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A Critique of Tribal Leadership

Posted September 4th, 2010 by Jeffbrucepatton in Business Leadership

In Reference to:

I finished listening to the audio book Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright (available free here thanks to zappos.com) which presents the 5 stages of corporate tribes depicted below.

The descriptive aspects of the book were right on, based on research, and useful to know. For instance, I found it interesting, though not surprising, that dysfunctional tribes (stages 1 - 3) make up a whopping 75% of the corporate world. (While at first glance it seems like only the first two stages are inherently dysfunctional, Stage Three "I'm great" is dysfunctional because of the inherent corollary "you're not great." This "I'm great and you're not" dynamic creates a tribe of defensive, isolated, overworked, and angry people.)

Though I agree with the authors' mapping of corporate stages, unfortunately, as is the case with a lot of non-fiction literature, things went a little awry when the authors got prescriptive. Specifically, the authors present the solutions to the dysfunctions of Stages 1-3 as primarily a change in mindset to be initiated by a "Tribal Leader"-- the leader just needs to lead the confused worker out of their funk, and voilà, they'll create a more positive work atmosphere. Which is a bit of a truism.

For instance, the book says if you're leading a group of people from Stage 2 "My life sucks" to Stage 3 "I'm great", you'll want to spot and work with the few members who want things to be different and explain that you see potential in them and you want to start working with them on developing leadership. However, the authors warn us that "depending on how long he has been at stage two, he may have developed an immunity to praise believing it to be a technique of manipulation." Their solution to this: lead them (manipulate them?) into thinking they're not being manipulated.

What's missing here is an understanding of the complexity of the situation. The fact is, when it comes to stage two, their lives probably do suck. They're probably working jobs that make use of none of their potential. They're probably working for companies who are focused on making money. They're tired of being a cog in someone else's machine. They're tired in general. And leading this miserable person into stage 3 by getting them to place their frustration on to someone else seems like a strange technique to advocate.

The book justifies this by saying that once the frustration is lifted from their own life and placed on to those who aren't as good (Stage 3), they can then push through to Stage 4 "We're great" whereby everyone in the tribe's frustration is again displaced-- this time on to the tribe's competitors.

This seems to make sense. However, these stages are not a fully developmental sequence: not all businesses start at level 1 and then move on to level 2, and so on. A brand new business could exist anywhere on the scale. So if a business could potentially start up at level 4, why all the talk about needing to drag employees through all the lower stages?

It's because many, if not most, jobs out there are hard to make satisfying. And once you're unsatisfied, it's an incremental process to making yourself feel better. If you're life sucks because of your job the one thing you can do is work to become better than other people- and then at least you'll feel a little self worth, if only in relation to those who have lesser worth than you. And once you realize you're better than most at your sucky job, and you're tired of being around people who suck, maybe then you'll have a break through and realize the people you work with don't suck as much as the people at that other company. Maybe then you'll have successfully tricked yourself into thinking that things aren't so bad at your sucky job... of course, this would all be much easier if you didn't have to trick yourself, and instead you had a tribal leader to do all the tricking.

I mock, but the fact is, a full treatment of these stages would involve all of the physical, social and institutional factors that cause people to be satisfied or dissatisfied with their jobs and wouldn't focus solely on the internal psychological patterns for coping with job dissatisfaction.

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Practicing 'Tribal Leadership' from an Integral Perspective

Posted February 28th, 2011 by Brian McConnell

Although only recently introduced to ‘Leadership Agility’, I'd developed an interest in parallels between 'Integral Leadership' and 'Tribal Leadership' since hearing Ken Wilber and Dave Logan discuss, "The Art of Tribal Leadership" here at Integral+Life.

Consequently, I've just published a very brief overview in pdf format as, “Tribal Leadership from an Integral Perspective” at academia.edu with a link from my ‘the integral economist’ site.

I’d be interested in any reflective impressions . . .

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Levels and perspectives

Posted September 4th, 2010 by skipshoe

Jeff -

Thanks for tackling the challenging topics this book. I read it recently and was looking for a forum to explore it more fully.

I resonate with some of your critiques. For one, why not strive to start your company at a "healthy level"? The problem I wrestled with was that the book seemed to conflate health and developmental level. Unlike Spiral Dynamics, which recognizes that you can health cultures are Purple, Red, Amber, etc. , Tribal Leadership seemed to assign a lower level with being unhealthy.

As a counter-point to that, I have a 16 year old friend who recently started working at two separate restaurants. While his job function at both places have many entry-level, food establishment similarities - the environments are worlds apart. In one restaurant, he is largely kept in the dark about how things operate, receives a envelope of tips from a manager .. .which always seems to be understated compared to the work load he put in bussing tables, etc. In the other restaurant, his co-workers have formed a cohesive tribe in which they are gently cajoling him to improve his customer interaction skills, they invent little games they play with each other to pass the monotony - and he feels like they really care about him. Structurally, these organizations seem to be very similar in level of maturity... but their healthiness is far apart.

