Tips
Tribal Tip of the Week #10:
Don’t Let Your Tribes Seize Up
When financial markets seize up, lending stops, cash flow slows, and businesses can’t function. A parallel process is when a tribe freezes up, and the culture quickly, and unexpected falls– perhaps in matter of days or even hours, through several stages. It’s the cultural equivalent of the Great Depression. As a Tribal Leader, you need to watch for this phenomenon, and if it happens, take quick action.
How Tribes Seize Up
High performing tribes–operating at Stage Four–express a “we’re great” theme, with people connected in webbed triadic relationships. A Stage Four tribe can outmaneuver and outperform the 75% of tribes at lower cultural stages. However, Stage Four tribes are not invincible. When a sudden threat appears—to the work tribe, to people’s personal lives, or both—individuals often regress to Stage Three, talking mostly about themselves, engaged in tactics for personal survival and dominance. People’s relationships degrade to “hub and spoke” patterns, with politics and gossip taking up to half of people’s time.
If the threat continues, people can fall to Stage Two, expressing a “my life sucks” theme. They disconnect from one another, and gripe about the situation without any effort to try to impact it. A tribe at Stage Two is “seized up,” not able function. Some individuals may even fall to Stage One, the zone of criminal behavior and even workplace violence.
What To Do
Today’s situation requires two immediate steps. First, get your tribes together in sessions in which you:
- Have a Tribal open discussion about the situation in the news, in the company and in people’s personal lives. Some will want to discuss their personal situations, and others won’t. Don’t push. The point is to “empty the cup,” so that people can engage in work to improve the situation.
- Create a very short term strategy for the tribe to survive and even thrive in this period of uncertainty. Normally, we suggest 90-day strategies, but with increased uncertainty comes the need to reduce this time frame. We now recommend setting 30 day strategies. Some tribes we know in financial services and commercial real estate are setting weekly strategies. See chapter 11 in Tribal Leadership on how to lead this discussion. For those who have not led this process, it is focused, empowering, and can quickly raise tribes back to Stage Four—even in uncertain times. (Let us know if you would like coaching on this process).
- Offer an optional meeting in which people will go through the same strategy process for their personal lives. Some are concerned about their finances, or the jobs of people in their families. Some just want to make sure they have a Plan B if something unexpected happens. Again, lead people through the process in Tribal Leadership’s chapter 11, but this time, with the focus shifting to their personal situations.
At CultureSync, our business is business culture. During this period of stress, it is imperative that our work cultures remain strong, and that Tribal Leaders become Culture Warriors to protect the tribe.
Feel free to contact us if we can offer any help to you or your tribes.
For previous Tribal Tips, see them at the blog.
