Tribal Leadership: Improving Company Culture Among Employees & Customers

Hey everybody, welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we get to talk about tribal leadership and how you build your tribe. Now, your tribe could be your company culture and your organization, and it can very well also be the tribe that you build around you, or the herd that you gather, or the movement that you become the attractive character for. Dave Logan is going to explain to us the 5 stages of building your tribe, both in your organization and something that you can take outside of your organization as well. Now, Dave Logan is the author of the book called Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. And in this episode, you're not only going to hear about the 5 stages, you're also going to hear how you can take your business and increase the productivity 300% to 500% without changing salary, tools, or systems. So without further ado, let's listen in to Robert Scrobb as he interviews Dave Logan on tribal leadership, improving company culture among employees and customers. I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name. The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Every group of people has a language and behaviors that are unique to that group. We call that a culture. But what makes some cultures so effective at innovating change while others are dysfunctional and a misery to everyone who participates? I'm Robert Scrogue, President of the Information Marketing Association and author of The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing. Today's program is how to look at the beliefs, attitudes, and loyalty of a group of people, say that's your team your continuity program members, how to diagnose what they're feeling, and more importantly, how to change the culture for the better. If you've worked with me or talked with me at all over the last year, I'm sure that I've recommended the book Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. All my coaching clients have read it, folks on my team have read it, and I've sent it out to prospective clients to illustrate why they need me helping them to grow their membership programs. And I'm so glad that Today, my guest is Dave Logan, author of Tribal Leadership. Welcome, Dave. Thank you, Robert.

Great to be with you.

Now, Dave is the co-founder and senior partner of CultureSync, a management consulting firm specializing in cultural change, strategy, and negotiation. CultureSync's clients include Intel, Colliers International, American Express, Prudential, HealthNet. Dave is also a professor at the Marshall School of Business at USC. From 2001 to 2004, he served as the Associate Dean of Executive Education, and during that time, he launched the largest training program in commercial real estate and new programs with dozens of other organizations, from Northrop Grumman to numerous small-cap financial institutions. Currently, he teaches leadership and negotiation at the USC Executive MBA, a program that's ranked 5th in the world, and is on the faculty of the Center for Medical Excellence in Portland and International Center for Leadership and Finance in Kuala Lumpur, endowed by the former Prime Minister of Malaysia. And I'm sure Dave is going to add to his bio a guest on this best practices in information marketing call with us today. So thank you.

Well, thank you, Robert. It's great to be with you today.

Well, Dave, we've got to cover a lot of territory because your book, Tribal Leadership, is written for large companies who have a large team of people, and even small teams, but about managing their people and getting them to be more productive. And it's certainly something that I've embraced here and applied many of the strategies. And so I want to talk through that. But also, I want to also translate some of the other things that I've done. I kind of see it as maybe using it— like you hear about doctors having off-the-label uses for different drugs, and I feel like it's the same thing. You know, this is authorized to use with your team, and I've used some of your concepts and strategies to help folks build and grow continuity programs, build memberships within their within their customer base. And so I want to talk a little bit about those off-the-label uses as well.

Yeah, I love the analogy. I mean, the truth is tribal leadership has gone really quite broad. In fact, far broader than I ever would have expected. And so we have a lot of people using it in membership organizations and all sorts of things that would have surprised us back in 2008 when we originally wrote the book. I really appreciate it, and I hope that your listeners get some value out of this and hopefully some things that they can apply right away.

Now, let's talk a little bit about kind of the big picture, the transformations that occur when a company uses these tribal leadership concepts and is able to get their team to be more effective. I think you tell a couple of stories in the book itself, and I'm sure And your work at CultureSync, you've seen several other examples. But when somebody takes this concept of tribal leadership and uses it to— within their organization, what are some of the transformations that you've seen, some of the real benefits from embracing what you're teaching?