I would also suggest that we do a disservice to the human ability to control our own attitude and outlook by blaming the environment. True, you need to have a high level of personal maturity to step outside of the environment - but lets not give everyone a pass on perceiving their job as sucking.

All that said, I appreciated the categories identified by the Tribal Leadership book. I've recognized these categories/patterns in the past - and the prescriptions for converting to a more healthy approach in work structure and environment are actionable and useful to me.

Thanks for starting the thread!

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Levels and perspectives

Posted September 4th, 2010 by skipshoe

Jeff -

Thanks for tackling the challenging topics this book. I read it recently and was looking for a forum to explore it more fully.

Thanks for starting the thread!

Skip

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Response to Critiques

Posted March 1st, 2011 by davelogan in response to Levels and perspectives

Thanks for this line of comments. I just stumbled across it and wanted to respond.

First, the book is an introduction to integral thinking, what Ken calls "integral light," and for that reason, we focused on only one quadrant: the lower left. This point is made clear in the research agenda. So we aren't making any claims that these stages are for individuals--that's covered by Maslow and others. It is a misuse, and a misread, to say that a person is "stage 2," for example. The tribe may manifest the behaviors of stage 2, but the same individual may be part of another tribe that behaves in stage 4. Instead, we're suggesting how tribes (groups between 20-150) evolve. As for the actual evolution being complex, that's true. In fact, it's far more complex than this critique illustrates. A business has to get everything right--it's strategy, people, skills, organizational structure, financial strategy, operating plan...and culture. Again, the book focuses only on culture. We wrote it to fill in the hole in the literature on performance. The other aspects of performance are pretty well addressed by other books and approaches.

Second, we make it clear that not all groups start at "Stage 1," but many do. Also, the history of human tribes shows a clear development starting at stage 2.

Third, the point on the complex interaction between individuals and cultures is non-trivial. It takes a careful read to see how this plays out in the book, but we are confident we got it right. The essence is that some stages require an individual intervention, and others, a group intervention. This has to do with the fact that some stages (such as 3: "I'm great") don't appear to be tribes from the inside, but rather, as a group of rugged individualists. However, from the outside, their "tribalness" is clearly visible. For example, many surgeons don't see themselves as a tribe, but most people in the hospital setting do. Again, the same individuals may be part of a stage 5 group, so it's inaccurate to say the surgeons are "stage three people."

Fourth, there is no claim in the book that the lower stages are unhealthy or dysfunctional. We use the analogy of grades. Third grade isn't better than second grade. It's more capable. This is fundamentally a performance argument.

I'm happy to talk more with people in detail if you're interested. I can be reached at dlogan@usc.edu.

Thanks for the thoughtfulness of this thread.

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Co-author's response

Posted September 5th, 2010 by davelogan in response to Levels and perspectives

Hi everyone,

The thoughtfulness of this discussion is refreshing.

Three quick points. First, Tribal Leadership is only about the lower left quadrant (culture). We argue, consistent with the thinking on this topic going back to Ed Schein, that culture cannot be measured directly, so we use language and structure of relationships as a proxy. The point about the subject needing to more complex is right on. For a business to move from "stage two" to "stage three," for example, requires address all of the other quadrants, including systems (lower right), individual behavior (upper right), and individual interior development (upper left). So why right an incomplete book? Because as people familiar with the integral movement have noted, almost all the action is on the two right quadrants. A lot of the self-help books get at the upper right quadrant, although with a stunning lack of insight. So culture has remained relatively unexplored in the mainstream business market. Not surprisingly, organizations often create new strategies and systems that cannibalize culture, resulting in an impotent organization. We wrote Tribal Leadership to fill in this gap, and as I mentioned to Ken when interviewing him for the book, as an "integral light" book.

Second, on the point about "why not get it right from the start," that's valid, and in fact, we devote a significant part of the book to that topic. Unlike the "Good to Great" argument, we didn't find that a culture can be built great and that it remains great. Unless it is constantly attended to, culture erodes, down to stage three or two. Most big companies have big, dumb cultures that can't innovate or motivate people. The challenge in those cases is to elevate their cultures as they also work on upgrading systems, strategies, individual performance, and hopefully, developing people through the individual stages that are familiar to people on this web site.

Third, on people's lives sucking, all of the points made here (including in the comments) are valid. Pragmatically, it's not about giving them a pass or manipulating them, it's about empowering them in a way that they can then empower others. We're not proponents of "stop sucking or lose your job," or any kind of trickery. It's about giving people opportunities and then seeing what they do. I've been in cultures that were so stuck in the mud that the victim mentality became invisible to people, including to me. This is not about creating blame, but we have to recognize that organizations can be, to quote the critical literature on the subject, "psychic prisons." Look at the recent numbers on employee engagement. Many people feel that their lives suck, in part, because we put them in rigid job descriptions, ask them to do mindless and uncreative work while tightening their belts and remaining motivated. Those same organizations reject ideas not invented by the people in power. So there is a sense where management needs to take responsibility for creating environments that pull people down to stage two ("my life sucks").

