framework: Approach your inner experience with Curiosity, Acceptance, Love, and the Motivation to grow. Over time, this helps you develop a coherent narrative of your internal experience and better understand yourself, which can contribute to moving past Stage 3 behaviors that hinder personal growth.)
The authors describe two paths from Stage 3 to Stage 4: from late Stage 3 to Stage 4 tribal leadership, or from Stage 3 individual ambition to Stage 4 teamwork.
The authors explain that to become a tribal leader, you first need to reach Stage 4 yourself. They describe three insights that lead to a deeper understanding of Stage 3, Stage 4, and tribal leadership:
Once an aspiring tribal leader realizes these insights, she’ll often begin to listen more than she talks, the authors say. By listening to tribe members and getting to know the tribe, she builds toward Stage 4, where people work as a united whole. As the tribe recognizes her burgeoning leadership, they’ll begin to support and empower her. In turn, she begins to live in service of her tribe. Ultimately, she recognizes that real success is tribal success.
Overcoming Developmental Plateaus
While the authors don’t describe precisely how to realize these insights, the process likely involves engaging in the inner work of reflecting on your experiences, examining your strategies, and reworking your approach to work. One principle that can help is “transcend and include,” which describes how one developmental stage progresses to the next.
Ken Wilber, a prominent intellectual, writer, and founder of the Integral Institute, contends that any stage of development must “transcend and include” the former stage. In other words, it preserves the structures of the earlier, simpler stage, and transcends it by organizing those structures to give rise to a more complex structure. For instance, molecules transcend and include atoms; cells transcend and include molecules; and organisms, such as humans, transcend and include cells.
A corollary of this pattern is that the strengths of each stage also act as limitations, and Stage 3 follows this principle: Its ambitious individualism is its greatest strength and its biggest limitation. This creates a “developmental plateau,” or a point beyond which it’s difficult to go. To transcend and include, realize that “what got you here won’t get you there”—that is, your current behaviors constitute a particular strategy that works up to a certain point. Beyond that point, you’ll need to adapt by examining what’s limiting you and consciously changing your behaviors.
From this angle, the Tribal Leadership insights describe a process of realizing that the underlying logic of Stage 3—its values and the strategy they give rise to—serves only certain ends (individual achievement). To grow beyond Stage 3, examine this logic as well as that of Stage 4, and you’ll come to see why Stage 3 falls short, and how to transcend it.
To coach an individual from Stage 3 to Stage 4, the authors recommend several tactics. They include encouraging three-person relationships, emphasizing teamwork, and demonstrating the inherent limitations of Stage 3. As before, leaders should work one-on-one with Stage 3 individuals who’ve started to realize the limitations of Stage 3.
Develop a Coaching Toolkit
Throughout Tribal Leadership, the authors offer a variety of coaching tactics, yet they don’t organize them into a coaching framework. To do so, consider that you don’t necessarily need a system—a prescribed set of steps—so much as you can gather a variety of tools and techniques into a coaching toolkit. Then, you can pick the right tool for the job each time you need to coach someone and you can continually add techniques instead of relying on a single approach.
One such approach you can add is that of Radical Candor, in which author Kim Scott argues that managing relationships is a boss’s main job. She offers two principles:
Care personally: Get to know your employees as people, not just workers, so that you see them as humans rather than “problems” that need solving.
Challenge directly: People often need a firm hand or nudge to keep them moving forward, and this means not shirking tough conversations or feedback sessions. In the end, directness—even when not “nice”—helps people improve.
The key to radical candor is balancing these two principles. Together, they help you give your employees “tough love”—that is, you give them caring support while also maintaining firm and fair expectations for their improvement.
You can also use Scott’s principles alongside those of Tribal Leadership. For instance, you might use caring personally to develop a relationship with a Stage 3 tribe member and help him reflect on the limits of his behavior. Then, you could challenge him directly by asking him to take on what’s tough for him—such as engaging in teamwork or building transparent, communicative relationships.
The authors describe three changes that mark a successful shift to Stage 4:
Getting Your Team to Stage 4 Is Crucial
As the authors imply, it’s crucial to upgrade your tribe to Stage 4 before trying to create a collaborative culture. This is because while collaboration can improve workplace productivity and success, there are right and wrong ways to create a collaborative culture.
Namely, you can’t create such a culture just by making collaboration the new policy. Unless you help people see the value of teamwork first, people may not actually adopt that value or collaborate effectively. Instead, you risk creating a culture where mediocre employees ostracize more ambitious employees:
While everyone is seen as an equal contributor to a team effort, some employees will naturally work harder than others.
