Social Media and Transformational Tribe Building
Apr 10th, 2009 by David Svet
This week Spurspectives is looking at how tribes interact with one another. In particular, how your tribe will react when faced with an aggressive competitor. The two previous posts this week discussed Andrew Schmookler’s thesis that transformation is the only viable option if both tribes are to survive and flourish. Today’s post looks at transformation in the context of empowering your tribe.
Transforming a tribe in the face of aggressive competition requires inspirational leadership. A blatant attack, whether real or perceived, can be a crushing blow or a rallying point depending upon your leader’s response. It’s an opportunity to sell the vision, inspire renewed confidence, rededicate your conviction to the cause, and shout, “follow me!” As long as this effort is directed at transforming the organization, both you and the aggressor can win. However, if it is a rallying cry to destroy the aggressor, there will be casualties and one of you will die. Destruction is the desirable option if you are fighting an aggressor that is the core cause of your organization’s existence, such as ending cancer or polio. But transformation is the desired option if your organization is to survive a competitive attack by another organization in search of resources. The steps for transformational leadership within a tribe look something like this:
Develop the vision
This is largely a matter of refining the organization’s direction to clearly show your differential advantage over the competitor. Why are you great? How are you different? When they zig, you zag. Develop your advantage as a story that is emotionally compelling and shows a path to victory. Social media can help you refine your vision by getting everyone in your tribe to weigh in very quickly.
Share the vision
The leader needs to repeat the story to a point of being painful. As the leader you will have heard every time the story is told. Get over it. The story is new to followers and they need to hear it repeatedly in order to assimilate the vision as their own. Social media is one of the best ways to spread the story. Through word of mouth, stories become legends.
Celebrate small victories
To achieve transformation everyone needs to see progress. The leader’s role is to be head cheerleader celebrating every inch of progress toward the goal in a loud and upbeat fashion. Social media enables you to engage one to one with everyone in your tribe at once. Online high fives work wonders and others in the tribe will join in on the congratulations. Everyone likes to hear they’ve done a good job and it inspires most of us to try harder.
