Birds flock, fish school and people “tribe.” That is the premise that inspired “Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization,” which debuted at 1-800-CEO-READ as the No. 1-selling business book in February. Dave Logan, Ph.D. and co-author of the book, will be the keynote speaker at the Small Business Times IQ Awards Luncheon on Wednesday, April 30, at the BizTech Expo.
Logan is the co-founder and senior partner of the management-consulting firm CultureSync, which specializes in strategy, cultural design and high performance. He is a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
“Tribal Leadership” (Harpercollins) was the product of an eight-year study of the “tribal” corporate cultures at more than two dozen successful corporations. According to Logan, small businesses are “tribes,” and large corporations are “tribes of tribes.”
Logan was recently interviewed by SBT executive editor Steve Jagler. The following are excerpts from that interview.
SBT: First of all, what kind of reaction are you getting to the book, now that you’re out and about the country and it has hit the bookstores?
Logan: “We had some pretty high expectations for it, and it’s actually gone beyond that. We’re doing lots and lots of keynotes all around the country, and we’ve even got some coming up in Asia and Europe. It’s really been amazing. Some industries are reacting in a way that we really didn’t expect. Commercial real estate and real estate in general has gone kind of crazy for it. Financial services have gone crazy, in part because of what’s happening in subprime. And health care absolutely loves it.”
SBT: Your book was compiled on the basis of eight years of research of 24,000 people at two dozen or so companies. That’s a big undertaking. Logistically, how was that done?
Logan: “We used a whole bunch of different research methods. We used surveys, we used open-ended interviews, we used what are called sociograms. Then we combined it all over the eight-year process.”
SBT: What’s your elevator speech on the concept of “Tribal Leadership?”
Logan: “First of all, people form tribes. They always have. They always will. Just like birds flock and fish school. People tribe. People form tribes for all sorts of reasons, including work. Most managers have never been trained to see that tribes exist. But the cultures within tribes determines whether people’s leadership efforts will succeed or fail. So, we have this one-to-five scale … One is everything you don’t want – stress, workplace violence. Five is everything you do want – collaboration, innovation, people feel they have more energy at the end of the day than they do at the beginning.
“Most organizations are in the two to three range. And if companies simply moved up one notch, they would get something like a 300-percent increase in their bottom line.”
SBT: So, give me an example of what a company that is stuck at the two or three stage can do to get to a four or five stage?
Logan: “One of the findings in the book is you can only move a culture one stage at a time. So, if you’ve got a two, you can move it to a three. You can’t move it from a two to a four without moving it to a three. So, if you’ve got a two, that’s like the place that renews your driver’s license or the places that screen your luggage as you’re moving through airports … a lot of people standing around, not doing very much. Kind of burned out.
“What you do in that case is you go find the people who want things to be different and work intensively with those people – mentor them, give them opportunities and elevate the way they talk to stage three, which nets out to, ‘I’m great, you’re not.’ So, you’re building a sense of personal accomplishment in them. And then you encourage them to do for other people in the tribe what you did for them. You get this mentoring that ricochets around the tribe, and before long, it’s upgraded from a two to a three, the critical match has shifted. Now, you’ve got a group of people, and it’s like you see in hospitals or law firms. Everybody’s personally competitive. That’s fine, except that there’s really not collaboration, and overall performance is significantly muted.”
SBT: So, then how do you move to the next stage?
Logan: “To move from three to four, you first have to find values that people share. You build multi-person projects that bring those values to life. You also begin introducing people in the tribe to other people on the basis of shared values. You also introduce them on the basis of mutual need. What’s interesting is that people form triads. They start talking in groups of threes. If two of the people have a fight, and that will happen from time to time, the third person will bring them back together.”
SBT: OK, so what are the key characteristics of a stage five company?
Logan: “Fives are very rare. They only happen about 2 percent of the time. They only happen for very short periods of time. It is absolutely inspiring. Most people have never seen a stage five culture, they’ve never been in one. The group that built the first MacIntosh was a stage five. The group that built the first I-pod was a stage five. Pixar has been and probably still is a stage five. People talk about it with the same pride they use to talk about their kids. It’s amazing. They’ll open their wallets, and say, ‘Here’s a picture of my kids and here’s a picture of this group that I was a member of in, you know, 1995.’ They’re simply chasing their sense of potential and making history. It’s all about what’s possible and what can be done to change the world.”
