Tribal Culture and Leadership in Agile Environment

The concept of tribal culture in an organization was introduced in the book Tribal Leadership. It is quite interesting theory and from the agile environment perspective it has a new and important dimension. Let's have a look and put things together. 
A tribe is a group of people that have something in common. In an organization trying to set up agile environment, we can easily imagine a scrum team. But we also have the community - a team of teams. Then there are virtual teams like a team of scrum masters, product owners or managers. The whole business groups... We can identify tribes at basically every scale. 
A tribal culture is the dominant culture that can be observed in a group of tribes. Or in an organization. The culture can be described as 5 stages. Let's explore these stages and then we will have a look at what it means for us.
Stage #1 - Life Sucks
A culture of individuals with no hope. Everybody is alone in such culture. This is a culture of prisons and can be observed in about 2% of companies. We can safely skip this one.
Stage #2 - My Life Sucks
A culture of people that are being dominated. By their boss or even processes. A world of complaints: "My life sucks because I have to follow stupid rules". "My life sucks because our boss is an idiot". "My life sucks because I have to do scrum". The last one is an example from 'Scrum-but' cultures that are typical for just technical scrum implementation where scrum ceremonies are just a set of rigid rules and when it doesn't work new rules are added. This culture is dominant in 25% (!) of companies.
To get people out of this mess they have to have a chance to succeed. Somebody has to give them responsibility and ownership and let them generate fast wins to increase self-confidence. Who? Their managers that are typically already at the next stage and this is why it's so difficult because they are already successful and now they need to change their mind set.
Stage #3 - I'm Great (and you are not)
A dominant culture of traditional organizations (49% worldwide). This is a world of experts, architects, technical leaders and managers... A culture of necessary people that keep their know how. At this stage, we can observe the importance of job titles and personal accomplishments. "I can do better job (than others)". A 'Senior Scrum Master' position is an example from this environment.
Managers that have their direct reports at the stage #2 are usually at this stage. And to be clear, this stage is no evil as it is a step for people coming from My life sucks cultures and it can't be skipped - only great people can form a great team. And this is where the agile transformation begins and the reason why it can fail or end up in 'technical' scrum so easily. Working scrum requires self-organization and self-organization challenges this traditional leader-follower model. It's challenging trust. Because it can be pretty difficult for leaders at stage 3 to resist the urge to have everything under control and to believe that others can be great (do the job) as well. As a ScrumMaster at this stage you would be underestimating your team - "I'm great but they're not so I have to take care of everything". Well that definitely doesn't make you a great ScrumMaster.  Or in a dev team this can be like "I'm the only one who understands this service. It's my service and I have to do all the work concerning it". But we can also easily zoom out to the community level: "They will only introduce bugs. This is our area. We are great but they are not."
It feels good to be at this stage. But if we will be able to change our mind set at this stage then we can generate success all together and get to the next stage.
Stage #4 - We Are Great
This is already a nice place to be dominant in 22% companies. People here believe in their products and have common goals instead of competing each other. Teams at this stage are ultimately achieving results. How is this related to agile? Well, agile brings agility to the company. But it also brings this nice culture to people. If we adopt the idea of collaboratio and autonomy and become a real team as defined in Scrum, we realize we are at this stage. To make it happen we need to build vulnerability based trust at every scale. 
Stage #5 - Life Is Great
The opposite end of the spectrum. Let me paraphrase the Tribal Leadership book: We are not at war with our competitors. We are at war with security threats. 
As an exercise, you can try to imagine all possible scales from particular scrum team to the whole company and try to guess the dominant culture. Then you can think about how to improve it. What team stages you can see, on which dysfunctions you need to work and which toxins prevent you from building vulnerability based trust as a first step to culture improvement.
7/11/2017

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