Oh, well, so many. Let me just, if I could tell you what happened since we wrote the book. So I founded CultureSync with my longtime business partner, John King, back in about 1996. We had a couple different iterations of it, but basically 1996 we co-founded it. And then what became Tribal Leadership is a synthesis of a lot of the coaching work that John had done, some kind of personal development work that John had done, and a focus on corporate culture was the subject of my doctorate at USC. And we wrote the book because clients kept asking us to write down what we had learned in, you know, mostly just in working with people. As someone who spent a lot of time in academia, I was also collecting a lot of data, far more than John was collecting. So we kind of put all that together, the data, the focus on culture, the focus on coaching and personal development. And it was this great synthesis of what we'd both been doing, and that's what became Tribal Leadership. When the book first came out, this was 2008 in hardcover, essentially nobody noticed. We did very little promotion of the book. In fact, the day the book came out, I think I was finishing my next book, was actually in a writing meeting in Miami, and it dawned on two of us in the meeting who were co-authors on Tribal Leadership, myself and Haley Fisher-Wright, who came on as a third co-author, that we should really be doing something. We should be, I don't know, signing books or giving a talk at a bookstore or something, but we literally hadn't done anything. Then just jump forward to 2011 when the book came out in paperback. It debuted number 1 on the New York Times list. You couldn't find it in bookstores. It was sold out. I think we went through a bunch of printings right away. The obvious question is what accounted for the turnaround. I wish I could say it was the brilliance of the authors or the marketing plan, but the truth is there were a lot of people in all sorts of different organizations and parts of the economy that just adopted it on their own. Two of the famous ones were Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. They began teaching classes on tribal leadership at Zappos. They began giving copies of the book away when people would go on a tour of Zappos. One of the other ones that is a bit more recent, Phil Jackson, it turns out, was a big fan was a big fan of it in his coaching work. We know that because when he wrote his last book, Eleven Rings, that chapter 1 of that book is essentially a summary of Tribal Leadership, and then he applies it, and he weaves a lot of other threads in there too, but he shows how he kept applying the framework, first in the Bulls and then the Lakers, and presumably now in the Knicks. And so some of the places the book was adopted were membership organizations, a lot of community foundations, I mean, of all places, the MBA program at UCLA, and I teach at in the MBA program at USC, so that was a little ironic. And so again, it kind of caught on in all these little pockets and all these little communities. So that's a long way of then letting me answer your question, which is what are some of the benefits? So the bottom line of the book is that if you take your culture, which is composed of these little things called tribes, and you measure where they are on this 1 to 5 scale, and then you elevate them one level, so you take them from a 2 to a 3, which is common, or a 3 to a 4, that whatever it is you want, your key results, your key performance metrics, performance indicators, whatever you're calling it, that those things tend to increase by a lot. And depending on the KPI, often they increase by 300 to 500%. So really huge numbers. So in the early days of the UCLA MBA program, Dylan Stafford, who's now their assistant dean of admissions in the fully employed program, he was doing a lot of this on his own. We didn't teach him to do it. Noted that he was using a lot of the best practices. But he would set up these events where people would come and think about getting their MBA at UCLA, and they were sort of being welcomed into this new tribe or into this new culture. And suddenly they realized, like, these are my people. And there was a time when the number of applicants were going up geometrically, and that didn't— if you extrapolate that from, I think, 2007 when we noticed it to now, you'd probably have to have the entire population of the earth applying to UCLA. So at some point that's going to stop. Capped out. But that's the sort of thing that we see. So it's just massive, massive upgrades in results that people get by using a lot of these principles.

And I think it's important to note, I mean, you're looking at a 300% to 500% improvement in production without changing the employee salaries, without changing the tools, without changing the systems. By changing the culture and what folks within culture, within the culture are talking about. And of course this isn't an overnight thing, but whether it's your internal team that's, you know, your employees that are working and getting them to triple their productivity, or your customers who are implementing what you teach or using what you are selling them and having them get a 300% better better results from what you're teaching simply— not at all because you're providing them more or having— you having to do more, but instead by the culture that you create within your customers. So I think it's a fabulous breakthrough. And so let's talk a little bit about the stages. You outline in Tribal Leadership 5 different stages. And I think this is one of the key things that I learned that going through this, because this is the biggest takeaway that I took from the book was realizing that there really are 5 stages and how to move folks from, or our culture from one stage to the next. So let's talk a little bit about those.

