May 9

Written by: Don Worthley
5/9/2008 2:04 PM

This is part 1 of a series of posts on thoughts related to Tribal Leadership:

• Tribal Leadership - Connecting and Sharing (Current Post)
• Tribal Triads - What Good Networkers Probably Already Know
• Tribal Triads - How To Get There
• Tribal Strategy - How to Reach Your Goal

We're into the second year of research related to Member Crossing, a community product we are researching and building which is designed to help organizations use technology to create engaging communities where members are able to share highly discoverable information.  Connect and Share.  Those are the two core aspects of our product. 

Two weeks ago, while perusing the new additions section of our public library, Tribal Leadership caught my eye.  Partly because of a fascinating conversation I had with Adam Wallace (a fellow entrepreneur who has worked on creating community solutions), a few weeks back and partly because of the fact that the tribe meme seems to really resonate with our culture. 

I labeled the post part I because I'm actually not done with the book yet.  Lot's of other things on my plate right now, but I wanted to highlight this book even before I complete it because of the amazing impact I think it will have on organizations of all kinds.

A Quick Book Overview

Like Good to Great, Tribal Leadership is based on years of research¹ which are boiled down to a core set of principles that we can apply to our own organizations.  As the authors poured over the data from their research, they found that organizations are really quite simple.  Sure many grow to include thousands of members, but regardless of their size, at their very heart, they are really nothing more than a collection of one or more tribes that naturally form within an organization, often crisscrossing both vertically and horizontally through organizational structures.  As the authors studied these tribes in more detail, they found 5 distinct stages through which these tribes progress if indeed there is progression.

One of the really useful aspects of Tribal Leadership is the association between these distinct 5 phases within tribes and the kind of language you might hear by leaders or members of a tribe in each phase.  Here's how the authors describe each phase:

1. Life Sucks
2. My Life Sucks
3. I'm Great (And You're Not)
4. We're Great
5. Life is Great

Connecting and Sharing

You'll have to read the book (and it's definitely worth the read) to get full description of the rest of the stages.  While the early stages were interesting to me on a personal level², what I'd like to highlight in this first blog entry about Tribal Leadership is the emphasis on connecting and sharing that takes members of a stage 3 tribe into the fourth stage.  The authors describe stage 3 as the stage of professionals, a stage that I fully understand having worked as a consultant and a trainer for a decade now.  I get work based on my ability to be great at what I do (or at least convince other people to think this is true). 

But as we all learn, you can only go so far by yourself.  Fortunately, I've had the opportunity to work alongside some wonderful teams of people that have encouraged me to look past stage 3 tribal life into what can be accomplished when people begin to think and act as a team, and it's really powerful on multiple levels.  You accomplish more and in the process, you develop relationships which enrich your life. 

One of the most fascinating things about Tribal Leadership now that I'm into the chapters on stage 4 tribal culture is the specific steps that can be taken to help members of a tribe move from one stage to another.  As we look to the development of community software we are currently developer at IT Crossing called Member Crossing, we've identified that these steps and these principles which help move people from one stage to the next are critical for the success of a technology solution which aims at increasing the stickiness and overall usefulness of an organization's community initiatives. 

Taking Your Tribe to the Next Level

So, what have we gathered so far?  What are the specifics?  We've found that people want to connect and they want to share, and this desire is increasing as new generations enter the ranks of our organizations, generations that have known only an era when anyone can publish anything to the entire world and in the process build a global network of friends that only the most socially elite could have managed just 20 years ago. 

Based on what we've learned through our studies of social media technologies, there are a few steps we believe organizations should begin to follow in order to ensure that they have identified a community strategy that is effective in moving members toward stage 5 tribal membership and leadership.

The following bullet points are not from the book. Check out the remainder of the posts on Tribal Leadership for more information about additional ideas covered in the book.

