Chieftain

Where You Are

Leading a tribe is no small task, but you’re engaging in the process wholeheartedly, and it’s paying off. You’re hitting your stride as once-difficult processes become routine; you’ve tapped into the values that drive you and define your community, and you’re building from them. Some of the beautiful things happening in this stage can include:

• You’re starting to see memberships and engagement increase.

• As you invest in your team, you’re not only making amazing memories; you’re building trusting, loyal relationships.

• You’re living a more extraordinary life: taking risks for your ideals, integrating your values, and reacting better to conflicts, disappointments, and victories.

But you may have begun to realize that, as you scale up, it’s not just the joys that scale up. Challenges get magnified, too. Some of the stressors for leaders in your stage include:

• Codependent leadership: looking to team and members for approval leads to an increasingly reactive leadership

• Conflict on team: hiring mistakes become most apparent and difficult decisions often have to be made if they haven’t been already

• Difficulty adapting old processes to new growth while preserving essence of community

• More high-level decisions to be made, but no one else understands how to make them like you would

• High growth with low retention, making community cohesion challenging; difficulty creating consistent experience for all members

These challenges arise when your community’s ideals and values aren’t deeply embedded in your day-to-day existence. You’ve started to learn that not everyone is in it for the long haul, and sometimes that reality hurts. You’ve made your fair share of costly errors and compromises in your pursuit that have caused pain to the people around you — but that only makes you more aware of what’s at stake when you start your day. This climb is shaping you into a seasoned veteran and replacing youthful naivety with costly wisdom.

You’re at a fork in the road: you can either try to force your new growth into old patterns and processes, or you can return to the values that ground your community and forge a new path.

Where to Go

This is a new threshold of initiation that many leaders don’t even approach. It’s the stage where you turn your best moments into everyday occurrences, where you learn from your highest and lowest points to make excellence, authenticity, and celebration into habits, rather than surprises.

The challenge you’re facing is to retain what makes your community meaningful while you grow it exponentially. The fourth Ring of Tribe-Building is the key:  “Tribes create meaningful rituals to tie their belief system to people’s daily routines.”

Human history has shown us that tribes throughout time have used rituals to pass down their shared stories, values, and standards across generations. Rituals bring together your tribe’s mythology and symbolism to give members a tangible, shared experience of the tribe’s purpose.

These don’t have to be some elaborate, woo-ey experience. A tribe’s most important ritual is its ritual of initiation, and this can be as simple as a tour of your gym or office space, or a really meaningful unboxing experience and symbolic gift for every new community member. 

Consider the process by which someone becomes a member of the community: are you sharing stories, communicating through symbols, and creating experiences that make this process meaningful for your members? Do all members experience the same process of initiation so that they have a unifying, shared experience with each other? Is there an exchange of mutual commitment (like a membership fee)? Focusing on implementing a strong onboarding initiation ritual will give your community a codified and scalable experience of your core values. This can have powerful effects:

• Inspiring team members to do excellent work that lives up to community standards

• Increasing retention, turning members into active ambassadors rather than passive consumers

• Regularly tethering you to your highest ideals so you can live them more consistently

• Creating memorable moments that bring new community members into the group

Concentrate on becoming a master of ritual. By attaching your deeper purpose to day-to-day operations, you’ll be offering your team a more meaningful reason for work while uniting your tribe around a common experience of belonging. To learn about how rituals function within a tribe, take our 7-Day Tribal Transformation. We can also help you develop your own custom ritual of initiation through our Identity Sprint for established communities.

Contact us to learn more.