Written by: Don Worthley
6/28/2008 4:14 AM

This is part 3 of a series of posts on thoughts related to Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright:

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

This has been a series of articles on Tribal Leadership, a great book that has helped on a number of levels to identify the underlying dynamics of organizational communities.  In this post, we pick up where our last post left off.  How do you facilitate stage 4 connections in your organization?  The authors of the book give some great recommendations and I'm sure that if we think about this ourselves, we could extend the conversation and come up with some ideas of our own.

The authors of Tribal leadership identify four specific steps to get started in the process of creating a network of stage 4 triads in your organization.

1. Values and Projects - the authors recommend that you know the values and the projects that each person in your network are working on.  What I came away with from this section was the importance of really connecting with people on a primary level, the kind of level where you seek to understand the dreams and aspirations of each person in your network.  What is really important to them?  How do they desire to grow?  Connecting on a primary level means that you are asking these kinds of questions, but you're also moving a step beyond this and asking yourself how you and other members of your network can help work together to help see these dreams and goals realized.
2. Small Gifts - This is from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.  He's quoted as saying something to the effect that networking is the art of giving small gifts.  Another way to say this is "give freely from the things that come easy to you and are of great value to those in your network."
3. Be Great - This gets back to what we said in the previous post about how it's impossible to skip a stage.  In order to move to stage four, one has to master stage 3; and stage 3 is the stage of the professionals who exclaim, "I'm great and you're not."  I'm not convinced of this point.  I would feel more comfortable saying, "Be the best you can be and do the absolute best you can at the things you're good at."  To relate this to the previous point, we could say, "Find those areas where you excel and do your best to develop and grow those areas so you can share your giftedness with those in your network."
4. Be Authentic - This is a theme that has run throughout many of the books on organizational leadership that I've read recently.  Jim Collins' level 5 leader from Good to Great and Bill George's depiction of a leader from True North are both pictures of a leader who is comfortable being open and transparent regarding their own struggles and limitations as a leader.  In many ways, This kind of openness says, "I'm may be the leader, but I'm human and I recognize that you are too."  The authors say this on page 204, which I think highlights the kind of reaction that occurs when leaders learn to be authentic.

"Triads lead to a blurring of roles between client, service provider, friend, mentor and coach.  Once the triad is established, all the roles merge and morph, requiring each person to contribute to, and receive contributions from the other two."

Additional Thoughts and Tools

I realize that I did not participate in the same kind of research, but after reading this section in the book, I sat down and asked myself, "What other kinds of tools, techniques or guidelines could we list that would help members of an organization connect in highly engaging, stage 4 networks?"  Here's my start to that list:

• Ask Questions - Have you ever been in a meeting where you didn't really feel like connecting or contributing, but then someone asked an engaging question that was right down your alley and you responded?  What happened during the remainder of the meeting?  Did you tune out again, or did you find yourself jumping in again and again because you felt engaged?  Questions are one of the most powerful mechanisms for communication within a community.  This topic could be a whole blog post on its own.  With the right wording, questions can lead people toward a particular train of thought and when directed, they can have a significant effect on the person's behavior being engaged with the question.  In conversations with 2 or more people, questions can be used to draw the conversation around to include a newcomer or maybe a member of your organization that finds it more difficult to engage others in conversation.  How is this done? My focus is on finding ways to use technology to make these processes easier.  On a simple level, this is done by using questions appropriately in conversations you start on your blog.  Ending a blog with a series of questions helps to let the readers know that you're starting this conversation and you're interested in their own thoughts.  Participating in online forums, especially question and answer forums if they are available to members of your organization.  Of course, the goal is to establish strong relationships, so there's no substitute for phone calls and face-to-face conversations when that's possible.  Learning to pepper all of these forms of communication with questions that engage is the goal.
• Listen - This is related to asking question as well as to Values and Projects from above.  You know you're asking good questions when you find yourself listening carefully to the response.  How is this done? Many of today's community sites have been configured to allow members of the organization to subscribe to forums or blogs through the use of a variety of technologies such as RSS and email.  A great way to "listen" to people in a network where members all have access to their own blog is to use the suggested mechanisms in your organization's chosen community software to subscribe to the thoughts being published by others in your network.
• Affirm Newcomers -  A growing organization will have a steady supply of newcomers.  This is probably one of the most important demographics within your organization to engage in healthy stage 4 relationships.  A great way to have members of your organization enter the community is to encourage them to answer a few introductory questions that help existing members of your organization get a feel for interests and goals the new member may have upon entering your organization.  Combine this with the idea of asking questions to make sure that these newcomers are engaged by existing members in some kind of dialog.  How is this done?  Many organizations have a member directory, but this is often just a cold, searchable database of basic profile information.  If your community tools don't have a way to quickly identify new members, you may want to invest in having an extension to your product developed to ensure that all members have access to new recruits.  Create a culture of growth within your organization by encouraging existing members to search for newcomers that have similar interests and volunteer some time in helping to establish a connection with the newcomer.
• Provide Feedback - People love feedback.  If you've maintained a blog for a while, you know this.  And, of course, you don't have to maintain a blog to know this.  It's a core aspect of being human and needing to feel appreciated, respected or just generally noticed by the universe at large.  Even constructive feedback says to the person involved that someone has seen their desire to grow and to contribute and they are being affirmed and guided in that desire.  How is this done?  If your members maintain blogs, it's a great idea to provide instructions on model blog behavior.  A couple of things could be said along these lines.  First, encourage people to use treat blog entries as conversation starters.  If they read a blog entry, it's kind of like listening in on a conversation and hearing someone speak for a few minutes about something they're really interested in.  So, first of all, encourage people to respond.  The same goes for threads in a forum.  Especially when you see that the thread was started by a newcomer.  Second, encourage people to respond to comments left on their blog or on forum threads they start.  Again, it may not be possible to respond to everyone in extremely large organizations with active topics, but certainly focus on those who are new.  A great gesture when you see someone new posting a comment to a blog or to a forum is to send an email offline to say "Hi," or "Welcome aboard," or "Thanks," or "Let me know how if can help."
• Disagree - There's nothing that will raise the level of engagement in a community like a little good natured disagreement.  And by good natured, I don't mean that it doesn't get heated.  When people have strong beliefs or opinions about a particular topic, there are often differences of opinion; and when these opposing sides are hashed out in a public forum, it can be a great learning experience for all.  How is this done? First of all, here's how it's not done. It's not done by avoiding community related technology in your organization because of a fear of losing organizational control over the thoughts and ideas expressed among community members.  While there are some organizations where control must be maintained to ensure that there is no hint of inappropriate types of collaboration among members, communities can be safeguarded by ensuring the members agree to community terms and conditions that clearly establish the guidelines for appropriate community behavior.  It is done by encouraging people to disagree amicably through blog comments, forum posts and any community tool designed to facilitate community conversations.
• Follow Up - While this seem similar to Listen, Affirm Newcomers and Provide Feedback, I feel this needs to be listed separately.  We're talking about knowing about an event or a situation that may have come up through interaction in a forum on through the comments of a blog, or even through face-to-face contact or a phone call; and then making sure to follow up on that event or situation at a later date to see how things went or what the outcome was.  How is this done? Let's say you write a post to your blog critiquing a new set of certification exams that you just completed and you notice in the comments that someone that you've never met has posted a comment.  After following up with an email, you find out that they have scheduled their first exam a couple of months from now.  So, you set an alert in your personal information manager to send a follow-up email after the exam.  This means the world to the new member and you're setting the precedent for the kind of behavior that will typify your organization as this level of intentionality and engagement becomes the norm.
• Mentor - We believe based on our own study of community within an organization and what makes it successful that the best communities will have an intentional mentoring process in place to help insure that the tools and techniques listed above are being practiced on a regular basis.  A mentoring program of some kind helps to raise the level of intentionality of members of the organization and it encourages accountability to the standards of community that are desired within the organization.  We also believe, based on our own experiences as members in a wide variety of organizations, that there is a certain percentage of the members within an organization that are naturally suited for helping other members of the organization on a mentoring level.  How is this done? A good mentoring program should be piloted and overseen by someone with experience both within your organization and serving as a mentor.  In an organization where no mentoring program has existed before and where the level of involvement of the mentor is also high, it is difficult for mentors to know what they should be doing.  Starting with a small pilot group of mentors can help to provide a solid leadership foundation for expanding out to larger and larger segments of the organization as members are trained to function as a mentor.  From a technology perspective, the mentor relationship can be tracked with as much or as little structure as needed.  In some cases existing systems, such as the certification system, may need to be modified to accommodate the need to track mentoring relationships.  In some cases, mentoring relationships may just be encouraged and then allowed to develop in a ad hoc manner using existing community tools and the techniques described above to increase the level of intentionality in the relationship.

Tribal Culture and Organizational Strategy?

It turns out that the last section of the book deals with the relationship between organizational strategy and tribal culture.  There were some fascinating discoveries that I will cover in a final post on Tribal Leadership.

Until then, I'm interested to know what you think about creating a stage 4 culture within your organization that encourages high levels of intentionality and interconnectedness.  Are there techniques or tools that you thought of that help to make a community more sticky and engaging?  Have you tried some of the ideas mentioned above and found that they didn't work as you had planned?  By all means, jump in and join the conversation!

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