Step 1 Up the Tribe Triangle: Understanding the Journey Towards Tribe and Why it Must be Taken
The heroic journey up the Tribe Triangle is a long and demanding quest that will force you into deep challenging introspection and development. You will face resistance from both yourself and your team.
Change is hard. Growth is even harder. Before we begin this journey, I want you to know why it is so important, because if our why is strong enough we will figure out the how.
In a nutshell, that why is the who of everyone you work with and live with all those people are counting on you to lead and make the decisions that keep them safe and successful.
The Tribe Triangle is the ancient, time-tested sequence of steps that leaders must take to transform a group of individualistic, self-focused, lone wolves into an aligned, committed and high performing pack, family or organization. This is the only proven process to create a championship team or family that can hunt the big game of meaning and sustainable success that includes:
Engagement
Retention
Morale
Innovation
Competitiveness
Efficiency
Resiliency
The Tribe Triangle is the way we reclaim kinship with our people and ourselves. This map exists in every truly high performing culture in the world including professional sports, elite military units and top tier leadership consulting. The Tribe Triangle is the rock-solid roadmap for building an intentional, resilient and high performing culture.
Culture is King. It is either your family’s or organization’s ultimate competitive advantage and source of meaning and freedom or it is your Achilles heel.
Investing in your culture has eight times the return on investment than leveling up either strategy or technology
Culture is that powerful because regardless of what you do in your life it will always ultimately involve other people. Exploring and mastering that unavoidable truth is the most valuable skill a leader can develop.
You are that leader. You deserve this trip up the Tribe Triangle. The success of your people and projects demands it.
Leaders are head of culture before we are anything else. What leaders do literally creates culture because culture consists of the shared beliefs and behaviors of a group of people. As a leader, your position is a force multiplier of culture creation. What you model with your actions establishes the values, vision, innovation, morale and overall success of your family, work team and community. In addition, all of these groups touch other groups and influence their cultures so what we do as leaders does truly echo in eternity.
Your ability to create the culture of these central groups of people in your life determines their destiny. It also dictates the happiness, morale, resiliency and quality of life on that journey towards that destiny. Culture is the way your people feel about getting together to do a project. Is it apprehension or anticipation? Insecure or innovative? Lukewarm or on fire? Transactional or reciprocal?
Ultimately, this core leadership skill of intentionally shaping culture and environment is about building tribe. Tribe is the ancient core operating system of our species. It is a deeply fulfilling experience of value-aligned people collaborating on significant and reciprocal projects that no individual could ever do alone. When you think of the best team you were ever on in your life it was probably in sports, the military, greek organization or successful startup. These are all honor-based, mission-driven and value-aligned Tribe Cultures.
The Tribe Triangle is the roadmap for creating this resilient, high performing culture wherever you go. The trip up the Tribe Triangle mountain is arduous and committed but the trip and the destination is worth the work.
Like all valuable things it will be consistent work. It takes a month to establish a new habit, three months to establish a new lifestyle and a year to grow a new culture. Hang in there, we will be doing this together and there will be incredible discoveries but you must do the writing and speaking prompts every week. Use a journal for the writing and pick your inner circle to do the speaking. Writing and speaking is the way we pull hidden things out of the fog so we can deal with them and make them better.
We are drowning in information but starving for wisdom. Writing and speaking are how we transform this firehose of information into practical wisdom that works for our people and our projects.
There are four stages to creating and maintaining your Tribe Culture. We will be exploring, discovering and implementing one of these each quarter this year.
Creating Alignment
Kinship and Belonging
Healthy Conflict
Sustainable Thriving
I have divided each of these three stages of Tribe culture creation into their primary 13 pillars, one for each week of the quarter. For you leaders who take responsibility for the culture and success of your team or family you will see the value and be compelled to do this work for both you and your team. If there is something in your team that isn’t as good as it could be it is because you are not as good as you could be. Remember, you are the Head of Culture before you are anything else. Do the work.
A couple notes on the term tribe and the challenge of tribalism.
Tribe is an anthropological term denoting a small social division consisting of families or communities linked by social and economic ties and shared beliefs with a common culture and a recognized leader. We still have Tribe Culture existing in isolated pockets of our gigantic, lone wolf world and we are obsessed with them. Look at how many movies are made about the military, super hero teams, sports teams and deeply connected friend groups. These are all Tribe Cultures and we are starving for the belonging and meaning that is only found within it.
Tribe is also the most ferociously competitive culture you can create because it differentiates between those of us who are in our tribe and those who are not. This is the heart of winning and it exists because competition and conflict are real and eternal. If you don’t see that and believe it, you should not be a leader in business or sports or maybe anything else. That competitive engine within Tribe Culture is connected to tribalism and it contains the tricky balance between inclusivity and exclusivity.
If you are committed to creating your team’s Tribe Culture, get ready for increased competition, accountability, innovation and all the other high-octane behaviors that happen when the healthy conflict of kinship is unleashed. When you call down the thunder of tribe, get ready to ride the lightning. Here’s one piece of advice about managing the challenges of tribalism while keeping the massive benefits of tribe culture itself:
Learn to love the people next to you more than you want to beat the people across from you.
‘Kindness’ contains the root ‘kin’ and it is the special behavior we hold for those within our tribe. We are all Tribe.
Click here to watch the video of Step 1: Understanding the Journey Towards Tribe and Why it Must be Taken.
Leaders must write and speak
Answer these questions in your journal by really writing them down. Discuss them with at least one of your most important people and really listen to their response.
What was the best team you were ever on?
What did it feel like when you got together with that team?
What was your shared mission and what were your shared values on that team? These may have been unspoken and undefined but they existed.
Ubuntu is an ancient African term meaning ‘I am because we are and we are because I am’. It means humanity. Ultimately, we are all tribe and I am truly grateful to have you with me on this epic trip up the Tribe Triangle mountain this year.
Ubuntu,
Philip Folsom