This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Tribal Leadership" by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Who wrote Tribal Leadership? What are the book’s strengths and weaknesses? What impact has it had?
The book Tribal Leadership was first published in 2008 by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins. It’s the only book on which Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright, and John King collaborated. In the book, they describe how to improve an organization by leveling up its culture. An organization is made of tribes—socially networked groups of 20 to 150 people—and the cultures of those tribes determine the organization’s performance and its members’ happiness.
Keep reading for our Tribal Leadership review, covering the book’s authors, context, impact, and more.
Tribal Leadership Review
A tribal leader is someone who builds a higher-level tribe by coaching its members to develop their skills and become team players. As this leader coaches tribe members to higher stages, the tribe’s culture will transform, and the overall organization will perform far better. According to the authors, using the strategies in the book Tribal Leadership will improve your bottom line, and your employees will become more motivated, productive, and happy. Here’s our Tribal Leadership review.
The Book’s Authors
Logan is a faculty member at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, where he teaches in the MBA program and served as associate dean for four years. He’s the co-founder of CultureSync, a management consulting firm, and he’s written or co-written five books, including Tribal Leadership and The Three Laws of Performance.
Fischer-Wright is president and CEO of Medical Group Management Association, as well as a former physician and management consultant. Fischer-Wright has held numerous leadership positions in the health care industry, and she’s been recognized as a top 100 leader in health care for several years.
King is an executive-level coach and co-author of The Coaching Revolution, as well as a trainer, speaker, and teacher. He has extensive teaching experience at schools including the USC Marshall School of Business, the University of Arizona Eller College of Management, the Central Eurasian Leadership Academy, and the Middle East Leadership Academy. King also facilitates The Samurai Game, an intensive leadership simulation meant to teach leadership in the heat of battle.
Connect with Logan, Fischer-Wright, and King:
The Book’s Historical and Intellectual Context
According to the authors, Tribal Leadership draws from the work of Don Beck and Chris Cowan in Spiral Dynamics, which presents a model of adult development that draws in turn from Clare W. Graves’s theory of emergent cyclical levels of existence. Graves, a professor of psychology at Union College, theorized that adults develop various psychosocial coping mechanisms to deal with existential challenges, such as conforming with group norms to preserve self-esteem.
Following Graves’s lead, Beck and Cowan developed Spiral Dynamics, a model to explain how individuals and value systems develop. Similar to Graves’s model, Spiral Dynamics holds that people develop value systems and corresponding behaviors in response to the demands of their environments—for example, Westerners in a modern society tend to seek individualistic success, pursue “the good life,” and act pragmatically to win.
In The Listening Society, Hanzi Freinacht argues that numerous “domain-specific” models attempt to explain adult development along particular lines. Tribal Leadership presents one such model, aimed at explaining adult professional development and organizational-cultural development within a traditional business context. The authors’ model follows the convention of describing various stages of development, and it uses values, language, and behavior as the metrics with which it delineates stages.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Tribal Leadership summary :
- Why culture makes all the difference when it comes to business
- The five stages of elevating a group's culture
- How to know which stage your work culture is in
