Tribal leadership
It's a fact of life: birds flock, fish school, people "tribe."Every company, indeed every organization, is a tribe, or if it's large enough, a network of tribes—groups of 20 to 150 people in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of everyone else. Tribes are more powerful than teams, companies, or even CEOs, and yet their key leverage points have not been mapped—until now. In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright show leaders how to assess their organization's tribal culture on a scale from one to five and then implement specific tools to elevate the stage to the next. The result is unprecedented success.In a rigorous eight-year study of approximately 24,000 people in over two dozen corporations, Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright refine and define a common theme: the success of a company depends on its tribes, the strength of its tribes is determined by the tribal culture, and a thriving corporate culture can be established by an effective tribal leader.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
27mentions
20people
2009–2025years
63% recommend37% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Ahoy. I agree that humans aren’t wolves.
For a good primer on hierarchy dynamics in human systems, I recommend Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.
In what Logan calls stage 3 leadership, organizations cluster around individual “rockstar” people - and this is the vast majority of human organizations.. they estimate 80%.
In Stage 4, it’s all rockstar people organized around values vs. a person.
You certainly still have people who have authority through competency, but people aren’t granted authority based purely on “position”.
Stage 4 culture are the best in the world, and learning how to build them is a worthwhile skill.
- It is. I've been trying to offer tips on how it works in my comments in this discussion.
If you want some personal books for yourself, try Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius), The Gentle Art of Not Giving a F_ck, and Atomic Habits. If you want some management books to help with your team, try Peopleware (a classic), First, Break All The Rules (much better than the title suggests), and Tribal Leadership.
- Random thoughts.
Theory X is very convenient for those in charge. No need to think hard - just pull out the whip.
In my experience it takes very little application of Theory X to create enough resentment (even if hidden) to make highly creative work impossible. If you want people to do creative work, Theory Y is your best approach.
Those with executive function challenges like ADHD gain increased executive function if doing what they should is also pleasurable. It takes a long time to recondition such people to this, but Theory Y does so. That said, in the short term Theory X may work better. But the long term matters more.
Some of the best advice that I know for moving an organization towards Theory Y is in Tribal Leadership, https://www.amazon.com/Tribal-Leadership-Leveraging-Thriving....
- I would recommend reading “Tribal Leadership”. Also, I just started but I would look at “Primal Leadership” too.
- I read a book a while back called Tribal Leadership that calls out exactly the problems you are referring to.
One is that the manager has to say the same thing to multiple reports, which simply isn’t scalable. Second the person at the other end of the 1:1 feels commoditized, and third, people start to spot inconsistencies (intentional or not) between what the manager is telling different reports, which damages their credibility. Their solution is to form triads (three person meetings).
- I’d suggest reading Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.
