Eric Schleien interviews John King, co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, Tribal Leadership
Interview with John King, co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, Tribal Leadership
Eric Schleien (ES): All right John, so thank you for taking the time to do this interview. I wanted to talk with you about some of the frameworks and principles that are brought up in “Principles of Power”. Some of these principles are principles and frameworks that you invented, and, [I] wanted to take a deeper dive into them so that when they’re brought up later in the book, readers will have a better understanding of what I’m talking about. Does that sound good?
John King (JK): That sounds great.
ES: Ok perfect. Let’s start with the cultural map. In the book, I mention things like Stage 2, Stage 3, [and] you’re quoted a few times where you talk about that and its relationship to givers and takers, push and pull, and flow. Can you give us a little sense of that world and what you mean by the different cultural stages and how that interacts with some of the other models that you’ve invented?
ES: You mention there are five stages of culture, five ways that people organize themselves in groups.
ES: Can you say a little bit more about that?
JK: Yes. In ascending order, people are more effective, that’s the first part of this. At Stage 1, there’s only about 3% of the people that are organized at Stage 1. It’s a kind of a place where criminals are, and, it’s an area that we call undermining. People who are in an undermining [relationship to their environment] and alone [in their environment] because it’s a very alone sort of thing are at Stage 1. The next level up is something like- we experience this on a bad day-at Stage 2. Stage 2 is ineffective. When I notice that I’m not really being effective at what it is that I’m committed to, one of the things that I notice is that I am not really well connected. In fact, not connected at all to the people around me. I’m kind of there and I’m amongst them. But, I’m not connected to them. So at Stage 1, one of the things people at Stage 1 say is: “life sucks”. At Stage 2- it’s a big change-it’s “my life sucks.” I mean, I could see that your life works. I can see that the things you do work well. I can see it’s a great life. I just don’t have an access to participating in it. I’m not connected in a way that I can participate in it effectively, so I’m being ineffective, and “my life sucks.”
ES: To make a further distinction, most people, when they say “life sucks”, what they actually mean is “my life sucks.”
JK: That’s actually what they mean. We tend to speak hyperbolically. And for the most part, very seldom, do people actually get into the true “life sucks” unless they’re in wartime or [involved in] criminal activities, or, they’re trying to bring down the whole structure. But the truth is, that “my life sucks” is kind of the place where you feel ineffective and then we kind of dramatize it.
JK: Stage 2 is connected by the way, kind of like I say joined at the hip to Stage 3. Stage 2 and Stage 3 have a symbiotic relationship. Stage 2, is ineffective, or you could say “a loser”, at least in this particular point [of view]. They have a point of view that “my life sucks.” Stage 3 is the winner. Think of sports. The person who is the champion is the Stage 3 and what they say is, “I’m great, you’re not, and I have the statistics to prove it.” So they are organized around winning. And if you’re organized around winning, in this particular way, it’s a zero-sum game. The people that you are winning over are the people who are at Stage 2. The trick about this is that Stage 3 does not exist without Stage 2 nor does Stage 2 exist without Stage 3. They live in a comparative world. This is where we form partnerships. But the partnerships are definitely senior and junior. Stage 3 is senior and Stage 2 is junior. What you have is a relationship where Stage 3 is dominating a Stage 2 and Stage 2 is avoiding the domination. It’s a relationship from [Stage] 3, “I’m great, you’re not and I have the stats to prove it”, to [Stage] 2, “my life sucks.” If you think about it just a little bit, you can actually see, when you’re being ineffective and then somebody is actually driving you, managing you, dominating you, what comes along with it is a kind of a glee, a sense of I’m better than you. So how we build our self-image quite often, particularly when we’re young, is we build ourself at Stage 3. It is not just a small thing, it’s a big thing. If you extrapolate this out to companies, it’s: “our company is better than your company”, which is a Stage 3 to Stage 2 sort of saying. “General Electric is better than Westinghouse”, or, you can say politically, the United States often represents itself as better than Canada. And so if you’re a Canadian, you’re in a Stage 2 relationship to most Americans and nobody realizes it because it’s all sort of in the background. So that’s Stages 1, 2, and 3.
