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Tribal Leadership Tips

Tribal Leadership Leverage Points (LLPs)  

This document represents the thinking and experience of many of our clients doing tribal Leadership.  We offer it to you in the hope that you will use it to create stronger tribes through more effective tribal leadership behaviours.

All we ask you let us know what additional tips or steps you find move people from one stage to the next.

This list adds to the leverage points from our research in Appendix A in the print edition of Tribal Leadership.

Dave Logan,  John King,  Halee Fischer-Wright,  Tribal Leadership List of Leverage Points (LLPs) Copyright © 2008 CultureSync.

2 How to Move People From Tribal Stage Two To Tribal Stage Three

•  Identify individual skills.
•  Teach people about their talents and strengths (such as Marcus Buckingham’s Now, Discover Your Strengths).
•  Provide opportunities for them to use their skills and make a contribution that is meaningful to them (based on their values).
•  Provide complements and encouragement based on what they do well, and ask what they’d like to do in the future.
•  Provide mentoring, especially in the areas of dealing with interpersonal skills/relationships and teamwork.
•  Encourage them to finish an educational program, such as a certificate, online training program or degree.
•  Offer them time management tips to get control of their time and lives.  David Allen’s work (Getting Things Done) is good in this regard.
•  Offer people training on personal organization.
•  Create training checklists and competencies so you (and they) can track their progress.
•  Offer progressive training with attainable goals.
•  Introduce them to people who were in their position, and moved to the next step.
•  Test their job fit against their values and skills.
•  Listen to problems and enlist people to participate in solutions.
•  Express appreciate for the person, not just his/her work product.
•  Help them build dyadic (two-person) relationships with others to increase their sense of belonging and community.
•  Mentor the person on organizational politics and how to get things done.
•  Without violating privacy, make sure the person’s personal life is in order—free of physical or interpersonal clutter.
•  Give feedback on what people do well.
•  Give people clear roadmaps on how to move forward, ideally with promises embedded (“if you do ____, I will do ____).
•  Encourage mentoring from those at late Stage Three.
•  Give offline encouragement about how to use skills they may not have identified in themselves.

How to Move People From Stage Three To Stage Four

•  Identify individual values (such as using the Click Down technique taught in CultureSync seminars).
•  Encourage mentoring with people at Stage Four (one-on-one).
•  Form groups of people at Stage Three, who share specific values.  Encourage group coaching from a senior executive who operates at Stage Four.
•  Keep increasing the definition of success, so that, to win, people have to collaborate with others.
•  When people receive training or education, require that they teach another person so that he/she understands it and can apply it.
•  Mentor another person to be better than he/she is.
•  Encourage sharing of tips, tools, and techniques (the hallmarks of Stage Three), so that people don’t hoard tactics for self-improvement. •  Find a potential client, or some sufficiently large collective problem, and facilitate a strategy session (chapter 11 from Tribal Leadership). •  Perform a 360-degree feedback process, provided the person trusts the system’s objectivity.
•  In one-on-one coaching, point out the person’s blind spots.
•  Identify learning styles and personality types of people around the person, and highlight the unique contribution of each.
•  Have someone keep track of how much time each person in a meeting speaks.  Generally, those at Stage Three will dominate the air time.  (Pointing this fact out to the person can give an important insight.)
•  Take the person through Tribal Leadership coaching, so that he/she has the epiphany (chapter 7 from Tribal Leadership).

How to Move People From Tribal level Stage Four To tribal level stage Five  

•  Find a way to work together with another group that doesn’t share your values.
•  Run a joint strategy process with another group/organization (chapter 11 in Tribal Leadership).
•  Ask the questions: “what will make history?”, “what will be a game-changer?”, and “how can we go further than anyone has ever gone?”
•  Point out the shared values of other groups, and how they resonate with the values of those at Stage Four.
•  Focus on problems that are global, rather than industrial or organizational.
•  Encourage Tribal Leaders (those who build tribes) to unite disparate tribes (becoming Tribal Elders).
•  Get feedback from all stakeholder groups, especially from those that the organization doesn’t usually solicit (such as suppliers to suppliers, workforces in developing nations), etc.
•  Create a separate R&D group tasked with creating innovative services or products that will put the organization out of business.  Partner with other organizations in doing so.
•  Emphasize giving away knowledge and information.

Stage Five of Tribal Leadersip is focused on global impact, not on hoarding intellectual property.  Also, giving away knowledge pushes people to innovate rather than protect.
•  Search out best practices from different industries, and ask how those practices can become game-changers if applied in our industry.
•  Find any ways the organization isn’t managing transparently, and change those.
•  Don’t just solicit ideas, solicit contributions.
•  Find out what will make every single group and person, with whom the organization comes into contact, “win.”

Tribal Leadership List of Leverage Points (LLPs) Copyright © 2008 CultureSync.  This document may be distributed and copied, provided it is done so in its entirety (including this copyright notice), without cost, and without any modification.  All other rights reversed.

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