Yeah, sure. So again, that's the main point of the book. So just a little bit of vocabulary. This is all people need to know. Is if you think of any organization, a membership organization or big for-profit company, and you want to notice what the culture is, you first have to talk about its tribes. So a tribe is a group that is between 20 and 150 people. There's a reason for 20 and there's a reason for 150 we can go into if you want, but that's the basic building block. So if you get an entrepreneur working on a business, they often say, I don't have a tribe, and I say, well, then you're screwed because unless you have really at least 20 people that are focused on making your thing successful, there's a good chance it won't be. But the key with a tribe is don't just think about people in some formal role. Think about all the informal roles. So think about your clients. Think about your spouse. Think about your investors if you have any. Think about the people that might be sitting on some advisory board or the people that you meet with for coffee once a month and you're talking about how your thing is going. That's your tribe. So again, if you don't have 20 of those people, you've got a problem, and then that goes up to about 150. So if you think of, let's say, a membership organization as perhaps having chapters, well, there's a good chance every chapter will be a tribe, or if a chapter is big, maybe it's a couple tribes or 3 tribes. And then the whole thing put together is a tribe of tribes. So that's your culture. Minimum building block is tribes. So when I mention these 5 stages, we're not talking about all of culture. We're talking about of the specific tribes. So Stage 1, so now we're done with the heavy lifting. So Stage 1, what they say, what comes out of their mouth about themselves, their work, and each other is that life sucks. And I know that sounds strange, but it happens in organizations about 2% of the time that you get these weird tribes. And they will steal things. They will do accounting fraud. They will punch each other in the face and do far worse. It leads to homicide at work. Which is far too common. So, you know, bad things. So we don't need to talk a lot about that other than just to note that it's there. And it can be a real problem when it happens. Stage 2, so now we're moving up a notch. So the theme of Stage 2 is not life sucks, but it's my life sucks. And that might not sound like a big difference, but it's actually huge. So if someone says life sucks, they have a generalized kind of complaint about all of life. That, you know, if the person is religious, God just messed this up. Often you'll actually hear things like that come out of people's mouths. And if you want to hear just some graphic discussions of Stage 1, look at these videos that unfortunately far too many people have made before they go shoot up a place. Like I think of this kid who shot up UC Santa Barbara, and he sat in his car and he recorded these videos. That's Stage 1. It's not my life is in some disarray, it's the the nature of life is unfair. And so anything that can right the balance even a little bit is permissible. And it's very scary. It's what leads to, among other things, terrorism and again violence. But stage 2 is completely different. It's just passive. It's where people avoid accountability. They spend their time griping and complaining. So as one specific example, I spend a lot of my time traveling., and I suspect some of your listeners do too. And I'm always amazed. I do try to obey all of the airport rules, but quite often I'll get on a plane and I'll reach down in my— and I've got one of these computer bags that I travel with, and I'll have a bottle of Crystal Geyser. And not one of the little bottles, one of those big bottles. And the reason often that they don't catch it is when the bags are going through the machine, they're busy griping or complaining. Last trip I took, they were complaining about the new schedule that just came out. So again, They're just kind of not looking at things. So quality is low, innovation is very low, performance is very low, people do the minimum to not get fired. And that's the case 25% of the time. So Stage 2, my life sucks where people gripe and complain, is 25% of the time. Stage 3 is, again, very different from Stage 2. The theme of Stage 3 is I'm great and you're not. So Robert, if you and I were to step into this stage together, I would try to point out to you how in fact I know more than you do about what you think you know something about. You would do the same back. I would do some combination of self-promoting and putting you down. And so the most common things that you hear in Stage 3 are I, me, and my. But remember, we're not just measuring an individual here, we're measuring the proclivity of a tribe. And we've probably all been in those tribes where where every comment that comes out of someone's mouth is self-promoting or putting others down. And if you just mentally go back to a tribe like that, there's probably a good chance you noticed there are some amazing people in this tribe, and yet so very little gets done. So Stage 3 is the case 49% of the time. So that's the big one. That's almost half.

And those tribes can be very, very productive. And there's a lot of sales organizations that, that, you know, it's amazing when you start seeing this, you can see sales training programs that are based on this premise that every single one is an individual, that every single one's performance needs to be separate and apart from everybody else's, and that you have to monitor each person because people won't be subject, they won't be motivated by team goals. And so you see a lot of training with this theme, this assumption built in, but it's really only one of five states.

