10: The Four Factors of a Sustainable Smart Tribe
In this chapter, the author intends to "get practical" and provide guidance for applying her smart-tribe principles to a commercial organization. She feel that it comes down to four factors:
- Behavior
- Leadership Effectiveness
- Organizational Effectiveness
- Mission, Vision, and Values
While it is important to support each of these factors, it is also important to do so in a balanced way: a little of all four is more effective than a lot of one and none of the others. Some quick summaries of what has been said thus far on these items.
Behavior: this depends largely on maintaining higher brain function and avoiding the animalistic fight/flight/freeze response to immediate threats. This in turn depends on having a sense of safety and belonging within an organization. Having a sense of purpose and seeing the value that will be achieved by behaving a certain way are also critical.
Leadership Effectiveness: this pertains to her five "accelerators" that were previously discussed. Leadership must model and reinforce behaviors with personal integrity and align people with the organizational agenda while at the same time respecting and supporting the individual's own personal agenda to the degree that it is supportive of and not in conflict with that of the organization.
(EN: While she provided brief summaries of those two, her discussion of organizational effectiveness goes on for much longer, and I'm not sure whether she intends to get back around to mission/vision/values.)
Organizational Effectiveness
To be effective in the present day, an organization cannot dedicate itself to efficiency in doing the same known tasks, but must instead be a "learning organization" that is constantly innovating and discovering new ways to do new things.
A learning organization has five main features
- Systems Thinking - Understanding that all parts affect the whole firm, and changes in any one part will likewise affect the whole firm. Effective management must take a holistic approach rather than focusing on a specific part.
- Personal Mastery - The recognition that the capabilities of the firm are merely the aggregate of the capabilities of its employees. Each employee must be committed to learning and growth, and the firm must support the learning and growth of its employees.
- Innovation - A willingness to challenge traditional approaches and cultural norms, enabling employees to take risks in order to achieve outcomes that would be discouraged by tradition and culture.
- Shared Vision - A shared vision provides a common direction that enables innovative efforts to be focused on a positive outcome for the organization - recognizing that the organization's vision must also be an aggregate of those of the employees
- Team Learning - Enables synergies to arise as people work collaboratively rather than competitively, with open dialog and complete transparency.
The Organizational Effectiveness Pyramid
The author provides an illustration of a "pyramid" of organizational effectiveness with six levels (base to tip):
- Alignment - The mission, vision, and values of the firm give foundation and purpose to the employees and management. Its treatment as foundational reflects that without a clearly defined mission, an organization is on shifting sands, and cannot stand when the core purpose seems to change at the whim of management or the changes in the environment. Without alignment, there can only be constant chaos and focus on immediate crises rather than long-term objectives.
- Urgency and Focus - Needle-movers and key performance indicators enable people to prioritize, give focus to the most important things, and understand the value and reasons for the things they are doing. They derive from the mission, because the reason for doing specific things is because they serve to help accomplish them mission.
- Empowerment and Trust - Giving people clearly defined roles and responsibilities helps them to understand their responsibilities, what is expected of them, and gives them a clear sense of personal accountability. Empowerment without structure is self-defeating, as people work on things that don't matter and may work at odds with one another. As an aside, this factor is often the root cause when companies are bloated with needless employees, departments, and facilities.
- Belonging - The culture of an organization provides "rituals" and defined patterns of behavior that are supported by a system of rewards and consequences that drives performance.
- Grounded and Safe - The standard operating procedures and explicit codes of conduct give people a sense of the boundaries and a sense of the nature and degree of risk they may take, enabling them to act with boldness, but not excessive recklessness. They must be clearly documented to enable people to act with certainty, and eliminate the element of mystery that occurs in instances where much time is wasted debating over what vague rules "really mean."
- Clarity and Decisiveness - The vision of the CEO and senior leadership must be highly visible and well articulated to the ranks to give them a sense of purpose and prioritize their work to meet the expectations communicated by the plans and forecasts of the organization. A clear vision at the top keeps everyone focused on the same outcomes.
(EN: In the course of her discussion, she refers to these as elements that support one another, and my sense is that's likely a better way of conceiving it than a pyramid-type structure in which there is the implication of priority and dependency.)