TRIBAL LEADERSHIP Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright

Know the values, current projects, and aspirations of each person in your tribe.

• Use Reid Hoffman’s “theory of small gifts” to build your relationship with people in your tribe as preparation for triading.

• Form a triad by introducing two people to each other on the basis of current projects and shared values.

• There’s no substitute for going through Stage Three, so that you’re known for some area of expertise. Doing so will give you the credibility to triad with others.

While the efforts of such exceptional leaders cannot be reduced to a formula, they do share characteristics of finding shared values, aligning on a noble cause, establishing triadic relationships (the topic of Chapter 10), and building a strategy to make his‍

Core values are “principles without which life wouldn’t be worth living.”

• There are two ways to seek core values. The first is for a Tribal Leader to tell a value-laden story, which triggers others to tell similar stories about their values.

• The second way is to ask questions such as “What are you proud of?” and ask three to five open-ended questions.

• The Tribal Leader’s goal is to find shared values that unite the tribe.

• A noble cause is what the tribe is “shooting for.” There are two ways to find a tribe’s noble cause. The first is to keep asking, “in service of what?”

the same general direction like magnetized iron filings.

As long as the tribe remains aligned on core values and a noble cause, its unity is strong. When it becomes about agreement, purges often follow.

Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line—the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person’s contribution, provided that they stay pointed in

The Spanish Inquisition has two vital lessons for Tribal Leaders. First, values must be core, and that means universal. The moment a group withholds the benefit of a value from another, it is not universal, hence not core. Second, the unity resulting from core values and a noble cause must be alignment, not agreement. A value is a squishy concept, and that’s part of what makes it so useful.

Amgen was fortunate to have started as a culture dominated by scientists eager to collaborate, so their culture reflected science-based inquiry, competition, teamwork, creating value, ensuring quality, collaboration, and communication, and being ethical—the eight values that continue to lead the company.

met a Tribal Leader in medicine, Dr. Mark Rumans of the Billings Clinic in Montana, who has taken Sample’s advice and put “atrocities” into a Stage Four context. His wall has a plaque, visible from the chairs in his administrative office, which reads, “The first clean kill awakens the whole herd.” This sign is stunning to people who know him as a man with a soft voice and a warm demeanor, and as a person famous for his self-deprecating humor.