Yeah, well, in the US in particular, a lot of what passes for education and training is actually getting people up to a slightly higher notch within Stage 3. So if you think you're great, Hey, if you take this course, you can be even better. You think you're a good negotiator? Take this, you'll be better. That sort of thing. And the truth is it happens in universities too. One of the big reasons that people go back and take one of the programs that I teach at USC or perhaps take one of the courses that my consulting company offers in many, many, many companies around the world is, as a result of this, I will be better. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's really helpful. It's just not the goal. It's an interim step. Every person should try to maximize their own potential, but then it kind of makes sense if you look at it in the context of Stage 4. So Stage 4 is not I'm great, but it's we're great. And this is where often there's an adversary or someone that you're benchmarking against. It could be another tribe. In a membership organization, it could be another location, or maybe it's another— I'm thinking of a couple membership organizations that I'm not going to name, I won't name them, but they were essentially in the same industry and they were always vying for the same people. And they always wanted a better keynote speaker at the conference than the other one did. There was a point where actually both groups were talking to me to go in and do a keynote. Full disclosure required me to reveal that. And then suddenly they tried to outbid the other and put a stipulation on the contract that I couldn't speak in the other group. And the other group was doing the same thing. It was kind of crazy. That's "we're great." So it's not I'm great and you're not. It's we're great and they're not, whoever they is. And this makes a lot of sense if you look at sports. Phil Jackson would often say in his book that when the different teams, when the Lakers and the Bulls moved from Stage 3 to 4, whoever they were playing that day is who wasn't great. They weren't in any kind of existential competition with poverty. They just wanted to beat the other team. And that's the case about 22% of the time. And if you just think about that transition from 3 to 4, then it makes sense why your results would go up so far. So at Stage 3, think of a bunch of lawyers working together or a bunch of doctors or a bunch of college professors. Those are classic places we see a lot of Stage 3. There's no gelling together. There's no vision. There's no sense that we're working on things together. You probably look in the person at, or look to the person in the next office as frankly being an idiot, and they're probably looking at you as being an idiot. And so you just kind of ignore what they do and you focus on your thing, and then when someone comes in and says, we're going to pay you according to what the person next door is doing, you say, I don't want my compensation tied to that idiot. And of course, they're saying the same thing. But at stage 4, there's this ownership of the group and the group goals. And if you want to see why this is so important, again, look back at Phil Jackson's book. When the players made the transition from 3 to 4, they started winning games, and a lot of games. And he said, but they actually missed the point, a lot of the sports pundits. It wasn't about the best talent or any of those things. It was about the individual journey that the players had to make from I'm great and you're not to we're great and they're not. And at that point, the Bulls became the most winning team in the NBA in their history.

And I loved the book Eleven Rings and have followed and read a lot of Phil Jackson's books over the years. And I think when the Bulls were stage 3, and Phil Jackson makes the point, Michael Jordan was scoring a lot of points. And the whole offense was essentially based on getting everybody out of the middle so that Michael Jordan could create a shot for himself and score. And because he was great and everybody was not, and that was a real theme that's pervasive throughout the team. And very often I see a lot of entrepreneurs have that feeling about their own team, is that they feel they're great, they feel like the people that they've hired that are around them are not, and that the people are really there to help the entrepreneur make his or her shots. They're not there about working together. And what Phil had— or Coach Jackson was able to help Michael Jordan understand was that you play— you will win championships by helping all the other team— your teammates feel good and feel like we're all part of the team. And I think one of the real brilliance of the book is that you actually give little crib notes for how to get from one level to the next. And in this particular— correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand it's a common enemy. So for the Bulls, it was the Detroit Pistons were the the common enemy at that time. They were the real nemesis. And so everything was about all training, all season was about getting better than the Detroit Pistons so that when they faced off during the playoffs that the Bulls had the team to beat. And it was all about we're great, the Pistons are not, we're going to take them down. And I see within membership organizations The same thing, you have to— I wrote an article about my client Jim Augustus Armstrong who sells to flooring dealers. And he is within his marketing and within his coaching program, they— he's constantly talking about the Home Depot and Lowe's and the big box retailers and how the big box retailers are taking customers. And so he's made the big box retailer a common villain so that all of his customers who are a flooring dealer from Topeka and a flooring dealer from Chicago and a flooring dealer, you know, from around— flooring dealers from around the country feel like they're united together. And my own little individual efforts are part of the overall team's efforts to beat the big box stores, and together we can win this. And help— just helping them move from that 3rd to 4th level will help them embrace what you're teaching and get better results.

Yeah, well said.

Very well said. So let's talk also about the 5th level and how to move from the 4th to the 5th.