Then, if you’ve done the work and put yourself solidly at Stage 4, then opportunities come along. They only come along for groups that are operating at Stage 4. And usually they’re the kind of opportunities that will make history, it will change the game completely. This is what we call a “vital stage” or Stage 5. At Stage 5, this is where team really shows up. Because your little group begins to connect up with somebody else’s little group and somebody else’s little group with somebody else’s little group to form a team. And when we form a team, the language around is generally “life is great”, and what we’re doing is accomplishing off-the-charts sort of results. Most people at Stage 3 think they’re doing Stage 5. Not accurate. When you get to Stage 4, and you do the work around building yourself at Stage 4, you have that Stage 5 opportunity. You actually get to see the remarkable difference between a zero-sum/Stage 3/”I’m great, you’re not”, and, a non-zero-sum/ “life is great”/ Stage 5. But in order to do this, you have to do the work, and you have to do the work with other people. Human beings are social creatures. In fact, they’re ultra social creatures. And so we work best, not when we’re alone, we work best when we work effectively with other people. So Stage 4 is all about effective stable partnerships, and, in Tribal Leadership, the whole name of the game is getting people stable at Stage 4 so that they are ready for the opportunity when it shows up. And it will for people who have done the work at Stage 4. It does not show up for people at Stage 3, and, they end up missing the opportunity and then-I don’t know-be weird about it.
JK: Yeah. Thank you, that’s actually really well thought through Eric. It’s about environment. See the thing is at Stages 1, 2, and, 3 it’s all about me, me, me, and, it’s only about my survival, and it’s all about me winning, you losing, and me getting ahead. However, at Stage 4, there’s a consciousness that: how I win is by making sure that other people win, so, what should become at Stage 4-and this is the beginning of leadership-you become not someone who is out for yourself, but someone who is out to create an environment for other people to perform well. So, it’s about being an ecologist. It’s about being an environmentalist. It’s about really providing an environment. It turns out, generally speaking, if you base your relationships with people properly, which is on merit, it turns out that people are probably pretty good at what they do and don’t need a whole lot of managing, but, they might need some leadership. Leadership-being kind of a code word for: a great environment to work in.
JK: Google is a great example of it. Because what Google does is hire really smart people and then creates an environment for them to work well together. And as a result, they get off-the-charts kinds of results. This is also happening in our other programs that we see that are the flashy splashy great ones going on. The ones that seem to be passing away are the ones where they are still operating of the old version of “I’m great, you’re not.”
ES: Right, which isn’t that conducive to having stabilized-
JK: Right. Rather than actually having stabilization-it actually presents bullying to say it brutally.
ES: Right, interesting. Can you explain how someone would actually apply these principles-I’m very interested-if you could talk a little bit more about the principle of the triad and how that impacts-and how you can use that principle to impact the environment around you.
ES: How did you discover that [it] was a myth?
JK: In other words, it won’t just work for me to pick you and some other random guy and then be committed to your success unless I’ve got you in a non-zero-sum game with me in which you realize that my success is your success and the other person’s success is your success. The rule is: the one person in the triad is accountable and responsible for the success of the other two. If you looked at it like a triangle, you would say the vertex is accountable for the success of the opposite leg, and, it requires that all three people in the triad are actually on the same boat. And the reason this is good is because it starts to bring up stuff that we start hearing a whole lot about. But we hear it discussed in an ineffective way. For example, this is where values come in. If I take you and another person, we have to be very clear that our values are aligned with each other, and so, if somebody has significantly different values, this is probably not going to work. This is where generosity comes in. Leadership is a generous space. This is where the idea of having the permission of the others comes in. Leadership is a distinction that operates or is granted by the permission of the people being led. So what you’ve got to have is you’ve got to have an environment in which all can succeed and that what you’re there [for], is you’re there for the success of the others in the group. Some people are extraordinarily good at this but not very many-maybe 20% of the population-if they wake up to it. So if I took the numbers and I said 3% are at Stage 1, about 20% is at Stage 2, roughly 50% are at Stage 3 at any given moment-and it’s a very fluid in-and-out thing- Stage 4 is 20%-its an enlightened 20% of people who are interested in the success of something that’s bigger than me-bigger than them. So something that comes in at Stage 4 is something called a noble cause, something that makes it bigger than me, bigger than the three of us, and something that is worthwhile for us spending our time, and our effort, and our money, and our ingenuity on to make happen. This is the-I don’t know-the golden egg I suppose or the Holy Grail of organizational culture thinking. If we can get everybody working, and working happily together in a respectful and honoring way with each other, inside of the same kind of value set, and working on something together that is worth accomplishing together, that’s bigger than us, then we have a good chance of putting ourselves at Stage 4. Otherwise, it just devolves into: I won this round or I lost this round.
