Work Tribes

The Surprising Secret to Breakthrough Performance, Astonishing Results, and Keeping Teams Together

Shawn Murphy

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780814439968
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

Are you building a typical team or a high-performance tribe? The motivational power of the desire to belong is the key element for ensuring employee satisfaction and retention, as well as your company's long-term success.

What happens when leaders revive the workplace by tapping into a hardwired human need? That need, a sense of belonging, can resuscitate employee satisfaction and retention, while also contributing to a company's long-term success.

In Work Tribes, Shawn Murphy, CEO of WorqIQ and a sought-after leadership speaker, will show you:

• tap into the motivational pull of belonging in a healthy workplace culture
• why a human-centered approach is more aligned with the way we work in the twenty-first century
• the need to resuscitate employee satisfaction and retention to cultivate a sense of belonging

Employees want more than a job. They want an opportunity to solve essential problems and receive fair pay and benefits. While some companies use slick culture tricks to attract and retain employees, a more meaningful experience can be created by fostering a sense of belonging.

Astonishing outcomes result from making your employees feel welcomed, wanted, and valued--and this book will show you how to transform your team into a unified tribe.

PART I

AN UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE

CHAPTER 1

HIDDEN CURRENTS

The Irresistible Tug of Belonging and Why It Matters at Work

By thinking human nature is monolithic, we instantly limit our potential.

—Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh¹

The scene is a diner in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1959. A typical busy night of families and travelers enjoying their meals is suddenly interrupted by a man falling out of his booth and lying on the diner floor in a fit of uncontained laughter. The man, Charlie, is responding to something his friend Warren had said from where he sits across the table with his wife. Charlie’s own wife, who is sitting at his side, does not look nearly as amused while witnessing him rolling on the floor laughing.

That night at the diner really happened. It was early in what has become one of today’s most-respected, successful business partnerships and lifelong friendships. The two men at the diner were Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, partners at the esteemed Berkshire Hathaway. Sixty years later, Warren and Charlie are still friends and speak repeatedly every day. In short, these highly successful businessmen have an unwavering friendship.²

Munger and Buffett are notorious in business and leadership circles for their commonsense business principles. Yet, for two very wealthy men who are clearly talented with money and investing, they have maintained an enduring respect for Berkshire Hathaway managers and their respective teams. Regarding the leaders of the company, Buffett wrote in the company’s 2010 letter to shareholders, “Our trust is in people rather than process. A ‘hire well, manage little’ code suits both them and me.”³

It is tempting to expand by way of evidence a revelatory explanation of how the notorious business leaders’ friendship contributes to success. I could discuss the fortunes Munger and Buffett have made and have helped others make as a result of a long history of great chemistry. Or retell stories from Buffett’s biographer, Alice Schroeder, that demonstrate the humanity and humility underlying the billionaire’s personality. Instead of examining the outcomes of such a great partnership, this book will focus on the lessons we can learn from what contributes to such abundance—materially and emotionally. As a leader, you are measured by your successes. However, the savviest among us know that orchestrating the convergence of talents in our people is the “secret sauce” to success.

The secret sauce has a name: human chemistry. One of the first people to use this term was Thomas Dreier in 1948. Dreier labeled leaders as human chemists. “Think of yourself first of all as a human chemist. Look upon your office as a laboratory . . . [Elements’] natures are such that alone they can serve only certain purposes; but when skillfully united with other elements their usefulness is broadened by the kind and number of elements with which they are mixed.”⁴ Dreier goes on to say that the outcome of a leader’s know-how to tap into human chemistry is wholly dependent on the chemist.⁵

One element that I believe all great human chemists use is deeply embedded in our humanity—belonging. Using this potentially volatile element requires understanding how it emerges and what it takes to facilitate it in the first place. Of course, it is important to know what kind of cultures can “blow up” belonging too.

How ludicrous that some leaders hold on to the outdated belief that the workplace is no place to build meaningful friendships. The denial of collegial chemistry is unnatural. Our human nature has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and yet some elements of being human have not changed. For example, we are drawn to people who are like us. Both Munger and Buffett have acknowledged that what drew them together were similarities in how they viewed life, their high regard for their fathers, and a whip-smart business acumen. The head buzz that comes from clicking with others smooths interactions, making it easier to avoid feeling annoyed or getting hooked by idiosyncratic behaviors and differing beliefs. The hidden currents between people need not only be sexual. As in Munger and Buffett’s case, friendship is a deeply positive influence. “Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner. The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends,” says Buffett.⁶

The hidden currents that tug at us, bringing us together or repelling us like two magnetic positive charges, are too often overlooked at work. We make complex meaning out of workplace culture, holding it up as the crown jewel of what makes a positive experience at work. But too many companies that want to be esteemed employers fail to grasp the significant influence deeply gratifying friendships have on people and performance. If you want a great culture, you need employees to build high-quality relationships with one another. Without meaningful work relationships your company’s culture has no character, no magnetism.

