What tribal instincts reveal about great leadership
Leaders can shape corporate culture by harnessing the deep-rooted human desire to belong. Sending out well-timed signals to their community of employees – and customers – reinforces shared identity, prestige and precedent, says cultural psychologist Michael Morris.
In modern-day parlance, the word “tribal” is often used to evoke rigidity, dogmatism and divisiveness. As an adjective, it is not one that conjures up visions of progress, harmony and evolution. And yet, that is exactly the word that Michael Morris, a cultural psychologist at Columbia Business School in New York, has chosen as the title of his new book.
In Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together, Morris explains that human beings are naturally prone to join a “tribe” of like-minded people: a community, an organization, a company. The culture they share, and their loyalty to it, can be harnessed by leaders to bring about positive change and evolution and “lift a team to greatness,” he argues. Leaders can transform a tribe, Morris tells Think:Act Magazine in an interview, “but it requires breaking the old culture before nurturing the growth of something new.”
Can you elaborate why you chose Tribal as the title of your book?
Some people bristle at the word “tribe.” It’s a really old word, and it came into other languages through being the label for the 12 lineages of Israel. Then it was translated, as the Bible was translated, and by Shakespeare’s time, it was used to refer to the Scots, to New World nations, to the Aztecs or to the Jewish Diaspora in Europe. Only a couple of centuries later did the word “tribe” take on this pejorative connotation when you had the era of colonial expansion and this political pressure to dichotomize European civilizations from non-Western tribes. That pejorative connotation still lingers.
How did this academic term make its way into the corporate world?
Around the same time, it became radioactive in anthropology and largely vanished from some academic fields, the word proliferated in popular parlance. And it is a word that companies use to describe their most dedicated customers – the Macintosh tribe, the Harley-Davidson tribe – and their really dedicated employees. It seems to be the word, at least in English, that best captures the feeling of what it’s like to be in a large community united by common ideas: whether it’s a common aesthetic, a common definition or a common worldview. Living tribally is what makes us human.
“When change initiatives fail, it’s often because there are too many signals sent at the same time, and it’s confusing to people. They don’t know what to follow, and they become suspicious.”
What advice do you have for leaders on using tribal instincts to help their businesses and organizations grow and develop?
What’s most relevant is that cultural change in your organization will happen organically, whether you want it to happen or not – but it won’t always go in the directions that serve you. And you can orchestrate it by sending signals. There are three kinds of signals: peer signals, prestige signals and precedent signals. They are a really important tool kit to keep in mind when you’re trying to shape the evolution of the culture.
Could you explain those three types of signals in more detail?
The first are peer signals. Controlling what appears to be prevalent is something that leaders can do, in part through what they publicize and what they facilitate. Prestige signals are another powerful lever: what people see as carrying status in the organization. They are things that you can control through whom you elevate, whom you platform, what accomplishments you showcase, whom you promote. You can shape the appearance of what carries prestige in the organization. Any behavior that you want people to do more of, you should try to send prestige signals around.
The final and least obvious one is that you can shape the future direction of change by sending signals about precedents: about the past. You may think of the past as fixed, but history is not fixed. History is rewritten every generation, and one of the best ways that leaders can gain legitimacy and buy-in for their plan is by showing people that this plan has some deep continuity with the collective past, with prior chapters in the organization’s life. That gives people a feeling of meaning, because it helps them see that what they are going to do is following in the footsteps of prior generations whose legacy they are carrying forward.
You don’t necessarily want to do these things all at once. When change initiatives fail, it’s often because there are too many signals sent at the same time, and it’s confusing to people. They don’t know what to follow, and they become suspicious.
“One of Apple’s most successful ad campaigns was explicitly tribalistic: Do you want to be the Mac guy, or the PC guy?”
What are some of the companies that come to mind when you think of a successful use of these signals to change both internal and external cultures?
One example that’s on the top of my mind is Kodak. It essentially had a near-monopoly on the kind of film that would be used for amateur photography. But there wasn’t much demand, because in the early 20th century, people thought of photography as a serious affair, better left to the professionals in their studios – going to get your picture taken was a thing you did a couple of times in your life. You had to get dressed up, and you had to sit there and have a serious expression and hold it for the camera. That was what Kodak was up against.
How did they change it?
They developed a cute and easy-to-use camera that they called the Brownie that was the 1900 equivalent of the first Macintosh computer. Then they gave it away to scout troops, YMCA groups and young active people who would use it playfully in public. They sold it as a loss leader, so that people could afford it. They wanted people to see their peers take pictures in a more lighthearted way, then see the photographs that resulted from that. Kodak managed to change the tradition of what we’re supposed to do when we’re getting our picture taken, which is saying “cheese” and smiling. Now it’s a deeply ingrained cultural norm: Americans have to try really hard not to smile for the camera.