ES: Could you say that those kinds of relationships are more transactional or commoditized?
ES: If you want to move your organization from Stage 2 or 3 to having it be stable at [Stage] 4, you essentially are looking for those people that could be your partners in building those triads. Is that the sense of it? What has been your experience?
JK: Yeah it’s a good question because you would think that you would look at the Stage 3 [people] because they’re a little higher on the food chain. But the truth is, when people are at Stage 3, and they’re winning, there is basically no incentive for them to change. So they’re very difficult to change. What we’re looking for are people who are at Stage 2, but who are bright and who are open and willing to make a change. So- my life sucks-but I could see that it could be better if I was-you know-working with you and you-and we were actually up to something that was going to be a benefit to all three of us. Where you look is you look at the Stage 2’s and you put together-what I’m going to call awake or enlightened Stage 2’s who see that- I’m sick and tired of being in survival, and, I’m sick and tired of being the loser and on the bottom end of this deal, and, what I want to do is I want to actually work my way out, and, the way that I work my way out is in a true authentic partnership with at least a couple of other people.
JK: Yeah, it’s true. There’s an ontological rule that: you have to have a breakdown before you can have a breakthrough. Stage 4 is a breakthrough place. It’s a breakthrough in several ways. It’s a breakthrough because it’s no longer a survival place. It’s a place where you’re actually generating abundance. It’s a breakthrough because it’s no longer singular, it’s social. And it’s a breakthrough because, I have this realization of: working with people is actually going to work for me, so that’s a breakthrough. And when human beings went from- the one individual to the team player, the collaborator-that’s when the whole conversation called human being began to move forward rapidly. For example, you take other primates-chimps haven’t learned this. So they live in a hierarchical world and they’re brutal. It’s a brutal world, a brutal competitive world, and it’s all about survival. So what we’re looking for is-we’re looking for Stage 2's-who while they may be in a survival-based relationship- Stage 2/Stage 3-they actually can see that if they were thinking about it differently-that there’s actually a different, more powerful, and more effective way to think about the way that I work with people. At Stage 2, the way that people work with people is they work in a way where they’re disconnected. If I work in a way that I am profoundly connected to other people-and what I mean by profoundly is: you’re connected at the level of some sort of resonance of your values-then you’re more than: we’re not just manufacturing widgets here-this is an honest person who does things in a way that I admire and I want to work with that person.
JK: I was working once in a utility years ago-they were very good at working with each other once they understood that they could drop the bravado and the machismo of Stage 3/Stage 2- and all of a sudden, they started working in a way that was uplifting to the company. I asked the class-I said: “I don’t know quite why I like working with you guys.” And this guy says, “I know why”-because he was one of the ones who was a leader in this area-and I said, “why is it, Tony?” And he said, “we cut square corners.” And it hit it right on the nail head for me. We like people who are honest, effective, generous, and they’re willing to work with other people, and it’s not based on their likes or dislikes, it’s based on their commitment to what it is that they’re doing together.
ES: Right. Now I want to further distinguish something. When you say s omeone at Stage 2, you don’t mean someone is inherently Stage 2, you mean they’re at Stage 2 in relationship to their environment.