If these employees are still at Stage 2 or 3, they might undermine or sabotage the harder worker, seeing her as a threat or outsider.
In turn, this can demotivate your more ambitious employees and cause stress.
Put another way, you can’t create a culture by planning it top-down. Rather, as the authors describe, a leader helps to grow a culture by helping her people to see the value of teamwork and tribal unity. This will create a genuine Stage 4 culture, whereas mandating collaboration won’t work.
As the authors explain, a tribal leader upgrades her tribe by coaching one tribe member at a time. To practice your understanding of the techniques, plan how you could implement their coaching methods.
First, recall the two key coaching opportunities: helping a tribe member upgrade her language and her relationships to the next Stage. When coaching a tribe member at Stage 2, what kind of language would you encourage her to adopt? List a few changes you could help her make—for instance, shifting away from commiserating language.
Continuing with the second coaching opportunity, how could you help that Stage 2 individual upgrade her relationships? Think of how to move beyond Stage 2’s tenuous relationships, and consider a few individuals that might support her growth toward Stage 3.
Next, consider how you could coach a Stage 3 individual to Stage 4. The authors recommend helping Stage 3 individuals learn the value of teamwork and collaborative relationships. What kind of work could you assign to a Stage 3 individual to help him work toward Stage 4? Briefly reflect below.
The authors also recommend mentoring, since mentors can model effective Stage 4 behavior. Last, think about who in your organization might make a good mentor for Stage 3 individuals—someone who values open communication and respectful relationships. Briefly, how might you work with this person (if it’s not you) to coach Stage 3 individuals with the Tribal Leadership methodology?
In Part 4, we’ll describe Stages 4 and 5, the most effective stages that the authors recommend striving toward. As before, we’ll describe Stage 4 and explain the three key markers. We’ll then break down the authors’ discussion of the three routes into Stage 4, as well as the three key activities that stabilize a tribe at Stage 4. To end, we’ll briefly characterize Stage 5, for which the authors include only speculations.
According to the authors, just under a quarter of the modern workforce operates at Stage 4. At Stage 4, the tribe comes together around shared values and pursues a well-crafted mission. They explicitly recognize themselves as a tribe, and they unify under a strong leader to pursue ambitious goals.
Stage 4 individuals have high energy, enthusiasm for their work, and positive relationships with their peers. They often express gratitude or appreciation for their jobs, and they respect and value effective tribal leaders.
On the collective level, Stage 4 cultures or tribes have much the same characteristics. The tribe cooperates effectively, and tribe members often resolve day-to-day conflicts by remembering their shared values. Leadership and staff respect each other, so they work together effectively and enjoy doing so. Altogether, Stage 4 tribes get more done with less effort, and they do it with a contented enthusiasm you won’t find at earlier stages.
The authors explain that Stage 4 tribes often have mature and creative cultures that attract the best talent, and their teamwork empowers them to innovate and achieve great things. Much like a sports team, a Stage 4 tribe needs a foe to compete against—usually an industry competitor. Competition spurs the tribe to innovate, stretch their abilities, and become better.
Collaboration Isn’t a Panacea
After the challenging natures of Stages 1 through 3, the authors describe Stage 4 with an optimistic, idealized tone. However, even collaborative work cultures have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include those described above—greater employee satisfaction, a happy workplace, and a creative culture. However, the authors don’t provide any quantitative proof of the benefits of Stage 4; on the other hand, recent research shows that overfocus on collaboration lowers productivity in measurable ways. The study found that:
Employees spent around 80% of their time on administrative tasks, such as emails and meetings.
3% to 5% of collaborators provide upwards of 20% to 35% of the value.
The few employees who contribute the most become overinvolved and begin to cause bottlenecks, wherein work can’t proceed until they’ve contributed. At the same time, they stretch themselves too thin to work effectively.
To counteract these effects, the researchers suggest identifying two people—the overinvolved “helpers” and the “help requesters”—and encouraging behavioral change that redistributes the workload. For instance, you might encourage helpers to say no to projects that don’t play to their unique strengths, and you might show help requesters how to find what they need elsewhere, such as from other employees who aren’t as known for willingness to help.
Like the previous stages, Stage 4 has three characteristic markers: its stance toward values, its language, and its relationships.
