This is part 2 of a series of posts on thoughts related to Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright:
While chances are that there are probably people in your organization that are naturally gifted at networking, one thing is for sure. If I were a member of your organization, I would not be one of them. And I suspect that I am very much like many in the technical crowd and possibly even very much like a large percentage of those on the business side of an organization. What can we learn from these social savants? A lot, I've found as I've continued my study through Tribal Leadership.
In my quest to understand what it is that brings people together in engaging and life-changing communities, I've focused recently, as you may know if you've tracked with recent entries to the blog, on books and resources related to leadership. It turns out that this focus has yielded some amazing insights into the ingredients for great, engaging, sticky communities, the kind that make you feel like you've just been roused from a long dream and which spur you on to learn and grow in ways you hadn't previously imagined. I believe that at the heart of any organization or community about which its members would feel this kind of excitement is a team of tribal leaders. And one of the central tools of the tribal leader, as discovered by Logan, Kind and Fischer-Wright in their 5 year study of organizations from multiple disciplines, is the triad.
You'll recall from the first post on Tribal Leadership, there are 5 stages commonly found within tribal cultures and these 5 stages are captured by the following phrases:
- Stage 1 - Life Sucks
- Stage 2 - My Life Sucks
- Stage 3 - I'm Great
- Stage 4 - We're Great
- Stage 5 - Life is Great
All Roads Lead to Rome
Stage 3, is the stage of the professionals, and those at this stage are usually good at developing a lot of 1 way relationships, where information or services seem to be the currency of the relationship. At the peak of their Stage 3 performance, tribal leaders and members alike are proud of the relationships they've developed, and they often use these relationships as a means to an end, trying to establish greater levels of respect by who and what they know. I think of the really good stage 3 professionals like the ancient city of Rome. And, of course, you've heard that saying that all roads lead to Rome. These stage 3 professionals will venture out along their networks to achieve some purpose, and when they're done, they return home to the city of their professional excellence.
A Short Story
A story from my college days emphasizes this point. I received a call out of the blue from a friend I had spent time with in an organization in which I was actively involved during high school. During this stage when we saw each other on a weekly basis, we knew each other and our families knew each other, but I wouldn't have said that we were friends (Spending long hours in front of a computer writing code for fun didn't engender me to my peers back in the 1980's, but that's another story I won't tell). So I received this call from, let's call him Tim, and Tim was just calling to catch up. He had spent time traveling around the world and had ended up in Canada, where he was helping to establish a new business. It all sounded very exciting, and so we agreed to catch up over pizza at a local restaurant. Now, I'm guessing most of you caught on a few sentences ago, but I was blinded by my excitement that someone wanted to connect with me over something transcendent, like my values or my goals and dreams. I thought that there was a chance that I may have made a friend and didn't know it. Sure enough, what I found was that I was being given the opportunity to grow in an exciting multi-level marketing business, that I'm guessing was very successful. I'll have no way of knowing because I wasn't interested and after that meeting I never stayed in touch. I was being offered a one-way ticket to visit and help build someone else's Rome.
Are Dyads Bad and Triads Good?
In their book, Logan, King and Fischer-Wright call these stage 3 relationships dyads and it almost comes across too simplistic as though dyads are *bad* and triads are *good*. The authors describe dyads as relationships between 2 parties where information or value often ends up flowing one way. I think dyads are a necessity for the professional, but I can also see that every opportunity must be seized to try to build triads out of an existing network of dyads. What was discovered in their study of stage 4 organizations was that the majority of relationships in stage 4 organizations were not dyads, which, if graphed would look like the hub and spokes of a wheel, but were rather a series of connected triads which would look more like a complex structure built of a series of interconnected tetrahedrons; and as those of you with children who are old enough to play with magnetics know, the tetrahedron is the structure of choice for building interconnected, stable structures out of building blocks held together by magnetic force.
Another Short Story
During my junior year in college, I joined a campus organization where I became actively involved as a student leader. Through my early involvement, I noticed a unique culture that had developed among the students of the organization. There was a strong sense of purpose and intentionality among members. Looking back, I realize it was due to the investment of the director of our organization who was one of the most authentic people I've ever met. As we developed a closer personal relationship, I realized that our director was a master at drawing people in through connecting on a friendship level and leveraging that connection to encourage members to turn around and do the same thing with other members. What a different experience the first time we met for lunch1. I never felt like a cog in someone's business machine. I felt like I'd made a friend with a real person.
Trust is Assumed
One of the things I like about Tribal Leadership is that the authors do a great job of highlighting little nuggets of wisdom they gleaned related to each topic; and one of the things mentioned in chapter 10 regarding the culture surrounding stage 4 triads is that trust is assumed and not earned. This is somewhat of a paradoxical statement, since one is only able to enjoy this level of community after having passed through level 3. The authors make it very clear that you can't skip levels and equally as clear that one can only graduate from level 3 after mastering that level. As one who has spent the past 10 years working and thriving as a level 3 professional, I can attest that there is a lot of earning that goes on. I think the way to say it might be this. Once you've earned the right to graduate from stage 3 behavior and you're welcomed into a stage 4 culture, then, and only then can you say that trust isn't earned, it's assumed.
Another point that I would make here is that while trust is assumed when working in a stage 4 culture, an organization will move members of the tribe up to stage 4 behavior more quickly by guiding the trust building process that's needed in the earlier stages through stage 4 engineered structures. I didn't say that quite right. Putting a stage 4 infrastructure in place for managing group identity and trust can help members of your organization move up through the tribal stages with a higher level of intentionality which will lead to a faster progression through the stages and greater levels of maturity for those who finally graduate to stages 4 and 5. This is fascinating to me, because it is this that I seek to capture in technological form as I go about designing and building community software. And if you are equally as fascinated by this, I would love to talk with you! I imagine we share the same values and we clearly share the same noble cause. More on that to come.
How to Get There
Well, that's going to have to be in another post. In the mean time, I'm interested to hear from you. Do you have a story to tell of a stage 3 or stage 4 relationship? Are you aware of tools or technologies out there that help facilitate more meaningful relationships than just being added as a connection or a friend through LinkedIn or FaceBook? Can this even be captured or facilitated through the use of technology, or is this a purely human thing which by it's very necessity will require natural, organic growth that comes only through building relationships that dig down through the layers toward a real friendship?
1
This is an aside, but sort of loosely related. Our director was also one of the most gifted people at asking engaging questions. I've often reflected on this quality and how much I admire it. It was through this relationship that I began to recognize the power of questions, not just at a relational level, but also in their power to form our thoughts and beliefs. The questions you ask yourself and other people form a very important part of your reality. And learning to facilitate an environment where your members are encouraged to ask the right questions can be a very powerful aspect of building community. It's a great way to encourage people to grow, but even more important for building community, its one of the most powerful tools for drawing people in to engaging conversations that often lead to the sharing of valuable ideas and help to build relationships around common interests. One of the things we're trying to do as we design community solutions is identify new ways to encourage the question asking process among members. Right now, this often happens in forums or listservs which are great for real-time requests and responses but are not as good for long term information retrieval. It's easy for all that important community data to get lost in the shuffle. More on this to come.