Tribalism in the Workplace

Who are you within your company? Are you part of the market specific group? Maybe you are HR or marketing? Overhead versus Operations? Dallas or Houston? East Coast or West Coast? Management or Production?

There are a multitude of ways for each person to label themselves or be labeled by others within a company. This is a necessary part of the day to day functioning of a business, but it also creates a problem at the same time. Tribalism. I had never heard this word used in a business setting until a few years ago. I came through the technical side of the business and I have not spent much time reading business journals. I was caught up in trying to get the job done and get home to my family. The first article I read instantly struck a chord with me. I started looking online and found that there were a number of articles discussing this idea. I would like to pass along some of the information I have found and allow each of you to think about the idea and look at breaking down the tribes in your workplace while still providing the support that those tribes were created for.

According to a 2008 article in The Economic Times, Tribalism is “an attitude that arises when subgroups fixate on their own activities and fail to look at the organization as a whole.” There are numerous subgroups within companies that have been formally created. There are even more that have been informally created. That same article identifies why tribes are created, “Tribes are a tool for self-preservation, provide identity, create emotional ties in a world where people have a deep need for belonging and are anchors.”

It is impossible to not be influenced by tribalism. I have attended baseball games since I was a young child. One promotion that I remember was called the dot race. Ushers went through the stands and handed out random cards with your assigned color. When the race started you cheered for your color and you were either excited or disappointed depending upon the outcome. This emotional tie was based on something as ephemeral as a random color assignment. The tribes we create within a business are much more defined and have larger consequences. As a company business performance is often measured at the office level, department level, service level, market level and project level. Compensation and incentive structures are then based on those metrics. Is an employee who is compensated based on sales metrics going to be happy with the operations team when an opportunity is not pursued due to lack of resources? On the opposite side, how does the operations team look at the sales side when the sales team makes promises to a client that it is then the operations teams responsibility to uphold and margin is affected which reflects back upon the operations manager?

If Tribalism is unavoidable, then how do we recognize it and make sure we are aware of its influence. A 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review, titled “How Tribalism Hurts Companies, and What to Do About It” lists four behaviors that I have seen within our company.

1.      Rock Throwing – Anyone who has worked for any length of time has been witness to this behavior. It often occurs when personnel is borrowed from other tribes, when a multi tribe proposal is created, or when two groups are seeking a limited resource.  This behavior is toxic, but I doubt there is anyone that has not taken part in it.

2.      Blaming the customer – This seems to be the evolution of point 1. If it is not another tribe within the company’s fault, then it is the customer’s fault. I have sat in on a large number of project debriefs and heard multiple times how the client was confused and did not understand what they needed, but we had to take a write off.

3.      Corporate did it – This seems to expand exponentially as a company grows. Leaders often want to avoid having difficult conversations with people and instead blame the “faceless” monolith referred to as corporate. No one has to own their portion of responsibility when we can just say it was corporate and I am part of the oppressed rather than providing clear explanations and reasoning.

4.      Refusal to work together – This can manifest in many different forms within an organization. I have seen leads reach outside the company to get quotes on services that their own company provides. I have seen teams fail on a project and lose a client rather than reach out to another internal team for help. This is the ultimate manifestation of tribalism and is essentially isolating your tribe and creating an us vs them mentality.

I am sure that at this point most of us are making an internal list of things that we have witnessed over the years and placing them in the behavioral boxes I just listed. The good thing is that when we are aware of our actions we can take steps to mitigate the tribal influence.

The article that originally piqued my interest did such a great job of offering ways to combat tribalism that I am going to quote it since I do not believe I can improve upon it.

Here are four steps toward resisting the pull of tribalism and advancing the business:

1. Call tribalism by name. Recognize that blaming problems on group identity can miss the point. It gives the illusion of being in control of matters by labeling rather than addressing the problem. Direct your energy toward surfacing core causes, however difficult to face.
2. Enter the discomfort zone. Find the courage to learn about others without prejudgment or bias. Ask open-ended questions. Instead of hearing what you want to hear, hear what is actually being said. A male colleague receiving credit for winning a client may not mean the firm favors men over women, but, rather, recognition for the groundwork he laid prior to the meeting.
3. Confront conflict avoidance. People commonly pretend they have things “handled,” when in fact they want to avoid the discomfort of not knowing how the other party will react. Telling a colleague that you excluded him from a pitch due to his overbearing communication style might cause hurt feelings, but it opens the door to helping him improve.
4. Build a code of conduct. Agree on your organization’s rules for communication, inclusion, and leveraging of its talent based on common goals that advance the business, not the tribe. Shift your focus from who gets credit to how you can work together to win over the client.

Tribes provide compelling places for support, validation, and direction. While these attributes are understandably attractive, when tribal loyalty thwarts the success of the broader organization, it behooves everyone to look beyond tribal borders.

Source – “Office Tribalism” The Zweig Letter, Julie Benezet, May 14, 2018

I believe that we all want to make our company the absolute best place to work that we can. No one comes to work and thinks to themselves “How am I going to sabotage the company today?” Instead we often times allow our unconscious actions and instincts to influence our behaviors without thought. I hope that we all are more conscious of our behaviors and how they affect the whole. I know that I could not ask for a better group of people to move forward with than my fellow teammates!

Here are links to the articles I used for sources. I do not want to plagiarize and tried to attribute, so I apologize for any mistakes on attribution and if someone will point it out I will correct it.

https://thezweigletter.com/office-tribalism/?utm_campaign=NEW+SUB+TZL++%28Jjy6Jc%29&utm_medium=email&_ke=anJlZG1vbkBzYW0uYml6&utm_source=Interested+in+Surveys

https://hbr.org/2017/07/how-tribalism-hurts-companies-and-what-to-do-about-it

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tackling-tribalism-in-an-organisation/articleshow/3194976.cms?from=mdr