Marker #1: A strong and explicit commitment to shared values. Unlike the previous stages, a Stage 4 tribe develops shared values—the tribe members and leaders discuss and articulate their values together. With values made explicit, the members of a Stage 4 tribe recognize their shared identity, and they begin to see each other as kin and allies.
According to the authors, an organization dominated by Stage 4 tribes finds creative ways to express and embody their values. For instance, it might replace cubicles with modern co-working spaces to encourage teamwork. Or it might reimagine how meetings work, allowing anyone from anywhere in the hierarchy to contribute equally to the conversation.
(Shortform note: In addition to their importance to businesses, psychologists recognize values as a key to finding personal well-being. Your “core values” are what you stand for, through thick and thin—such as reliability, passion, or rationality. There are several ways to find your core values, including by using a “values inventory” tool, reflecting on the best and worst experiences you’ve had, and observing your behaviors to find out what drives them.)
Marker #2: Tribe-centered language. In a Stage 4 culture, the prevailing mood is one of camaraderie and authenticity, and the language reflects this. Both tribe members and leaders often praise one another, expressing how great it feels to be part of such a strong, collaborative organization. According to the authors, they use “we’re great” language.
(Shortform note: The authors’ description of a Stage 4 tribe evokes the camaraderie of a sports team, wherein the team’s success explicitly depends on how good the team members feel about themselves and each other. In this same vein, some collaborative companies use sports-themed retrospectives to review their work and stay aligned, since sports offer a rich array of team-building exercises and wisdom to draw from.)
Marker #3: Strong, networked relationships. In a Stage 4 tribe, individuals form networked relationships—that is, they always interact with at least two other individuals. To the Stage 4 individual, the tribe comes first, so he’s always looking to build strong relationships or introduce people he thinks might work well together. Given this, multi-person networking dominates Stage 4 social occasions, and everyone works to strengthen and expand the tribe’s relationships.
(Shortform note: The McKinsey Institute suggests that successful organizational change often comes from focusing on the informal networks within your company, rather than trying to restructure the various departments and teams of a typical organizational chart. Much like the authors of Tribal Leadership, they argue that these networks—which disregard the boundaries of departments and hierarchies—determine what gets done. Networked relationships help information flow more smoothly between those who need it, and they prevent bottlenecks wherein many subordinates rely on one higher-up who makes the key decisions.)
To create a Stage 4 Tribe, the authors explain three strategies. Strategies #1 and #2 apply to building a Stage 4 tribe from scratch, while Strategy #3 works to create a Stage 4 tribe within an existing organization.
Each strategy hinges on creating a core tribal team that gives rise to the tribe’s culture. Create this core team from individuals who have “owned” Stage 3, as we explained in Part 3. Having played and gotten their fill of Stage 3, these individuals are ready for the collaboration and teamwork of Stage 4.
Strategy #1: Bring together like-minded friends. Get together with a group of like-minded friends—people with whom you share values and a general outlook—and figure out how you could make money. By starting with the friendship and camaraderie of a solid group of friends, you place a strong culture at the foundation of this new organization. And as the authors explain, culture is more important than anything else—so long as the culture is strong, business success will come as a byproduct of that group’s love of working with one another.
(Shortform note: Starting a business with a group of friends has advantages and disadvantages. As the authors explain, it provides a solid basis for strong, amiable relationships. On the flip side, you and your friends might share the same blind spots, especially if you come from similar backgrounds. To counteract this, aim to find recruits who demonstrate different perspectives and skills, and be sure to clearly define the strengths and roles of each co-founding friend you start with.)
Strategy #2: Grow an alliance within your company. Within your organization, look for others who sense the need for greater teamwork and collaboration. Help these others through the Stage 4 insights, as we described in Part 3, and build your relationships by speaking to shared values. The authors suggest creating a formal declaration of values and asking aspiring Stage 4 tribe members to commit to those values. This filters out people who lack genuine interest and ensures that aspiring Stage 4 individuals form the core tribal team. With this tribe formed, do your best work and demonstrate the superiority of Stage 4 tribal teamwork.
(Shortform note: For this second strategy, the authors note that a Stage 3 boss can hinder or dismantle Stage 4 efforts. If this occurs, focus on keeping your emotions in check and dealing with the boss in a clearheaded way. Then, identify what kind of bad boss you have and use the right strategy to neutralize the threat. For instance, you might find that your boss is a “tyrant,” in which case giving him some credit for your Stage 4 ideas could assuage his ego and get him on board.)