JK: Well, particularly around business, we live in a management-driven culture not a leadership-driven culture. And as a result, we often see that leadership is a subset of management, and, it’s not true. That’s backward. Leadership comes first and then management occurs afterward. Management Is granted by authority. If somebody tells me I’m the manager I come in, I go, Hi I’m your new manager. There’s no voting and we are now automatically put in a state of: I’m Stage 3 and you’re Stage 2 and I’m managing you. Leadership is granted by permission of those being led. So it’s a collaborative/cooperative kind of space. But you’re not going to collaborate/cooperate with me unless you are somewhat inspired by what I’m offering to you-as you know-what we’re going to be working on together. Management is pretty much saying the way things work is by domination, however, we’re going to make it a little nicer. B-schools teach people: oh what you need to do is you need to think about people, you need to take them into consideration, you need to listen to them. They give you all kinds of tips and all kinds of strategies so that you can get more out of these poor god-forsaken Stage 2's.
ES: Almost like a belief about your life?
JK: Yeah. Stage 4 is a flow state. So, when we get it going, when we get everybody going, we’re in flow state. Well, what is flow state? Flow state is part of a cycle. There’s a four-part cycle and the first part of the cycle is something where we’re learning a whole lot, where it’s called loading and we are becoming overwhelmed with the information that we need and the adjustments we need in order to work effectively. So there is the learning part. Then, there is a formal part called the release. And the release is a place where maybe we do something socially together, we do something to kind of get away from what it is that we’ve been working on, and then coming back, what has happened is we have bonded in such a way that we go into flow. So if you think-I can look back and look at the military-so basic training was brutal. But after basic training, you got to a point where you really were able to kind of release the energy of all of that and bond with your buddies. And you came back-and you came back as: wow, we’re really bonded as a platoon-so it happens on every sort of level. A smart leader teaches, teaches, teaches, teaches, teaches-watches the frustration-and then at the right point-provides something quite often-it’s a place where they can laugh and they can have a good time and even poke fun at the person who is the leader-and then they come out of that and they are connected together and they go into flow. And flow-your productivity is just off-the-charts. People think flow is a place that feels good. It’s not [about] a place that feels good, and it might, but it’s not about feeling good. Flow is a place of accelerated learning. So what you’ve done is you have loaded up, you have got the release, you’re now working with the other people, and now you’re in a state of accelerated learning. You’re learning about what they can do, you’re learning about what you could do, and you’re applying the principles that you’re learning really fast. So accelerated learning leads to accelerated performance. And that gives us an access to the cycle of flow.
ES: There’s a model that you developed that actually breaks down that principle of flow. C an you talk about that a little bit?
JK: I’m not sure, tell me what you’re thinking of in this model-
ES: With the four quadrants.
JK: Yes, well this is something that I developed for managers based on the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who is the guy who distinguished-out flow and he’s the genius who talks about it all the time. I’m just a guy who borrows from people smarter than I am. But if you look at a four stage matrix, and you look in the lower left corner, this is an area where you’re not performing well at all. So that’s an area of where it’s of low energy, it’s of low commitment. So nothing really happens here. There are two measures. One is the area that measures how difficult something is and your skill-set in being able to do it. The vertical access is how difficult things are. The horizontal axis is your skill-set. What it’s saying is low skill and low performance. However, quite often, we get people who are overwhelmed, they are in a state of anxiety, they are scared to death. If you take a look at it, you could see in the matrix that they’re in the upper left. And in the upper left there at a level of high expectation of their productivity. But if you look down on the horizontal axis you can see that their skill set is still very low. So, people who are are like that are in a state of overwhelm. And if you’re a smart manager, what you do is you provide training for those people so that they can actually do what it is their tasked to do. So if you give high training and high competitiveness, the productivity goes up immensely. If you take a look at the bottom right quadrant, this is a quadrant where people have an enormous amount of skill but they have very little incentive to do anything because they’re not challenged. So if you take a look at where the challenge is low and skillset is high, then they’re in a state of boredom. So the three states are:
low skill/low challenge: apathy
high challenge/low skill: anxiety or overwhelm
[The fourth state would be flow. T his is high skill/high challenge and would be in the upper right quadrant of the 4 stage matrix]
And where we want to get is where they’re in a state of high skill, and at the same time, high challenge. Flow- and there’s been an enormous amount of work done on this since 1991-I mean literally tens of thousands of case studies on this-where we find that if we want to get the best performance out of people, we’ve got to give them the highest skill set and the highest challenge and make it available to them.
