Teams, Tribes, and Community - 0.1.0
Several months ago, I made bold decision: Take command of the helm for a brilliant tribe of diverse creative thinkers dedicated to helping each other succeed. This is the first of an on-going series of posts - maybe once or twice a month - describing this evolving effort.
For an extrovert, this might not have been a bold decision. But in my case, you should know I designed the card that card-carrying introverts carry. So this decision involved a more thorough application of my already robust decision-making process. On a professional level, this may be the most significant challenge I've taken on to date. Will my years of experience with forming and guiding teams help this tribe further their success? Will I be able to find the gravitational force that holds us together and the spark that keeps us inspired? These are open questions. They are also questions that occupy much of my thinking.
We are not dedicated to achieving a single goal or moving in a unified direction. We each have our areas of expertise and independent business goals. We are much more a tribe than a team. As such, I believe we will be guided more by tribal dynamics and models than team rules and policies. The path is not clear, but this much I know...
There is no leader of this tribe. Not in the sense of a single person who's responsible for setting the direction and making all the decisions that impact the organization. There is no "Chief" or "Czar" of anything. I'll fill the role of Launch Commander and Flight Commander in order to get us organized and moving forward. However, I have been clear from the start about my intention to structure our tribe on principles of self-organization.
The emphasis is on simple and accessible technology and easy ways to organize meetings based on Agile principles and practices - lean coffee, for example, has served us well for our initial meetings. What has emerged since then are more involved and interactive meeting formats, such as client role-plays and accountability exercises. Keeping things simple and remaining mindful of barriers to participation is vital. Too many tools with too many logins risks the creation of a Tower of Babel. For now, the weekly video call is the center-point around which we all meet. This in itself is enough of a challenge given the global participation. Other than this, email is the acknowledged primary channel for asynchronous communication.
We are not accepting new members. Whether or for how long this remains the case is undecided. We have discussed various ways of introducing new members, but have decided to decide on this issue later. The circumstances that brought each of us together created a unique bond of trust and familiarity with each other's business interests that makes the introduction of new members a risk to maintaining these relationships. At the moment, we are tipped slightly toward being on the large size and everyone acknowledges if we grow much bigger the meetings may become unmanageable and the interactions less valuable. Since trust is foundational, none of the details related to who we are and what we discuss will be revealed in this space. My writing will be limited to the general case of what I discover from having participated in and helped guide our tribe. It is my hope this may help others with forming and guiding their own teams and tribes.
Whatever the outcome, it's been more fun thus far than I've had in a loooooong time.
Image by Youssef Jheir from Pixabay