Strategy #3: Create a tribe through networking. By aggressively networking, you can find like-minded people who see the value of Stage 4 teamwork. Look for others who’ve seen the limitations of individual ambition, and bring these people together to build new relationships.
With this strategy, a tribe comes together around a leader who has exceptional people skills. Treat tribe members with respect and warmth, and listen more than you command. This kind of Stage 4 tribe is often flatter than a typical corporate hierarchy, and its business runs on the power of social networks.
(Shortform note: As a real-world example of this third strategy, consider styled shoots, a type of simulated wedding event that gives hairstylists, makeup artists, florists, models, planners, and photographers a chance to collaborate and network. Through these events, the various vendors and artisans build relationships and establish lightweight business networks—for instance, a planner might meet a handful of makeup and hair stylists on whom she can rely for real weddings, too. In this sense, they’re an informal tribe that supports one another in their business efforts.)
According to the authors, a tribe must perform three tasks to stabilize at Stage 4:
First, establish shared values and unite under a worthy purpose. These act as the foundation and the direction of the tribe’s work, respectively. When the tribe has that solid ground to start from and an inspiring purpose to pursue, they come together and become more effective and innovative at work.
If you neglect values, the authors say, your company culture will lack a strong foundation. Think of values as the principles you follow no matter what. Without a set of principles to live by, you might do anything to succeed, such as resorting to unethical business practices that prioritize profit over humanity or meaningful work. (Shortform note: An article in the Harvard Business Review describes values as “guiding principles,” and they say that you must stand for them through fair and foul weather alike. Throughout this section, we’ll compare Tribal Leadership to their model of collaborative culture-building, termed “collective ambition.”)
To create and establish your tribe’s values, use these tactics:
According to the authors, establishing values is not a one-time task to check off a list. Instead, view values as essential principles to continually live, refocus, and hold yourself accountable to. Return to them as often as you need to, and develop them over time.
Values Form a Core Philosophy
In Built to Last, Jim Collins explains that companies that achieve lasting success operate on a core philosophy—the set of values that guide the company through years, even decades, of business. For more ways to find your values and develop a core philosophy, consider Collins’s steps, which reflect and complement Tribal Leadership’s steps:
Craft your core philosophy with five to seven employees who already exemplify it, as opposed to working with the whole tribe.
Keep it concise. Stating your values plainly and concisely clarifies them for everyone.
Limit yourself to three to six core values. Any more, and it’s no longer an essential core so much as a loose list.
Collins explains that with a core philosophy established, many top companies create a “cult-like” atmosphere that promotes adherence to those values. Employees who embody the values fit in and find success, while employees who don’t might find themselves asked to leave. While this might seem intense, Collins says that it’s simply part of creating and maintaining a purposeful, values-driven workplace—the benefits, including employee loyalty and commitment to the company’s mission, are well worth it.
After establishing shared values, a Stage 4 tribe must find a worthy purpose—the tribe’s North Star, or overriding direction. The authors say that a worthy purpose should be inspiring and ambitious rather than rational or realistic, since an audacious mission unites people better than an easy, uninspiring aim. There are two methods to create a worthy purpose:
To keep your purpose alive, the authors recommend conducting regular check-ins. Tribe members often need to express grievances, rearticulate their values, and recommit to the tribe’s work. Again, use the four key questions: What’s working, what’s not, how can we do better, anything else? This prompts the tribe to reflect on and resolve any outstanding issues, and it allows them to examine and adjust their actions as needed.
Starting From Purpose
In contrast to the authors’ assertion that values come first and a purpose derives from them, an article in the Harvard Business Review asserts that a company’s purpose comes before all else. They define “purpose” as “your company’s reason for being,” and in their model, it acts as the center of a “compass” that guides a company’s values, strategy, brand, and vision.
They note also that a purpose need not be the grandest—providing an excellent shopping experience, they say, can be just as meaningful as improving access to essential services, like health care, as long as it authentically represents the company. A purpose should differentiate the company and suggest its values: For instance, a minimalist, sustainable footwear brand might stand for “healthier feet and a healthier planet.”
As you build your tribe, create a business strategy that further unites the tribe. According to the authors, a tribal leader must balance the tribe’s needs and the business’s needs—accounting for human well-being as well as making good business decisions. If you don’t account for both, you risk alienating the tribe or struggling to find business success. So when creating your strategy, always listen to feedback and adjust accordingly. This helps tribe members feel heard and valued.