Yeah, so the 5th one, we actually had a hard time identifying. Well, I did. John saw it before I did. But we walked into this strange company. It was Amgen out in Thousand Oaks, California. And people, I don't know how else to say it, people just talked funny compared to how people normally talk. And we realized after some time that they were in fact a Stage 5 organization. So the big difference between 4 and 5, so the theme of 5 is life is great. There's no them. So there's no sense of competition or no sense of trying to better. You know, you compared to another group. It's a pure values play, and it's really impressive when you see it. These are the cultures that do the world-changing innovation. Think of Apple making the first iPhone, you know, that no one at that point had ever done. That was something that was really new. That's Stage 5. So those are the 5 stages. Again, the premise of the book is that culture is actually the most important thing that you can ever focus on. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, to paraphrase Something we think the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, said. So you notice your tribes, notice who talks to whom. That's the basic building block of getting anything done. And then work on upgrading those from whatever stage they are to the next stage. A tribe can't skip a stage, so you just want to focus on moving to the next one. And at that point, some really fun things begin to happen.

What are the common markers for Stage 5? So how do I know I've got that? And what does that look like when I'm there?

Well, stage 5 is the hardest one to talk about. A lot of people have never seen stage 5. And again, even as researchers, and I'll say me here because John was convinced that they existed before I did, they're easily mistaken for stage 4, but with one big difference. There's a kind of ethereal nature to their conversation. And I mean, just to put it bluntly, they can sound a little unstable. So think of during, this is a long time ago now, the dot-com thing that was going on in the tech sector between roughly 1998 to, I guess the bubble finally burst around May of 2000. And now I had students leaving USC, full-time MBA students, saying, I don't need any of this strategy stuff. I'm going to go get my business plan funded and I'm going to be a millionaire within a couple months. And a lot of them did. It was just a millionaire on paper. I would check in with some of them and I would ask these difficult questions like, "How's your profit margin?" They would look at me like I was crazy. They would say, "We don't need profit margin. We don't need revenue. All we need is eyeballs. All we need is clicks and we've got that. That is the new currency." I mean, there's just kind of an insanity that sets in. So that's kind of Stage 5 where they are focused on something that is almost transcendent in nature. There's a great book that I have to recommend. I'm not completely done reading it. It's actually a short book, but I just started reading it last night called Zero to One. And it's a book about a lot of the thinking that went into the dot-com time. And the author is someone I respect a lot. He ran PayPal for a while and then was a very successful still is a very successful venture capitalist, but he argues that during the dot-coms, a lot of us are quick to condemn it, but there was actually a point where people saw the future far more clearly than they do now. And they perhaps over— what's the right way to say it? They thought technology was further along than it was, but they actually saw what was required. And if you look at a lot of the frenzy even in the last few months, It was mapping perfectly on what happened over the next now almost 20 years, but it all happened very quickly. So that's kind of stage 5. It can lose sight with the key performance indicators that a great organization should focus on. They often ignore things like profit margin. They're focused purely on perhaps it's innovation or something that is just going to change everything. From an outsider's point of view, they can be a bit delusional. They produce Apple, right? They build the Macintosh. They produce Apollo missions. So those are some of the hallmarks of Stage 5. Did that answer your question?

Yeah, and I think it's almost a kind of an attitude of, I mean, I don't really know what you're talking about. We're operating on a completely different level. They have this, you know, it's almost as if they totally don't understand what— when other people are saying, "Well, you got to get down to earth." It's like, "No, your criticisms don't count. We're on a completely different plane, a whole different level than you are." And they have this vision. And I think what you said was what was really my understanding of it is they have a vision of the future that is unique to the tribe that they are that they already see fulfilled. There's just a couple of last steps to put into place in order to make it happen. And the vision they see almost already fulfilled is something that most people think is totally impossible.

