Work is tribal - I'll unpack exactly what this means for you as a leader

My guide for leaders on why humans are weird at work - and what you can do about it

 

There is a sense that we are rational and logical at work - and actually, I’m here to tell you that we absolutely are!

But not in the way you might think.

|  Humans will always act in service of their survival. 

Whatever unhelpful or anti-social things we end up doing, they are all trying to protect and preserve us. There is a perfect logic to everything we say and do and it's all about survival.

I’d like to unpack one particularly dominant survival instinct at work that explains many of the problematic patterns of behaviour we see. 

It’s an instinct that is (at least) 50,000 years old. It has shaped our brains and deeply influences how we think and respond to different situation.

 

This instinct is to successfully remain within a tribe*.

Now, tribes have made humans the most successful mammals on the planet.

At their most basic, tribes allowed us to stay safe through interdependence. I can sleep because you are watching for predators. You can eat, because I brought home meat. Good system (3).

But over time, tribes offered humans much more than that (2).

- Your tribe provided psychological wellbeing through connection and group identity

- Your tribe enabled social learning so you could specialise (butchers, bakers, candlestick makers etc)

- Your tribe provided access to resources, status and therefore mates (thank you Caroline Clark!)

Of course now, there are fewer tigers to worry about but that social aspect of our brain is still very much functioning and the threat to safety comes from loss of 1. resources (money/income), 2. status and 3. power. 

Our brains are wired to spot and respond to threats to those three things. Humans will ALWAYS act in service of their survival. This has huge implications for how we collaborate at work - including wonderful opportunities alongside the threat to successful team working. 

*By tribe, I mean groups of people who share characteristics or interests leading to a strong affiliation which creates connection, identity and safety for members. Therefore by tribal, I mean the human desire to form and find connection, identity and safety in these affiliate groups. 

 

Here are three massive influences tribal behaviour has on how we meet and collaborate that you absolutely have to understand.

 

1. When we are in groups AKA meetings, we want to stay safe and elevate our status in the tribe and that can make us behave in weird ways.

Staying safe and elevating our status means:

- Being valuable (right, smart, useful, hardworking)

- Not being a threat (not challenging the alpha)

- OR being in control (becoming the alpha) 

You can see how on these terms, it might make perfect sense in a meeting in 2024 to:

> Be defensive

> Want to make sure your idea is ‘the winning idea’

> Nitpick over unnecessary detail

> Talk a lot

> Not talk at all...

Another nice example in the civil service and plenty of large corporates, people make acrobatic and athletic efforts to force a contribution in a meeting so they are preserved for the official record in the minutes. This tangible artefact demonstrates someone is valuable but is largely useless in serving the real goal - the work that needs to be done.

The more pressure we're under, the more these survival behaviours come out. 

Over-simplified answer: bringing teams together needs more design, more thought, more structure and dare I say it, more formality - at first. 

 

2. When tribes collide within a business, better facilitation is needed

Humans are designed to Us/Them in every situation. We divide the world into people like us and people not like us. This happens at a minor level, every time our team meets with another team, at a major level when established organisations meet to discuss merging and at a dangerous level when people with extreme views confront those their consider 'Them' (as we say in the shameful racist riots in the UK recently).

Thinking about own world at work, in our own team tribe there are high expectations of trust and reciprocity but when we work with other team tribes we have to negotiate this more carefully and formally (i.e. with more design). 

Under-estimating this is what can lead to friction between teams, levels and departments.

Over-simplified answer: bringing teams together needs more design, more thought, more structure and dare I say it, more formality - at first. 

 

3. Every time you restructure or even switch people across teams and projects, you disturb the tribal ecosystem.

That doesn’t mean you should keep everyone in the same role forever (of course not!). And there are lots of benefits to encouraging people to collaborate with different people in different ways. But it does help to understand that switching people drags a wrecking ball through the invisible tribal chains that keep them feeling safe. Suddenly 'Us' is gone and they have to reform their sense of status and safety. This is expensive on brain capacity and it's distracting from your bigger goals.

Over-simplified answer: we need consider the negative impact of switching and restructuring and do it thoughtfully and as little as necessary. We can also find great ways to reform those teams. For example, I have worked with a number of project based organisations to help them become really skilled at spinning up strong teams quickly and thoughtfully - and that is a GREAT skill to have as an organisation.

 

4. We are members of MULTIPLE ‘tribes’ at work and that creates internal conflict

We’re not just part of this team or that team.

We:

- Might be members of a professional body

- May associate strongly within a marginalised group - as a woman, gender non-binary, queer, black, brown, immigrant or non-native English speaking person among many other groups. And of course, many are at the intersection of multiple marginalised groups.

- Could align with a particular philosophy or school of thought related to our role or discipline

- May support one political party and align with this as a worldview

- Came from one previous company before the merger - or the other! Or we’re newcomers.

 

And so on. Each of these tribes will have different rules. We are often acting from a place of inner conflict.

 

Over-simplified answer: I don't really have one! Except to be aware of how intersectional tribes are and to stay open and alive to the fact that there is no one Us and Them. You will always need to probe, sense and respond. 

 

 

Something to reflect on.

I wonder if this survival instinct casts psychological safety in a new light for you at all?

We are not trying to artificially cosset people so they can 'be creative' (whatever that means!). But we do need to think hard about the extent to which we are putting unnecessary, excessive and counterproductive pressure on people. Doing so discourages the co-oporation we need and creates the conditions in which negative tribal behaviour thrives.

We want to foster the massive upside of tribal behaviour and interdependence so it becomes logical from a survival perspective to cooperate together.

Because you will NEVER override human survival instincts.