What about cultural icon Apple. What was its approach to changing popular culture?
Apple’s biggest influence was that Steve Jobs thought: I’m going to make a personal computer that looks like a Cuisinart and I’m going to make the liberal arts people of the world feel like the computer is their thing. Apple really changed popular culture through this idea that all sorts of people could be empowered in what they were doing. Steve Jobs called it a bicycle for the mind.
Which tribal instincts did Steve Jobs and then – by extension – Apple appeal to?
One thing that Apple thought a lot about when trying to socialize its products was that they wanted people to see other people using their products. When Apple’s laptops first started coming out and becoming really widespread, the company had to decide whether to position the apple icon on the laptop so it was upside down for the person using it when they shut it, or for the person seeing it from a different table in the cafe. And they prioritized the person seeing it elsewhere in the cafe, because they wanted that person to say: “What’s that cool laptop over there? Oh, it’s an Apple!” They’ve been very aware that prevalence signals – what you see your peers doing – are an important step in normalizing a practice.
One of Apple’s most successful ad campaigns that was explicitly tribalistic in its underpinnings showed an actor who looked a bit like a young Steve Jobs, a cool guy with long hair who looked kind of artsy. He was the Apple guy. Then they had a nerdy-looking comedian who bore a distinct resemblance to Bill Gates, and he was the PC guy. These two were like caricatures of the prototypes of the user: Do you want to be the Mac guy, or do you want to be the PC guy? Apple at the time were a smaller company, and they owned a certain segment of the market – the market for graphic designers, for video production, etc. They were very much speaking to their tribe, and saying: “Don’t switch, don’t go over to the dark side.” Even though, at that point in history, PCs cost about a third as much, and were in some ways superior technically, Apple was trying to keep the loyalty of their customers by making it an explicitly tribal issue.
You also mentioned a third instinct, appealing to precedent. What is a real-world example of that?
One company that does this really well is Levi Strauss & Co. Their jeans were developed during the Gold Rush, because regular pants weren’t rugged enough for prospectors climbing all day. So, they used a riveter to put the denim together. They’ve kept their 501 product, and they’ve always had it, which shows the continuity back to the founder.
Gen Z doesn’t believe in a lot of consumption. They want to buy vintage clothes – and they don’t want to buy as much. Levi’s has been able to say that the 501 is the ultimate sustainable product, because it was always built to be more rugged, and it’s always been a hand-me-down product, which people reuse and recycle. Levi’s can make something seem both trendy and traditional, which is usually the best way to sell something.
“What you want to do is have a healthy group identity so that your employees are glad they work for you and not for the competition.”
Takeaways
There must be examples where these attempts to appeal to tribal instincts have gone awry …
Trying to impose cultural hegemony is always something that is resisted, to some extent. Take Bank of America – a lower-status consumer bank, but one that happens to be large – at a moment of crisis acquiring a very prestigious centuries-old investment bank like Merrill Lynch. The Merrill bankers were not going to readily adopt the identity of the bank that acquired them, including the Bank of America pins and logos.
In general, tribal thinking goes awry when people rely on the ideas of the culture inordinately, in a sort of unchecked way, and it leads them to make bad decisions that hurt the organization. What you want to do in an organization is have a healthy group identity so that your employees are glad they work for you and not for the competition, while at the same time learning from everything that the competition does and planning realistically about how to counter the things that the competition is doing that may be valued by consumers. Sometimes firms tend to derogate, to caricature the competition at those moments when they feel most threatened.
Unternehmen neigen manchmal dazu, die Konkurrenz herabzuwürdigen oder ins Lächerliche zu ziehen – insbesondere dann, wenn sie sich am stärksten bedroht fühlen. Dieses Verhalten mag kurzfristig das Stammesdenken stärken, ist aber auf lange Sicht kontraproduktiv. Stattdessen sollten Unternehmen die Stärken der Konkurrenz anerkennen und als Ansporn für eigene Verbesserungen nutzen. Nur durch eine ehrliche Auseinandersetzung mit den Wettbewerbern können Unternehmen nachhaltig erfolgreich werden.
You have also investigated how companies use flags, totems, coats of arms and logos – like MGM’s lion, or Ferrari’s horse – to shore up tribal loyalties.
Indigenous groups across the world all have this convention of totems. Clans have totems, and the totems are usually animals that humans interact with which are admired for something: the strength of the lion or the bull, the fierceness of the bear, the speed of the bird, the endurance of the camel. The same animals recur throughout history in totems, then coats of arms, mascots and corporate logos. That doesn’t seem to be going away. If you think of your arbitrarily constructed social groups – whether a corporation or a profession or a social club – as being like an animal species, then it inherits, in your mind, a lot of tacit qualities. You hear that when people talk about their groups. They say, “critical thinking is in the DNA at our company, and we can’t not be innovative.”
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