Yeah, yeah, there's a sense of a noble cause that runs a Stage 5 group. They're doing something really important, something noble in the world. They'll often talk about It's actually my colleague at USC who said this, Warren Bennis, that they're on a mission from God, quoting the Blues Brothers movie. And they may not be religious, but that's often the sense. So Stage 5 tribes can be very, very inspiring. Our recommendation based on our research is Stage 4 needs to be your home. So if you've got a group that's below a 4, do the steps that you need to to get them up to 4. Then if there's something that happens, in the economy, in the industry, or maybe something you engineer, you might need to bring a tribe up to 5 to leapfrog everything. So Stage 5 does not produce generally things that are incrementally better. They produce things that are several steps beyond where people are thinking, and there can be a loneliness in that. You know, think of the, some of the pioneers of of digital technology were really working alone. If you want to read that, look at Walter Isaacson's book called The Innovators. It's a great book. And he talks about the originators of a lot of this stuff that we just take for granted now working alone. A lot of their discoveries were even lost, but often again there would be a little tribe of maybe one person working in Iowa with a few graduate assistants doing something really remarkable, kind of inventing the future. So 5 is a good place. And what we said in the book, and we reaffirmed it when we did the paperback edition in 2011, is we don't know of any organization, at least no for-profit organization, that is stable at Stage 5. We know several that are stable at 4, but stable at 5 is a really different thing. You want to reserve those for the moonshot, and then you want to probably have most of the tribes even in those organizations focused in 4 making sure the bills get paid and the lights stay on.

The reality of the situation rather than always focused on the future. And I think that it's interesting when I do a lot of membership marketing both for for-profit companies helping them create a continuity program or also for nonprofit associations. And one of the— I was working with an insurance, an association of insurance agents. And my first focus was years ago before I had read Tribal Leadership was creating this noble mission. And it was all about bringing the industry together to create this. And this has been something that I had done in other organizations. And it really brought everybody together. Everybody really shared and provided this input. And so I kind of was trying to go from walking in the door to noble mission. And it really— and of course, that, as you probably would know, it did not— it failed. It did not catch on. It did not work. And I really didn't completely understand why. Until I read your book, Tribal Leadership, and understood that I was trying to go all the way up to level 5, or depending on the definition, I was trying to go way up to too many levels up before I got there. And what I needed to start with was if I diagnosed them at level 3, then I needed to start with an enemy and helping them understand, rather than focusing on a noble cause, focus the attention on an enemy and get them to rally around that and help them feel that they're better than that enemy is, and on that basis help them share. Can we talk a little bit about— so if you're at a Stage 2, you know, what are some of the characteristics, the things that you want to do in order to move a tribe from 2 to 3? What are some of the things that you roll out and communicate?

[Speaker:JIM COLLISON] Sure. Well, I'll give you a whole bunch of actions. Some of these will work in a tribe and some of them won't. You just kind of have to use them. The big thing we've noticed, if you kind of take the standard thing that works and strip it of its content and talk about it in a pure kind of template, you want to go into the tribe. You want to find someone who really wants things to be different. Tongue-in-cheek describe that as the person who sucks less. So everybody kind of sucks, but you want to find whoever sucks less, and you want to mentor them. You want to create what's called a dyadic relationship. That's a two-person relationship. So it's you and that person. And assuming that they really want to become better and develop themselves, you begin offering advice. Let's start maybe by getting organized. Let's start by Setting some goals, but it's very person-specific. You're not trying to improve the tribe. You're just trying to elevate that one person. And if you do your job well, before long, maybe a week, a month maybe, that person will move up from 2 to 3. That person will then begin saying, "I'm great." They look around at everybody in their tribe and say, "They all really suck." And at that point, you make that person a mentor to someone else in the tribe. So the way that you elevate 2 to 3 is not by taking on the tribe. The negativity is just too great. It will overwhelm you and they'll make sarcastic jokes about you and you won't even know that it's happening. We sometimes describe that as character assassination. They'll assassinate you without you even knowing that it happened. There are other things we've noticed. If you get a group organized, that can really help. Simply getting the group together can sometimes help if they're right on the threshold between 2 and 3. We've seen things like appreciative inquiry sometimes helping. That's where you go into a tribe and you point out that in fact not everything is broken. There are some things that are working very well. So let's notice what those are. Let's notice what our role is in that perhaps limited success, and then let's see if we can double down on those things. So there's a variety of things, but that's really the thing we always recommend is launch a mentoring effort within that tribe. So that will bring you up to 3 in most cases.

