The power of three: an innovator’s guide to tribal leadership
It takes a village to raise a child and a tribe to launch an exponential company. Some of the most innovative organisations in the world today use tribal leadership to promote a creative dynamic in the workplace and to keep people from falling into a lone wolf mentality.
Tribal leadership is a framework for promoting high-performing, creative teams. It is based in the premise that every company operates at a certain level of cultural maturity.
Most companies, it turns out, aren’t very adult. They are full of unruly children in suits, battling it out for scarce resources, creating a selfish, competitive culture. The alpha dogs in these organisations see the world in win-lose terms. ‘I’m great (and you’re not)’ is the governing mindset.
These companies tend to be terrible at innovation. There’s no higher purpose, limited creative autonomy, and little or no collaboration.
Such a culture will not fly in an innovative organisation. Such organisations battle dozens of wicked challenges every day, and people simply have no time to fight among themselves.
It takes work to build a high-level collaborative culture. It requires that everyone in the organisation commits to operating at the highest levels of cultural maturity. Workplace competition is fine, when it’s a virtuous competition between teams. Tribal teams say: ‘We’re great’ and mean it, because they’re proud of how they self-organise and how execute for a higher purpose.
The tribal leadership framework (as defined by Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fisher-Wright in their bestselling book Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization (2008)) posits that organisations that want to pull themselves out of the eternal war of workplace individualism must commit to a higher purpose and teach leaders to encourage people to self-organise into teams of three, or triads.
Two is a partnership but three is a tribe. A triad of three diversely-talented individuals can achieve an exponentially greater amount than two individuals working on the same task.
Triads open people’s eyes to what can be achieved through collaboration. Often, star players can be so convinced of their abilities that they resist collaborating with others, seeking to reaffirm their personal greatness again and again. The strategy of putting these people in triads is to help them realise just how much more they could achieve by working in concert with others.
This is the goal of the tribal leader: to bring the lone wolves of the organisation to an epiphany and transformative experience. When lone wolves experience the power of triads, their independent achievements are reduced to scale. They become capable of thinking and acting exponentially, dreaming big and taking tilts at impossible goals, which, with triadic power, they now have a shot at pulling off.
Are there people in your office that you work with particularly well? Take the lead and form a triad. See if there’s some challenging task that the three of you are uniquely capable of completing.
Once you’ve done it, you can turn to the team and say: ‘Wow, we’re great’. That’s the power of tribal leadership.