Anyway, thanks for the comments. My life sucks--time for coffee. :)

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thanks for book

Posted September 13th, 2010 by Isaac Holze in response to Co-author's response

I just wanted to say thanks for this book. The audio discussions with Ken on Integral Life alone have opened many thoughts and discussions of the culture at play here at work. On our best days, I believe we at Blue Sky Studios have a Level 4 culture on our best days (especially when a major portion of our films are done), but we can definitely dip to Levels 3 when conflicts arise and Level 2 when members of our tribes feel stuck. I really appreciate the new way to look at stage development in our culture at work. Now I can easily see where the languaging within tribes resides at and can actually do someting about it! (Either not fall into the "sucking" trap, or better yet look for ways to move our tribe up a stage in thinking.)

Also, this has been one of the better discussion posts, thanks to all who have contributed.

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A response response

Posted September 7th, 2010 by Jeffbrucepatton in response to Co-author's response

Thanks so much for taking the time to address the issues i presented. You did so fully, and hearing your explanations made sense out of everything I took issue with.

Your book is very interesting and really made me think- which is why I composed a critique in the first place. As I said in my post, I found your 5 stages supremely useful and well developed. On multiple occasions, I've even taught people the 5 stages when talk turns to jobs sucking -- as it often does -- and it was interesting to hear people locate their corporate cultures on the scale.

Thanks for writing a book worth discussing!

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the state of the tribe

Posted September 7th, 2010 by Kerry Dugan in response to Co-author's response

Looking at the broader context of corporate cultures, their situatedness in markets of demand and need creation/fulfillment, it seems to me that in the larger relations of inter- and extra-corporate functioning, a dance of compensatory systemic habits (or addictions, pre-conscious habits) serve to perpetuate the prevalence of stages 1,2,&3.

Stepping outside of the workplaces, looking at peoples 24/7 uses of time and energy, with workforces chronically indulging in off-the-clock diversions of all sorts, I wonder if a mirroring of hermeneutic vacuums is in play, embedding corporate cultures in cultures of distraction, working against freedom from the suckages, the lower TL stages.

The whole ecology of demand/supply: r&d, product/service, consumer/user, intention/motivation, …is where tribes form. These broader contexts, riding entropic gravities of lowest common denomination, exert the forces which tribal leadership seems designed to counteract. Every aspect in the continuum of purposes, from what's produced to who makes it how and why, figures into the function of each aspect.

Tribal Leadership, or the impulse it represents, is necessitated by the range of tensions and pressures that lead us away from healthy sustainable culture and society.

This line of thought springs from an epiphany I had speaking with Ken recently. It became clear how a spiritual by-passing allowed me to go straight to a kind of stage 5, Life Is Great, outlook (a ‘get out of ‘psychic prisons’ free’ carte blanche). Now I see that my view was primarily an upper right, rather than a lower left, affect.

Through state cultivation, starting very young, I’ve had the mixed blessing of consistently grounding situations in an appreciation of intrinsic reward. By-passing, down playing, reducing the relevance of, relational/cultural qualities, I’ve usually found the sensibility that life-is-great to be a natural disposition regardless of circumstance, though it helped me to gravitate to cultures, such as religious communities, wherein that sentiment is mirrored and expressed.

Until seeing this thread I didn’t quite get that my long identification with stage 5, since about fifth grade, could be based on a by-passing that undercut the prior stages, sparing me both whatever pains and the pleasures there may be to the first four.

But what about most folks who don’t make that move into state cultivation? Are there ways in which normal employees seek out and aggregate into cliques of resonance which support their interior stances? , contributing to the cultural and societal forms that reinforce their view? And how might the larger contexts of business be influencing the sorry statistic of 75% mired in degrees of ‘sucks’? How might the loops of feedback and ‘forth, throughout quadrants, be establishing and maintaining tribes?

In David’s response [above], “… organizations often create new strategies and systems that cannibalize culture, resulting in an impotent organization. We wrote Tribal Leadership to fill in this gap…” , he cites a main reason behind the book. It sounds like we’ve been mis-applying innovation, treating symptoms, and that TL brings a much needed traction to the slippery slopes of maladaptive fixation.

Peter Drucker used to point to Zen monks as exemplars of life-long learning. TL gives me the hope that that earlier recognition of the necessity of on-going learning for business is getting play beyond the systemic tweaking of exterior structures and finding its footing in the invisible spaces of interiority. No small feat!

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the state of the tribe