Tribal Wisdom and Leadership Advancement

“... I’d rather be a pagan in a creed outworn.” Williams Wordsworth

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You can boost your leadership skills and hence your job performance and career by understanding this one thing that most leaders miss: great leadership incorporates a spiritual dimension.??

This spiritual dimension has been a part of leadership throughout history. After all, when people needed to meet a great challenge, one thing usually took place, a leader gathered them together and spoke from the heart. Using my experience working with leaders of all ranks and functions for decades, my guess is that this heartfelt speech had a spiritual aspect.?

The word “spirit” has been applied to many different things in different fields: to stealth bombers, corporations, rock bands, comic book characters, etc. The spiritual in leadership differs from the religious. Whereas the religious involves organized principles and beliefs, the spiritual is more of a personal relationship with transcendent aspects of the human condition. ??

Religions embrace spirit in many ways, but the spiritual aspects of leadership I’m talking about must be exerted universally in the global marketplace, across cultures, nations, ethnic groups, etc.?

Leaders who can connect with these aspects and communicate them have great power no matter what profit/nonprofit categories in which they may serve.?

However, in today’s global economy, buffeted by wars and AI hurricanes, we do not hear of the spiritual in leadership. Yet more than ever, with the overburdens of technology, the spiritual brings advantages in cultivating organizational success.?

Talking about the spiritual in leadership, we must also talk about the results leaders achieve, hard, measured results.? Plus, we must talk about getting more of them, getting them faster, and getting “more, faster” continually.? Otherwise, there is no sense in delving into the spiritual aspect of leadership.?

Fortunately, there is a universal ground for the kind of spirit needed in today’s leadership: the spiritual wisdom of tribal cultures. Anthropologists have come to identify common features in the diversity of tribal cultures around the world.?

First, they are earth-based.? The relationship between the earth and most tribal cultures is one of mystical interdependence. I suggest that “earth-based” translates today in our hi-tech marketplace into sustainability.

Whereas tribal people understand their words/actions have deeper connections than immediate, surface dynamics, so sustainability today can embody that which continues beyond our present endeavors.

A client of mine gave an example of this. A quarter of a century ago, he played high school football in West Texas. His team never won a game. But one player, a skinny lineman grievously outweighed by his opponents, was always totally motivated to play his best, going all out on every play, cheering on his teammates to do their best even though his team was losing badly.

“I never forgot him and the way he played and the great motivation he showed,” my client said. “In fact, the remembrance of his play has influenced the way I lead.” (My client was the CEO of a small company.)

The point is that what one achieves is of course important but HOW one achieves goes to the heart of sustainability.

Just as tribal people, often through ritual, looked to bring the enduring truths, as they perceived truths, into their activities by aligning those activities with their physical environment, in your leadership look for what can live on. It might be a process or the identification of what inspired actions or a lesson, such as persistence that can be applied in another task. Whatever the identification, it holds the seeds of future success. It manifests sustainability.

Second, most tribal cultures view all individual things that make up our universe -- rocks, stars, mountains, rivers, people, animals, fish, etc. -- as interdependent.

This interdependence is not just a physical dynamic. Yes, we live on the same earth, breathe the same air, and are all mortal.? But many tribal cultures understand it as a spiritual dynamic as well. Unlike the concept of the human soul, which is believed to be unchanging, eternal, and preexisting, one’s spirit, according to tribal wisdom, develops and grows as an integral aspect of a person living dependent upon and integrated with community and environment.

Today, these interdependent features of tribal spiritual wisdom can be applied with results-producing consequences to global leadership. Just as tribe members saw themselves as interdependent with their tribe and their spiritual deities and dictums, so today’s leaders, to be truly successful on a global stage, must see themselves in similar interdependent terms.

However, the difference today is that interdependence is not with a tribe but with people the world over and with the world environment.? That’s a profound, spiritual leadership lesson, hard but necessary to actualize, from which great leadership results flow.

This is not about changing your religious commitments. Instead, the idea of tribal wisdom as a template for practical endeavors in today’s market environment is for lay leaders. in the real world of organizational dynamics. If it doesn’t, it’s useless.?

For example, I helped boost the effectiveness of hundreds of small-unit leaders of a major, power- generation company by bringing an interdependent focus to their activities. That focus had them seeing their leadership not as an order giving activity but as a motivational activity. The leaders learned not to order people to go from point A to point B, but to set up an environment in which the people wanted to go from A to B. Instituting this “want to” is a matter of their choice, a choice that comes from seeing their relationship not as manifesting from separate sides of an order but as from an environment of honest interactions.

My experience shows that the latter relationship is far more effective in achieving results because it is grounded in the reality of interdependence.

When I say “tribal wisdom,” I know there is much about tribes that runs counter to modern, Western values: cannibalism, human sacrifice, etc.; still, tribal wisdom, born from generations of thriving in often harsh environments, has a lot to say about leadership in our harsh, economic environments.

Tribal has recently related to the MAGA political movement in the U.S.; but that connection regarding the way I view tribes and their relationship to today’s leadership necessities, is wrong. Sharing a common focus on one man, Trump, MAGA is cult not tribe.

Evolving globalization is forcing broad and deep changes in human relationships. Leaders of organizations are being challenged to achieve greater results in difficult social, climate, religious, and marketplace environments. When you enhance your leadership skills using practical processes bolstered with spiritual dynamics connected to tribal wisdom, you will boost your job and career performance.

Copyright ? The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.

The author of some 40 published books, Brent Filson’s latest two leadership books are: “The Leadership Talk: 7 Days to Motivating People to Achieve Exceptional Results” and “107 Ways to Achieve Great Leadership Talks.” A former Marine infantry platoon and company commander, he is the founder of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc., which for 40 years has helped thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions in top companies worldwide achieve sustained increases in hard, measured results. He has published some 200 articles on leadership and has been a guest on scores of radio/tv shows.. His mission is to have leaders replace their traditional presentations with more effective Leadership Talks. www.brentfilson.com and theleadershiptalk.com.?

Besides having lectured about the Leadership Talk at MIT Sloan School of Management, Columbia University, Wake Forest, Villanova, Williams, Middlebury, Filson brought the Leadership Talk to leaders in these organizations: Abbott, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, Armstrong World Industries, AT&T, BASF, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Betz Laboratories, Bose, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Campbell Sales, Canadian Government, CNA, DuPont, Eaton Corporation, Exelon, First Energy, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, GTE, Hartford Steam Boiler, Hershey Foods, Houghton Mifflin, IBM, Meals-on-Wheels, Merck, Miller Brewing Company, NASA, PaineWebber, Polaroid, Price Waterhouse, Roadway Express, Sears Roebuck, Spalding International, Southern Company, The United Nations, Unilever, UPS, Union Carbide, United Dominion Industries, U.S. Steel, Vermont State Police, Warner Lambert — and more