Are You Leading a Tribe?

This is the first article in a series bringing concepts from business books into an IT context. We’re starting with Seth Godin’s Tribes. Tribes is a book encouraging all of us to consider ourselves leaders. It provides a framework for leading from the ground up and offers several inspiring examples of individuals without authority or position creating positive change in their organizations or on behalf of worthwhile causes.

In today’s organizations, everyone is expected to lead. If you’ve been waiting for a leadership role to come to you, it might be time to step up and seek out your opportunity to be a leader. If you look around you, self-proclaimed leaders are receiving interesting projects, building enviable careers, and being promoted.

What Is a Tribe?
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. Your local parent-teacher organization is a tribe. So are your CBAP or PMP study group, your project management office, and each of your project teams. Your entire organization might be a tribe and, if you have tight relationships with your customers, people outside of your organization might be inside of your tribe.

As individuals we belong to several tribes. A hundred years ago, tribes were primarily local. With today’s technologies, tribes are more often connected by an idea than a location.

Who Leads a Tribe?
A tribe has a leader. You might already lead one or more tribes. I consider myself a leader of a tribe over at Bridging the Gap, part of the business analyst community. I am a follower in the “One Small Change” movement, a group of eco-conscious citizens who make one small change each month to reduce their impact on the environment.

In my formal role as a manager of a project management, business analyst, and QA team, my team was not a tribe because we did not have a central shared idea and largely operated as small “teams” within a larger group. Just having the same leader (or in this case authority figure) did not make us a tribe. But I did lead a loose tribe of product managers across the organization who shared a goal for improving our products and sharing technology investments. Several of my best direct-reports led small project-focused tribes and others led tribes to improve aspects of how we ran as an IT team.

Unlike running for city government or becoming CEO, no one anoints you as tribe leader. Leading a tribe means leading from the bottom, not from a place of authority.

What Does It Mean to Lead?
Participating isn’t leading. If you go to every local professional chapter meeting, you are participating but not leading. If you sit in on a meeting but don’t voice your opinion or sign-up to contribute, you are a participant. Leading is not just about showing up. It’s not just about sending in your resume and hoping for the best.

Leading is not about publishing a status report that communicates progress and highlights risks and calling it a day. Leading is about finding the people who can do something about the risk, connecting them together, and motivating them to overcome it.

Leading is about generating a movement or, if that seems too big, just generating movement. A movement is about creating a new future. In a movement, a shared interest becomes a passionate goal. The members of your tribe desire change and are involved in making the change happen.