(Shortform note: In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt explains that an effective strategy uses your strengths against an opponent’s weaknesses. With this in mind, consider both the strengths of your tribe and your business’s unique strengths. Taken together, they’ll help you craft a strategy that can direct great power against your obstacles.)
The authors recommend using their three-part approach to business strategy: Develop your strategy by meeting to discuss your desired results, your resources, and the actions you’ll need to take.
Discussion #1: Decide on your desired results. In a conversation with as much of your tribe as possible, figure out what specific results you want to achieve. Listen for shared ambitions and articulate what you hear. When you put this underlying ambition into words, tribe members will often have an “aha” moment and feel you’ve put your finger on just the right thing.
In addition, the authors explain that results are distinct from goals. Aiming for a goal implies that at present, you’re already failing and need to stop. In contrast, assume that you’re already on the path to success and simply not there yet—this is what the authors call a result or “outcome.”
(Shortform note: Rumelt also explains that a bad strategy fails to name the problem. In Tribal Leadership, the authors focus on desired results rather than the main challenge. To complete this approach, consider the main obstacles you face and the results you want to achieve. For instance, a startup founder might need to secure funding, position and differentiate her company, and build a strong team. With these challenges identified clearly, she can then aim toward her desired results more accurately.)
Discussion #2: Gather your resources. In a separate conversation, brainstorm what resources you have at your disposal. Resources are everything from material assets—buildings, tools, technologies—to skill sets, connections, and intangibles like brand recognition or past successes. The authors recommend considering two types of resources:
(Shortform note: Once you’ve gathered your resources, Rumelt recommends directing them toward a focused, well-defined goal, such as overtaking a competitor in a key marketplace. By focusing all your resources in one direction, you direct your strengths toward the competitor’s weaknesses. Rumelt suggests doing this at “pivot points,” or areas where you can leverage your strengths to create an imbalance in your favor. For instance, a video game studio might have strong foundational resources, such as innovative product designers, and strong reciprocity with their fans; by launching an ambitious, long-awaited game announcement at a pivotal point in the year, they could shift attention away from competitors and toward them.)
Discussion #3: Plan action steps. To make your strategy actionable, the authors suggest that you brainstorm the individual actions or efforts the tribe must undertake to achieve its desired results. Consider everything from smaller-scale plans—such as gathering marketing data—or tribe-wide behavioral changes, such as developing a more productive workflow. To compensate for mistakes, devise a plan A and a plan B, in case things go awry.
(Shortform note: When planning action steps, don’t stop at making a list. Rumelt suggests that an action plan should integrate all sub-plans into one well-crafted design—a dynamic whole, like a car engine, where many parts work in tandem to produce something more than the sum of the parts’ actions. To do this, consider how your steps fit together—for instance, how a marketing team’s tasks fit with the product designers’, the software engineers’, and so on.)
Until your strategy passes the authors’ three tests, they contend it’s incomplete. By validating the strategy, you ensure that it’s worth committing time and money to, and you motivate the tribe to action.
Once you’ve built and validated a strategy, the tribe will often ascend to Stage 4. According to the authors, building a viable strategy unifies the tribe and creates enthusiasm. Now you can begin to implement your action steps. Focus on executing your behaviors. In the face of setbacks, stay resilient and reorganize the tribe around a readapted strategy.
Avoid Excessive Planning
In Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall contend that strategic planning, like the above method, doesn’t always lead to success. They explain that leaders often devise large, top-down strategies based on inaccurate assumptions about how things will play out. Because such strategies are based on ideals rather than reality, teams inconsistently execute them—that is, they simply don’t work.
To avoid foundering with a large, clunky strategy, Buckingham and Goodall recommend staying agile. Agile companies use a flexible, lightweight strategy that centers on adaptation and communication. By taking action every day and staying attuned to what information a team needs and how they’re doing, an agile leader guides her company via quick, frequent pivots. This allows the company to navigate the complex world of business and competition, and it saves time and energy otherwise spent coordinating the various parts of a complicated and demanding strategy.
The authors explain that at Stage 4, three-part relationships prevail. This looks like three people or three entities—such as a person, a tribe, or an organization—forming a relationship.
A tribal leader actively builds relationships between potential tribe members by speaking to two things: who each person is and what they have to offer—in other words, their values and their work. As he connects people, they speak well of him to their own networks, and he benefits from this word-of-mouth networking. Imagine the head of a startup incubator who introduces various founders, speaking of their values and their skills. By connecting people, he spreads seeds for collaboration and tribal success.
