Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

Human beings can’t help it: we need to belong. One of the most powerful of our survival mechanisms is to be part of a tribe, to contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people.

Part of leadership (a big part of it, actually) is the ability to stick with the dream for a long time. Long enough that the critics realize that you’re going to get there one way or another…so they follow.

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.

It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash.
They don’t. It’s always (almost always, anyway) a matter of accretion. Drip, drip, drip. Improvements happen a bit at a time, not as grand-slam home runs that are easy to get.

The organizations that need innovation the most are the ones that do the most to stop it from happening. It’s a bit of a paradox, but once you see it, it’s a tremendous opportunity.

s it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization that’s flat and open and treats employees with respect? What happens when you expect a lot and trust the people you work with? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, too little predictability, and way too much noise. This isn’t the top-down model of the factory, or the king and his court. It’s chaos. It’s easy to reject out of hand.
Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses watch and shake their heads, certain that this is an exception and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base.

I define sheepwalking as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them brain-dead jobs and enough fear to keep them in line.

The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on.

Heretics don’t settle. They’re not good at that. Managers who are stuck, who compromise to keep things quiet, who battle the bureaucracy every day—they’re the ones who settle. What else can they do?

Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education, and certainly nothing to do with organized religion. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. Leaders are curious because they can’t wait to find out what the group is going to do next. The changes in the tribe are what are interesting, and curiosity drives them.
Curious people count. Not because there are a lot of them, but because they’re the ones who talk to people who are in a stupor. They’re the ones who lead the masses in the middle who are stuck. The masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing, which the curious can’t abide.
It’s easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone to become curious. For seven, ten, or even fifteen years of school, you are required to not be curious. Over and over and over again, the curious are punished.
I don’t think it’s a matter of saying a magic word; boom and then suddenly something happens and you’re curious. It’s more about a five- or ten- or fifteen-year process where you start finding your voice, and finally you begin to realize that the safest thing you can do feels risky and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.
Once recognized, the quiet yet persistent voice of curiosity doesn’t go away. Ever. And perhaps it’s such curiosity that will lead us to distinguish our own greatness from the mediocrity that stares us in the face.