Book Review: Tribal Leadership

Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization
Written by Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright, and John King in 2008

Summary: The authors are each professors and leadership coaches, and this book synthesizes their ten years of research into what makes a successful organization. The result is a framework for five cultural stages that organizations and individuals can be in. Tribal Leadership describes these stages and provides coaching steps to move your organization upward toward optimal cooperation and creativity.

Review: The subtitle, “Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization,” is misleading. The authors’ research does not extend beyond the business context, and their recommendations neither apply to nor draw from broader group psychology. That said, the book paints a clear, well-supported picture of why “tribal leadership” — a cultural stage marked by 1) total buy-in from all stakeholders including clients, 2) star performers having the willingness and trust to work on projects bigger than what they can accomplish alone — is worth striving for, and outlines realistic tactics to get there.

Tribal Leadership isn’t a book you read once and digest the lessons from. It’s one you keep in your back pocket as you embark on a long journey to uplift yourself and your colleagues until you reach history-making success.

Strengths:

• The book states at the outset that each chapter uses individual anecdotes for an easier reading experience, but that the lessons in these examples are backed by ample research, all described in the appendix. This was a brilliant choice to balance the readers’ engagement and skepticism. I read the research first, then sank into the main book confident of its validity.

Weaknesses:

• I really wish books like this would stay in their lane. Suggesting that suicide is a product of Stage One thinking, or terrorists are Stage Four organizations with bad values (which the authors do more seriously than a simple metaphor) is at best ignorant of real issues in people’s lives, and at worst arrogant prejudice. These authors have coined a helpful framework for discussing businesses. They have not discovered a social “theory of everything” that will solve injustice.

Rating: 17/20 wild west sheriffs

Ideal Setting: Read this when something or someone in your workplace is holding you back.