(Shortform note: In addition to business-oriented networking, informal, social networking can help workers develop friendships, grow more comfortable with their coworkers, and learn from each other. However, research finds that in social networking, women may be less apt to participate in after-office gatherings than men, since they often have families or children to take care of in addition to work. To counteract this, try introducing more social time, such as open collaboration time or group lunches, during the day.)
Three-part relationships have three main benefits: They’re stable, they’re easily expanded, and they enable creativity.
Mapping the Networks
In a paper on the power of informal networks, the McKinsey Institute recommends mapping your organizations’ networks of relationships and using them to better understand how information flows and work gets done. Some of these relationships are three-part relationships (triads) as the authors suggest, yet research shows that dyads and tetrads are also common structures.
The informal, cross-departmental networks within an organization do function as creative catalysts, as the authors suggest. The Harvard Business Review writes that when urgent deadlines or difficult tasks arise, it’s not a business’s formal structures but these informal work networks that drum up the resources and morale to get things done.
However, informal network mapping shows these networks aren’t entirely made up of triads—instead, their relationships take various forms and networks form spontaneously, often without triads or a tribal leader. Relationship types include dyads, where two people might relate with a one-way information flow, or an incomplete triad with one person in charge and the other two as subordinates (like a “v” shape). Often, someone sits within a matrix of connections while another is all but disconnected on the outskirts. This suggests that triads are just one kind of network relationship, and that they aren’t strictly necessary to create work networks.
The authors explain that undertaking the above three activities will stabilize your whole tribe at Stage 4. When this happens, you’ll see three main changes in each individual, as well. These changes indicate that the individual has also adopted the Stage 4 view of values, language, and relationship style.
All Models Are Limited
While the development of a given individual might unfold just as the authors describe, it also might not. This is because any given model—an abstract representation of reality, such as the Tribal Leadership model of development—is inherently limited. As the authors of The Great Mental Models Volume 1 explain, we create models with limited information from limited points of view. Because of this, any model will reflect just one perspective on an issue.
Given this, allow room for error when looking for these markers in your team. A given tribe member might express all the specific behaviors the author describes, or she might express just a few. Likely as not, no one will transition to Stage 4 in exactly the same way.
In addition, the authors seem to neglect individuation, an important aspect of psychological growth wherein the individual matures into an autonomous, self-determining person. An update to the Tribal Leadership model might acknowledge individuation, whereas the current model suggests that tribe members conform almost religiously to the will of the tribe. In some ways, conformity is good—it promotes harmony and easy interactions. At the same time, some individuals might fall out of sync with a tribe that can’t honor their uniqueness, and this could strain the fabric of the tribe over time.
Finally, the authors mention a fifth stage, while acknowledging they hadn’t envisioned it until just before publication and therefore hadn’t developed their thinking on it. They speculate that Stage 5 is the next level of effective and meaningful work, and they assert that Stage 5 is where top-level companies are heading. The authors suggest that Stage 5 has the following qualities:
(Shortform note: In an interview with Gallup, Logan gives a few examples of companies within which some tribes reached Stage 5, including Apple, IBM, and Pixar. The distinguishing attribute of Stage 5 tribes is that they produce world-shaking innovations, like Apple’s creation of the iPhone or the graphical user interface (GUI) pioneered by Xerox PARC. These innovations, Logan says, are hard to quantify, but they’re undeniably world-changing—just try to imagine life without smartphone technology or visual, user-friendly computer interfaces.)
The authors emphasize that tribal leaders must learn to recognize the key markers of each stage. To practice this skill, consider your immediate colleagues’ values, language, and relationships to identify the stage of tribe that you work within.
Recalling the “three key markers” of each stage—relationship to values, characteristic language, and relationship style—consider your current workplace tribe. First, how do your immediate colleagues relate to values? Briefly describe any shared attitudes you’ve noticed.
Secondly, think about your workplace’s shared language—how do you and your colleagues tend to speak about work? For instance, you might use generally upbeat language but still love the weekends. Or, people’s language might be less cheerful.
Third, consider how your close colleagues form relationships. Do you see primarily two-person or three-person relationships, or a mixture of the two? Describe the typical structure(s) you see.
Now that you’ve reflected on how your tribe displays the three key markers, identify your tribe’s stage. Recalling the two key coaching opportunities (helping someone to level up their language and their relationships) and the authors’ recommendation to work with one person at a time, how might you begin to upgrade your tribe’s current stage?