Tribal Leadership – What level of leadership are you at?
There are many perspectives about what leadership is and how it should be done. Contrary to many recipe books on this topic, Tribal Leadership is a useful tool to assess the stage of your personal leadership style and evaluate the impact and the consequences of each stage. Although the backdrop of the book is that a higher leadership stage is better, the real value for me was as a tool to understand the culture and more importantly the people we deal with as part of Agile transitions.
While the majority of leaders in the work place are at stages 2 and 3, Tribal Leadership shares tools and insights to help individuals and organizations break through to the next evolutionary stages – which are usually much easier for a transition.
To help you get a gist of where you may stand as a leader and possibly help you determine at what level people you work with are, the authors provided on their web site a quick map (below).
As Agile coaches, we must often work with teams and their leaders. Understanding the behaviours of the leaders and their motivation is extremely useful. As such, the book presents a model allowing the transformation of Level 1 leaders to higher levels – granted most people start at level 2 or 3.
The book provides rich insights into human behaviour, group dynamics and individual motivation. Overall, it provides a good framework to understand people’s behaviors and with some clear thinking, can lead into actionable strategies to help support an agile transition.
Tribal Leadership is available in audio book [285 Mb zipped file] and in a traditional book format (Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization).
See Dave Logan’s presentation at TED.