And for folks that are running a membership organization, or you've got a group of customers, and it's all about helping a group of customers or a couple of customers individually move up in their skills, be better, and then turn those around and help them mentor others. I work with, a lot of my clients, and one of the things that I teach them is as quickly as possible, have other members within your organization on your coaching calls where maybe it's you and the coach, you and the person answering questions, and you help one of your people help provide content and tell their story. Well, one of the reasons you want that is because it proves that what you teach works because here is this person who just a few months ago was right where they are and now they're able to teach and talk about what they've accomplished. So it proves that what you teach works, but it's so much deeper than that because it helps make a connection between your members that is far more powerful than the connection just between you and them so that when you have events, when you have— when you are pulling your folks together, they're not just coming to see you, but they're coming to see the people that you promoted and talked about within your coaching calls, within your programs. So it's a very, very powerful strategy. So I appreciate that, Dave. So moving from 3 to 4.

Yeah, so that's actually harder. So moving 2 to 3, you've got an advantage, which is people don't really like being part of a group at stage 2. They know they're part of kind of a loser group, and they don't like that. They want to change it. So moving from 3 to 4 though, you have to realize what you're up against, and it's the individual, and let's call it what it is, addiction to each person kind of convinced that they are better than everybody else. So that is what you have to get past. And the way you do that is you have to find something that trumps individual ego. So one of the things, and you pointed to this, is you can find an enemy. So there is some group that we need to compete against. And maybe they are a group that is better organized than we are. And if we are not going to die, then we have to close ranks. Another thing you can do is identify core values. So things that we have, commitments that we have that are even more important than my desire to be the best. So values tend to trump individual ego. So that's another thing. You can also find a sense of a noble cause, which is a little different than a core value. One of the ones we've been working with lately, this is not in the book, so this is new information, is find something, if I can be a bit crass, that really pisses people off in the tribe. There's something that is not right about the industry. There's some service that people should be receiving and they're not. There's something that's off, but something that actually makes them angry. And anger can be a huge motivator as long as it doesn't become that white-hot rage that makes people throw things and say career-limiting statements. So those are some common pathways. Another one, and I'll wrap this section on this one, is you want to form what are called triads.. And that is a 3-person relationship where each member of the triad has 2 goals. One is they're building the relationship between the other 2 people in the triad. They're actually building that relationship. The other thing is they're trying to solve some problem. So there's a project they're working on. There's an initiative. There's something that they're working on together, but it's within this context of this 3-person relationship that becomes a very, very strong commitment for them. We see that triads are almost always the key to Stage 4, so if you build them proactively, it really helps you to move forward.