This is why in sports-we say that you can take a look at what happened in some sports like track and field-you know 40 years ago-and we could see that the food is better, the actual activities that they’re doing is better understood, and so on like that. But ultimately, the coaching is better and the coaching is what has made-forget that they’ve got better shoes, and better surfaces to run on-all of that was going to happen with technology.
ES: Yeah. Speaking of being action-oriented, one of the brilliant things about the Tribal Leadership work is that the principles are all applied, it’s not just theory and being intellectual about things.
ES: And it only works when you actually apply it to situations. That leads me into strategy-and I know you have a strategy model that you developed.
ES: And I think it’s brilliant.
JK: Thank you.
ES: Any corporate strategist would tell you that strategy is very hard, there’s a very high rate of failure. Your strategy model has a very high success rate on average. One of the things that you figured out-which I think is incredible-is you saw the connection between taking on a strategy [and taking on a strategy] that was actually conducive to the culture that it was in. So if you have a team-based strategy in a Stage 2 culture, it’s not going to really work very well.
JK: Not at all, won’t work at all.
ES: Can you explain a little bit about-
The strategy model that we do is a simple. Basically, [a] Y-shaped strategy with 3 moving parts and three challenging questions. If you can unlock that strategy yourself, you will devise yourself a strategy for the next 90 days that is doable assuming you do it.
And then you go into the SELP program, and in that, you design a project which does several things. It teaches you how to do projects. It shows you that if you can bring people into a project, and have it be a worthwhile project, something is going to bring a benefit, or in the language of that particular program, create a possibility for a group of people that you are touching-and the term that they say is touching, moving, and inspiring-that if you could do that one thing, what you will end up [having] out of that is a profoundly heightened sense of effectiveness. So there is lots to be said of the Self-Expression and Leadership Program in terms of your engagement with a project that gets you out of it-actually gets your nose out of your own navel-out of the way of your own Self -gets you into a conversation that is about designing effective and useful futures for other people, and as you do this, you will you will experience more success in your life.
Because you as a human being-see, in your case Eric, you’re a young man and I would guess that between now and when you die-if you live a normal lifetime-you will probably do 200 or 300 projects in your life. And one of the things that particular program does, and one of these things that I’m concerned about is: teaching people how to be effective and successful in doing whatever the projects are that they bring up. I’m a huge fan of the SELP program that Landmark provides.
ES: Self, as an expression of who you are-and then this sort of this automatic identity-this kind of automatic machinery running in the background-
ES: Can you go into how that plays into the environment that you’re in? If there is a correlation-
Now both of those are going on all the time at the same time. And as a matter of fact, in the world of survival-to get back to your question-in the world of survival, mostly all we’re concerned with is:
How do we appear from the outside-in?
How do we appear to our peers?
How do we appear to our culture or community?
ES: Interesting. So I think that covers the models and principles in “Principles of Power” [here I am referring the models and principles that John developed specifically, not every single model and principle in the book].
Is there anything else that you think you’d like to add to this conversation or contribute to this conversation?
JK: Not so much. You know it’s kind of like-I had a friend say to me the other day, it’s not like eating an apple, it’s more like peeling an onion, and I like that. It’s kind of like as we talk about these things, and we’re sort of peeling it away, or peeling it away to see that which is underneath what that which is underneath-what is the source or the cause of something-and if you’ve eaten an apple all the way down, you’re left with a core. There’s something right there in the middle. But if you peel an onion all the way down, and you peel it all the way down, there’s nothing at the center. And nothing is your area, your soul, your Self, the place where you generate your creativity, the place where you access your true power. It’s never going to be outside-in. But outside-in is the way you’re going to always be perceived. It’s always going to be you as a human being and how you generate from the inside-out from nothing.
ES: That’s great. Well John, I really appreciate your time.
JK: Well, thank you. And, I appreciate the questions, Eric. And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something that I love a lot.
Resources For More Information On Tribal Leadership & Cultural Transformation:
Originally published at https://ericschleien.com on April 7, 2019.