Consider for a moment the amount of time and money invested in employee engagement or improving employee morale. In a 2012 study, companies spent $720 million on engagement solutions.⁷ Yet in 2018, nearly 66 percent of US workers were still disengaged.⁸ Reduced to shortcuts and popular “culture tricks,” leaders invest in indoor slides, beer walls, breakfast bars, and free dry cleaning, believing these perks matter. These entertaining elements are fun until an underskilled manager fails to advocate for his team. The deterioration of relationships or the absence of quality ones will diminish the effectiveness of culture tricks. The simplest solutions are always the hardest to see. While companies distractedly look for quick hits to make employees “happy,” “motivated,” “satisfied,” or whatever current business colloquialism dominates popular wisdom, the secret sauce is largely unused.

Can you move a mountain by pushing it with your bare hands? The rational side of your brain says, “of course not!” But consider for a moment that your logic is undermining your perceptions. Yes, mountains are monolithic. (If you look up the definition of monolithic, you’ll find that it has some nuanced meanings associated with something that is so big it is imposing, rigid, and fails to be interesting.)⁹ But if you hear my question without the filter of logic, you could find a way to move a mountain with your bare hands. You could, for example, use your hands to direct a massive earth-mover, which reduces the stature of the mountain. A logical response to my question hides possibilities from your view. Conversely, challenging your mind’s immediate response reveals them. These possibilities show themselves through an openness to other perspectives. They also allow us to experience a broader spectrum of emotions and even observe the depths of our unique expressions of creativity.

The curious leaders who routinely seek ways to remain relevant and use effective methods to achieve mutually beneficial results will quickly learn how to create an unforgettable experience of work. What it takes for leaders to inspire and motivate today’s workforce is wholly rooted in human nature. To fully grasp this paradigm shift requires that you challenge convenient beliefs.

A convenient belief is one that lets us off the hook. When we quickly, perhaps blindly, settle for what has always been we are relying on conventional thinking. Leadership and conventional business thinking is not enough to generate the value any company wants to deliver. In a time where technology advancements and their influence on the workforce worry many thinkers, leaders, and employees, we need to learn how to use the good in our human nature to design an unforgettable experience of work. We need not throw out the proverbial bath water with the baby. We need a better mix of longstanding business conventionalities that remain steadfast in their effectiveness, along with evolving our thinking about leadership and the role work plays in our lives.

Logic is hardly enough when it comes to making sense of our human nature. Looking at and making sense of work through what it means to be human can be confusing. After all, for centuries we built companies on the belief that work is a means to a monetary end, without much thought for the actual workers. Employers were the big “baddies.” (Perhaps monolithic?) Companies paid a meager wage and expected outrageous results with limited time and resources. (Some things do not change.) There was no concern for employees’ personal challenges or professional goals. Humanity was hardly a factor in designing how the business generated value. Instead, the prevailing viewpoint was this: “You get a paycheck for a month’s worth of work. Suck it up buttercup; your paycheck is gratitude enough. You’re lucky to have a job.”

Human nature is hardly monolithic. It is diverse, outrageous, expansive, and simple—simultaneously. With advances in psychology, neuroscience, biology, and many other “ologies,” we now have deeper insights into how our brain helps us make sense of the world, others around us, and ourselves. Science has also revealed insights that help us understand our own narrative as human beings. We will hear later from scientists and their research to learn how to become master mixers of human chemistry.

What does human nature have to do with business and leadership? Throughout our time on earth, we have always worked alongside others out of a need to survive and find enjoyment. Today we have built upon these instincts a nuanced knowledge of what facilitates great working partnerships. Our quest for ways to live a fulfilling life has merged into our professional pursuits. What it means to be human has always quietly shaped our work, the solutions we help create, and the relationships we nourish with those who also contribute to the work. We are now beginning to see the value of being human at work. Science and experience have led us to this point—human-centric workplaces are a natural evolution in the ways businesses generate value. More importantly, our human nature has deepened our need to evolve how we lead people, teams, groups, and ourselves. The organizations that ignore this will become irrelevant, undesirable, and forgettable.

THE TUG OF BELONGING

Just a few years after Buffett and Munger became good friends in Omaha, the same bonding agent was weaving its influence on two musicians, but this time in London. When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards shared a fateful train ride into London on October 17, 1960, a powerful chemistry worked its influence on the two young wannabe musicians. At the time neither future superstar realized that a lifelong friendship was beginning. The two future Rolling Stones band members had discovered that they shared a longing for a different type of music than was popular in the United Kingdom in the early sixties. For Jagger and Richards, they could not get enough of the blues coming from US artists like Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Richie Valens. Their earnest passion and shared commitment to learn to play the blues and to find a way to express themselves helped form one of the greatest rock bands ever.¹⁰

What bonding agent brought these two sets of friends ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: An Unforgettable Experience
• Part II: The Hard Things About Soft Things
• Part III: Unifying Your Tribe
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author