That's, it's really big, and let's chat a little bit about, you know, in membership organizations, I know within the association world, that's the most common place is that you get your folks believing in themselves. Then they think, "My company is great. Those other companies that are part of the association suck. Why would I even go to those silly meetings, interact with those people? I'm so much superior. I don't even have to be there." It's very easy. That's kind of where a lot of these associations find themselves within the info marketing world. Very soon after your customers start working with you. Maybe you're doing coaching meetings. Maybe you're having events. As Dan Kennedy will often say, is folks feel like they're too smart for the room. And they get to where, you know, I've heard this stuff before. I don't need to hear it again. And the thing you have to realize is that Every group goes through this stage, and the individuals within it also move through this stage. So if you don't have a ready antidote for this when it happens, you're just having a system that automatically moves people up and moves people right out of your membership. I think that this kind of recipe that you provided, Dave, with a common enemy is important to understand and important to use and embrace. Values, what we're about, the noble cause, an irritation, and then of course the triad. And it just is because a lot of folks who are listening to this will know and be a subscriber of Dan Kennedy and read a lot of what he writes. You know, you can see that he understands this as much as anybody. I mean, when he writes, the common enemy is big companies that don't get it. It's the advertising, people who are selling you advertising that is not accountable, the time vampires. He has all kinds of enemies that he brings to illustrate that we have to stick together. Next, in terms of values, Marketing that works, marketing that's trackable, long copy versus short copy, sequential. There are these tactics, but also within those tactics are implicit values of what we are about and believe in. Noble Cause is all about pushing the businessperson forward versus everybody else, and how salespeople are— everything starts with a sale. Nothing happens until somebody buys something. These are, you know, he is trying to reach out and advocate for his audience, and with it, to his audience. And this helps make him attractive. And then of course irritations, you know, from the stories about people who use cell phones at the urinal, to people who don't understand your marketing, to employees who don't get it. You know, he has the recipe for moving folks from this level 3 up to a level 4 where, and this is the key thing that, you know, what I really see as kind of when you know you've got this, Dave, is when folks see group victories as personal victories. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. So there really is kind of an epiphany that happens to people as they're moving from 3 to 4. You can create the right environment for it to happen. There's no, at least that we've ever found, there's no guaranteed way of making the epiphany happen. That's just not how those work. But it's a fundamental realization that happens in the mind of a person that I am only playing for myself. I'm not playing for others. Or another version of it is, I see myself through other people's eyes and I really don't like what I see. Or I've been playing very small. Or I'm surrounded by great people and I never knew it. That's interestingly why a lot of people go through the epiphany if they become sick. Let's say that someone gets a diagnosis of cancer. Often they realize that they've got this tremendous support around them that they never really knew they had, but it had always been there. So that's a kind of thing that can trigger the epiphany, but sometimes doesn't. Again, you can't always count on it. So a lot of what you're pointing to is that epiphany. And on the other side of that epiphany, that's where the person and the tribe begins to move into Stage 4, everything looks different. People look different, their abilities look different, your challenge looks different. The thing you want to spend your time on is quite different. Often at Stage 3, people are addicted to returning all my phone calls and getting on top of all my email. And at stage 4, that's important, but it's really not vital. What's important and vital is that we spend a bit of time together and figure out who do we want to be when we grow up, things like that. And so you're highlighting again some different pathways. I would just caution you that whenever anybody steps forward and says I've got the roadmap from 3 to 4, we've tested a bunch of those, and I'm not that familiar with with specifically what you are saying, but I mean we probably tested 20 or 30 different systems. And they work in some cases and they don't in others. So the key with leadership, I've got to go back to my mentor here, Warren Bennis, often considered the father of leadership, is leadership is not about recipes. It is not about formulas. It is about being curious. It is about trying different things. You might find that something works that you never would have imagined that it worked. Or something fails. You were 100% sure it was going to work because it worked in this other group and they seem the same, but it doesn't work in this group. So it's about being aware, being present, being very curious, being kind of intellectually or having the ability to intellectually dance with a group of people is very, very important. And that's why in tribal leadership we don't say, "Do these 4 things and you'll go from 3 to 4." We say, here are some things to try. Here are some coaching tips. But you just don't know. And please, if you get into something and you realize there's something we left out, email us. So we put together a supplemental document. It's floating around on some websites. There are dozens and dozens of additional things that readers of the book have written in and told us can elevate 2 to 3 or 3 to 4, even 4 to 5. We don't vouch for any of them. We just consider them best practices from other people who like us are interested in developing great tribes. So the thing to focus on again is the epiphany. How do I need to get this person to see things differently that will make the transition?

And I— in wanting a recipe of all exactly how to go from one stage to another, is a very Stage 3 thing to want. Yeah. You know, because a Stage 4 person, you know, you start having the epiphany on the other side is the more you think you know, the really less you know because you've closed your mind to a whole bunch of other possibilities. Yeah, that's true. And so you— so I completely agree that there is no recipe, but it's They're just kind of describing some symptoms and things. One of the things I wanted to share with you and with everybody, the interesting way to use triads, because it's always been my belief that you keep people within your membership organization by connecting them with others, that their connection to you is one thing, but if you can get— I realized this many years ago when I was working with the Florida Society of Dermatology. I was running events and there was bunches of people who came before we even announced what the sessions were. As soon as you sent out that this was happening and here, send your money, boom, they were registered. They didn't care. 'Cause they weren't coming for what we offered. They were coming to see each other. And their wives and groups were all together. And it was interesting, after sharing this book with Debbie Phillips and Rob Berkley with an organization called Women on Fire, they instituted triads as an organization and encouraged— and they essentially assigned their members kind of up, 3 up each other, and got them to coordinate and have meetings and gave them a little agenda to talk about so that they would form little groups that were connected to each other. And so now when it comes time to come to the event, you've got the triad working, oh, well, you got to come because I'm going to be there and we want to, you know, we got to have a triad meeting at the event itself. So these little things work brilliantly within your business. And most of all, the biggest benefit of all of this is the 300% to 500% improvement in their lives. And it doesn't take more work on your part. It doesn't take more training on your part. It just takes leadership to help them have this epiphany. And whether they're at 2 and need to move to 3, or whether they're at 3 and need to move to 4, so that they can see life differently in a much more effective manner. Dave, my goodness, thank you so much for helping us see how to move the world in a more effective way.

Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. And this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free. Just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at nobsltr.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you're also you get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.