How NOT to use Tribal Leadership
Just the other day a reader of Tribal Leadership sent an email to CultureSync asking: “how can I get my boss to read this book and make these changes?” It’s a great question.
It took me back to what happened when I asked a similar question. That experience changed my life – and if you do what I did, it might change yours in unexpected ways, too.
Here’s what happened.
As a member of my organization’s executive team, I’d been reading a book designed to assess and develop personal leadership skills. But, something wasn’t clicking for me. The gap between the organization we were and the organization we wanted to be seemed to be growing. Finally, I googled “organizational culture” and found Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.
From the first chapter I was hooked. I could see the path from “My Life Sucks” to “I’m Great” to “We’re Great.” Next, I started hanging flip charts of triads and the cultural stages on my office walls. I listened to the audio book while working on financial reports. I couldn’t get enough of everything I was learning.
As I started making changes, some days were good and some were bad.
On bad days, I preached to colleagues about how they should fix their teams. It was clear to me: I was great, they sucked. I flooded their in boxes with Ted Talks, like this one and this one.
Inevitably, my co-workers’ interest turned to avoidance as I continued preaching. Looking back it isn’t surprising that I started to feel isolated. Walking down the hallways was once filled with camaraderie, now it felt like people were diving back into their offices as I came around the corners. Suddenly, my life sucked!
On good days (before my life started sucking), I listened to the values of people and noticed that I could hear them in a different way. In one episode, a leader in our tribe shared that he wasn’t engaged by our project any longer. At our next meeting, we talked about his future in the group. That meeting turned into a project that produced instant engagement for him, valuable feedback from the tribe, and a new metric that would actually track what mattered to the entire tribe. It was so cool!
In the end, I learned that every moment I spent trying to force a change in the behavior of my colleagues was a lost opportunity to listen for their values. I was failing. The isolation of the bad days overwhelmed the successes of the good ones. After ten months, the writing was on the wall, my resignation letter was in the envelope, and my boxes were packed.
It was one of the greatest lessons of my life.
This brings us back to the question asked at the beginning of this blog “how can I get my boss to read this book and make these changes?”
The answer is pretty simple. If you are looking to impact your tribe, start first with yourself. Begin by listening for the values present all around you including your own, those of your boss, and your colleagues. Next, start connecting people by the values that they share. When you do, culture, strategy, and structure will begin syncing more easily than you could have imagined.
Deirdre Gruendler
CultureSync Approved Tribal Leader™
Director of the CultureSync Academy