AUDIO: To get your team to perform better, think ‘Survivor Island’

DENVER, COLO.
January 31, 2008 12:01am

American business is not “Survivor Island” with its tribes, but a new book says businesses are made up of tribes and it’s the wise manager who recognizes them and takes advantage of their power.

“Every company is a tribe or a network of tribes,” says Halee Fischer-Wright, a physician and clinical professor at the University of Colorado and co-author of the book “Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization,” published by Harper Collins.

“Tribes are more powerful than teams, companies or even super star CEOs,” says Ms. Fischer-Wright.

As she explains, tribes are groups of people within an organization who come together and form their own group cultures.

“It’s these tribes that actually hold the influence over most of the companies in the United States and around the world,” she says.

“They’re held together typically by values, by culture, by organizational units, so we’re all members of multiple tribes,” she says.

(Ms. Fischer-Wright talks about the theory of tribes, how to recognize them and how to leverage their power in today’s CVBT Audio Interview. Please click on the link below to listen or to download the MP3 audio file to your PC or iPod.)

Ms. Fischer-Wright says the book is based on a study of 24,000 people and how they interact with each other and their organizations.

“Where tribes are the most efficient and where they are recession-proof” is when the members talk positively about themselves as part of the group, she says. “They talk about ‘we’re great.’”

The book’s authors, Dave Logan, John King and Ms. Fischer-Wright, are partners of CultureSync LLC, a Los Angeles-based management consultancy.