• Vision - The tendency for many organizations is to begin setting strategies or even thinking through possible implementations before a vision has been cast for a community initiative.  Your vision should be specific, measurable and achievable.  "We will increase the level of engagement for every member of our organization," for example, would be a great goal, but a pour vision statement.  You may consider something more along the lines of, "We will implement the systems necessary over the next 3 years to ensure that every member in our organization can identify at least one other member who they would say has tried to connect with them in a helpful and meaningful way."  Or maybe the community focus of your organization revolves around one or more publications.  Your vision statement may be, "By the first quarter of 20??, each of our publications will be extended to allow members of our community to connect and share through interactive community features associated with the web presence of each publication."
• Strategy - Determining the right strategy to see your vision through to reality will require feedback from multiple departments within your organization and from internal staff and key vendors who are able to help your organization weigh the many organizational and technological changes that may be needed to achieve your goals.  Feedback from your staff and your vendors may lead to changes in the vision, and this iterative process should be encouraged for as long as possible.
• Milestones (With Accountability) - This may sound like project management 101, but it's amazing how often this step is overlooked or executed incorrectly.  At least one person needs to be responsible for each milestone, and these milestones should have deliverables which serve as talking points to ensure that everyone involved in your initiative is on the same page.  As much as possible, and as late as possible, these milestones should provide opportunity for dialog between your vendors, staff, key representative members, and key stake holders to ensure that your overall community solution adheres to your vision and to ensure that no new data has uncovered reasons to consider revising your vision.  As much as possible, this is an iterative process.
• Teams - De-emphasize hierarchy as much as humanly possible for the most efficient execution of the specific steps and tasks identified through the strategy and the core milestones set for the core members of your team.  Be careful to choose vendors who work well as team players and give them the level of access to your own staff, regardless of organizational level (as much as is possible), so that each team member feels empowered to achieve their specific tasks and goals with the help of all other members of the team.  Our experience with organizations who really understand this principle has lead to the development of software that we are proud to have written, and it's all because of the great team atmosphere encouraged within our client's organization.
• Execution - At this point, you have buy in on every level and you've identified your course of action and all members of the team have been empowered to solve problems creatively and with all of the necessary tools and resources necessary to complete their work.  Changes can still be encouraged, but a specific change management process needs to be agreed upon in advance to ensure the project milestones are met on time.  Whatever you do, don't start at this phase!³

As we move forward in our work with organizations to help them use technology to connect and share, we plan to follow this same process; and we will be encouraging our clients to break their vision down into a series of projects that will help to progressively draw members into stage 4 and 5 tribal leadership and membership.  Here are some specific features that we encourage organizations to consider implementing.

• Profiles - moving beyond membership directories, members of an organization over the next 10 years will expect to maintain a personal profile that will allow each member to upload an image of themselves, maintain an optional blog, show basic contact information to others and create and manage connections made with other members of the organization.
• E-commerce Enhancements - for those organizations with an online store, we encourage considering an upgrade to the store to include community related features such as product ratings, product comments and product related forums as well as related product listings which show what other customers also bought.  Word of mouth is extremely important for your members as they consider making a purchasing decision and having community related features included in this process helps to increase the overall level of engagement of your members.  Of course, the fact that these changes have been proven to increase revenue helps to ensure that there is a tangible overall return on investment for the upgrade.
• Event Enhancements - While this isn't expected by most members of most organizations yet, it will be soon.  Events should be augmented both before and after with the use of community related tools. 
• Community Knowledge Management System - As members of the your community are encouraged to connect and share, the artifacts of this sharing process will need to be managed through a new type of application that currently goes under many names.  Some may refer to this type of application as an enterprise wiki, while others may speak of content management systems that are opened up to members.  Others may focus on blogs or forums.  In the end, what is needed is a new type of system that we call a Community Knowledge Management System, or CKMS.  That's the vision for Member Crossing.

Of course, these simple steps are just the beginning, but as simple as they are, it will be important for the overall success of your organization's community building initiatives to follow all 5 of the phases outlined above.  In the future, we will be writing a white paper which outlines the details of the community building process we recommend for implementing an effective community building solution in your organization.  And we're really excited about some of the features that go beyond these initial steps we've outlined in this post, features that we believe will help to significantly raise the level of intentionality of community among members.  More on this to come!

While many of the social networking and social media features will be well used by a certain percentage of your overall members, we believe that this percentage will be the percentage of your members which are already naturally inclined to connect and share socially.  Some of the initial features like profiles and enhanced community features will help address the expectations of this smaller percentage of the core membership, but will do little to help draw in the majority of your members into active and engaging connections within the community.  At a fundamental level, this is not a technical problem to solve; it is a sociological problem.  So what we've done over the past few months is ask ourselves, "What draws people into an organization?" Or, "What really facilitates connections and causes people to open up?"  We're taking the answers to these questions and then asking ourselves, "How can we translate this into a system which interacts with each individual member and encourages members to interact with each other in ways that leave people feeling appreciated, empowered and engaged all at the same time.  We will start by helping organizations with the first, expected set of features.  Then, with this foundation in place, we'll begin introducing a set of features that will help to significantly increase the level of intentionality of an organization's community.  It's an exciting process and we look forward to partnering with organizations to help move from vision to completed community solutions that will help their members connect and share in ways that significantly increase the overall value of membership.

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