The Secret to Fantastic Leadership (note: It’s got nothing to do with you)

After a 10-year study of over 24,000 employees across multinational corporations, our team came to a startling conclusion about leadership: the more you develop yourself as a leader, the less of a leader you are.

How could this be? We ourselves were dumbfounded when we asked the leaders of Fortune 500 companies for the key to their success. They each had the same answer: “Don’t ask me. I didn’t do anything!”

Finally, however, the answer became very clear: the leader does not shape the organization. It’s the culture.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, any day of the week. So the successful leaders were the ones who stopped focusing on themselves, and created a world class culture. This made their leadership appear “effortless” to both them and everyone around them because they leveraged the strength of the entire group, or as we say, “tribe.”

This leads to a very important finding: if you are empowering yourself instead of your tribe, you are hurting your company.

So it doesn’t matter how many books you read, it doesn’t matter how much training you’ve had, it doesn’t even matter if you are strong at execution. You could be checking off to-do’s left and right with efficiency that would make David Allen cry, and yet still you would not create a thriving organization.

Tribal Culture

We now know the key to having a world class organization is to develop a world class culture. But what is culture exactly? And where can it be seen?

A better question is actually where can culture be heard, because culture lives in language. If you think about it, most of our work is made up of communication…emails, meetings, documents, proposals, instructions… they all live in the domain of language.

After 10 years of study we realized there are 5 stages of language that determine the culture of the tribe:
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