Support the Tribe

Recently I was on a train to DC, thinking about human beings as tribal creatures. There was a group of young men and women just in front of me.  They were all clearly colleagues; their conversation was peppered with in-jokes, and their interactions were relaxed and fluid.  They were part of a tribe, and it was obvious they felt respected and comfortable in that tribe.

It often occurs to me how little attention many businesses pay to the fact that most of us have a strong preference to be part of a group in which we feel comfortable, and react badly when that group is disturbed or broken.  Business leaders often deal with their employees as though they are cogs in a machine: entirely separate and interchangeable.  If you take one cog out of a machine and put in another, the machine won’t be affected as long as the new cog is the same size and shape as the old one.

But people in an organization are neither entirely separate nor easily interchangeable.  An organization is a tribe, or series of interconnected tribes, and a tribe is a system.  The members of that system are interdependent.  It's necessary, in an organization, to remove and add people, but if you do it cog-fashion, it will impact the whole system in ways both invisible (confusion, fear, hesitation, sadness, disorientation, anger) and visible (less creativity, fewer reasonable risks taken, lowered productivity, increased turnover, subtle and overt sabotage).

If top executives conceived of their organizations as tribes – living systems of influence and support – and approached their employees with the care such a conception implies, change would be much less traumatic.  The strengths of tribe – mutual support, trust, ease of communication, sharing of knowledge, individual investment in the group’s success – could carry the enterprise through necessary transformations largely intact.

It's an important time to recognize this.