Your Leadership Tribe

Everyone has a tribe – family and friends, other people with whom you have a relationship. This tribe is primarily involved with you in social, support, and general activities. People you’ve invited (or inherited) to participate in your life.

Taking it to a higher level, Seth Godin wrote about tribes, seeing them as the confluence of the leader (you), an idea (your vision), and a mission of creating change and achieving results (you and your followers). Whether it is:

• marketing a new product or service – or changing how existing products and services are sold, like the progressive sale of eBooks;

• spearheading a health mission like identifying trans fats, labeling their presence in foods, educating consumers, and virtually eliminating the presence in consumer foods; or

• eliminating steps in a process because they no longer serve a purpose – akin to cutting 3-inches off the ham before baking it – because your old oven was too small.

What about your leadership tribe?

It has some traits of your personal tribe – it provides support and offers the insight of experience. It is forward-focused like Steh’s tribe but differs – you are not exclusively the lead dog in your leadership tribe.

Your leadership tribe consists of people you know, others you respect, and still others who are a significant influence on your outlook and thoughts – a super peer group in a sense.

More about the three components of your tribe:

• people you know; you have a relationship; you value their insight and input; they participate in your projects and you participate in theirs,

• people you respect, but may not know personally; you read their writings and listen to their talks; you follow them over time; they provide ideas, points of view, thought stimulation – for me this includes folks like: Seth Godin, Fred Wilson, Chris Anderson, Harvey Mackay,

• people who are an influence on you; by what they did; from their ideas and shared wisdom; because they changed the world; they achieved results; they tell the truth, have high standards, and stand by their principles – for me this includes: Peter Drucker, Jacques Cousteau, Ronald Reagan.

With your leadership tribe sometimes you are the leader of others and other times you are a follower of another’s leadership. Your tribe is a foundation – tapping their experience and listening to their perspective to broaden what you bring to the project. Your tribe is resource – physical, mental, and emotional participation in your project. Your tribe is a training ground – you learn by doing under the leadership of people you value and respect, and by reading their account of other situations.

As with other peer relationships, you will have the role of a leader, a follower, a driver, a participant, and an advisor at any point in time – even simultaneously for different projects. You may appear alone to observers at times…doing all the work by yourself – in reality, your leadership tribe cloaks you with significant depth and strength to deliver on commitments and goals.

A team focuses on a goal – win the game, complete a project – while a tribe is a more organic structure – on an operational level when working on a project, certainly it is focused on the goal, but when that has been attained the tribe continues to serve its members with new insights, thoughts, sharing, mentoring, validation, and other continuing benefits. Members of the tribe with direct relationships receive inputs and provide outputs from the others.

Who do you have in your leadership tribe?

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