Does your business focus on meaningless details and micro management?

Reporting, filling in the figures is various sheets and applications, having meetings and teleconferences to discuss the figures over and over again. Being like a cog in large machine or factory. Feeling numb, brainless and non-creative. Does this sound familiar to you? If not, you can consider yourself lucky. Many medium and large companies often live in a factory culture and in deep mistrust. This has resulted an overblown structures of command and control and related reporting. Sometimes it goes so far that there is hardly enough time to do something productive which would have an real impact to the bottom line. The overblown reporting sure has a large impact to the bottom line – unfortunately a negative impact.

What the mistrust, ego-driven decisions, overblown reporting and control cause to your business?

1. culture of even stronger mistrust

2. motivational problems

3. proactivity disappears

4. large hurdles to innovative thinking and creativity

5. forgetting the customer (who actually pays your daily bills)

6. at very best focusing on doing the very least

7. endless arguing about the minor things, instead of doing something to improve them

8. culture of blaming

….and the list goes on and on.

I guess by now you get the point. What can be done?

One very powerful tool for firstly understanding the current state of your business, secondly defining your goals and thirdly providing tools for achieving the goals is called tribal leadership. Tribal Leadership is based on focusing on your company culture. It claims that every group of people in any setup (country, city, town, company, department even a family) can be seen as a tribe. The members of your tribe are people who you probably would greet if you meet them on the street. You may also share also a certain set of common beliefs, ways of thinking, values or you are on the same mission.

In the tribal leadership framework the tribes are divided in to five different tribal levels. The levels range from full blown anarchy up to working commonly towards a noble cause. In between there are levels such as self promotion and real team work. The whole point of the model is that it gives you an easy tool to recognize where you are as well as it gives you simple practices and tips how to advance to the next level.

Why to advance to the next level? The research done by the authors Dave Logan & co proves that over a longer period of time the higher levels always outperform the lower levels. The most interesting thing to know is that globally 75% of the businesses are on the levels 1,2 and 3 and only 25% on the levels 4 and 5. In the other words, there is plenty of potential for improvement that can be done focusing purely on your company culture and without touching your products and services at all.

Would you be willing to hear the truth about your business? Would you be ready to change your company culture? If you are smart you would.

To be continued….