Tribal Leadership

According to Dave Logan, the co-author of “Tribal Leadership,” professor at USC and co-founder and Senior Partner at CultureSync, from this article

the five stages of Tribal Leadership:

Stage 1 is motivated by the motto “life sucks.” This is the domain of workplace violence and it makes up about 2% of tribes.
Stage 2 is motivated by the theme “my life sucks.” These tribes move very slowly, they don’t collaborate and they have very low performance - in fact they do the bare minimum not to get fired. They also have a high degree of cynicism (done that, been there) and they comprise 25% of the tribes.
Stage 3 is where people think “I am great, but you are not.” Productivity and effectiveness in these tribes increases, but they need to verbally compete to operate.This stage is very typical of professions where knowledge or personal achievement is key - or where you need to outperform you peers to get ahead. Again there is very little collaboration at this stage and people talk a lot about themselves. They comprise 48% of the tribes.
Stage 4 is where people are motivated by “we are great and they are not.” You find those cultures primarily in young organizations and high tech environments where there is little bureaucracy, making it easier to get things done. Because they are based on shared values, there is less politicking going on, less anxiety and much more collaboration. They make up 22% of the tribes.
Stage 5 cultures no longer need rivals and their theme is “life is great.” It’s focused purely on values - e.g, curing cancer. This is where the breakthroughs happen and they make up 2% of the tribes.
As a leader, you need to stabilize the level that your tribe is operating before you can work on moving them up to the next level. If you do not push into a new level from a stable position at the previous level, your tribe will operate in a position of weakness and have a high likelihood of regressing back. Of course, that also means that you cannot skip a level. Dave used the example of many dot.coms to make that point. They deluded themselves into thinking they were operating at level 5 without having gone through the previous stages. When the bust hit, many of those tribes regressed multiple stages - some as far as Stage 1.