Tribe Organizations

In this article we will give you hands-on insights and a simple DIY guide why Tribe Organizations are beneficial to foster growth and innovation and how to implement it in your company.

First we need to Trust

Before we normally start to coach and consult organizations to develop autonomous and flexible tribes, we emphasize that the most important foundation is trust.

And trust starts with the leadership; how trustful is your leadership style?

A Harvard study also showed that compared with people from low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report:

74% Less stress
106% More Energy
50% Higher Productivity
76% More Engagement

How do you start to redesign your organization?

Have you ever sketched how your organization is organized? If you want to build-up a sustainable long-lasting organization it should not be dependent on one-single contributor. You should rather have a strong interaction of different experts to create high-performing value.

There are 2 principles an organization can be designed as. Either “Functional” or “Customer-Centric Network”.

In a functional organization teams work very much on themselves and in their field of competences. They are not so strong in connecting to other functions. Team members therefore work in parallel and not as one team.

Cross-functional teams on the other side are a lot more dynamic. The people learn more in 360 approaches and they learn more because they are involved with each other. They can be a lot more flexible and have a better understanding of the different areas. They are real creator teams that work together and collaborate.

In today’s world it is especially important to know all the aspects of your working environment. This comes a lot with self-organization. This means that your team organizes itself from within. The team starts to develop their own schedule and what best serves the client.

So how do you set up tribes in agencies?

A tribe is a full stack autonomous team in which there are all the different specialists necessary to create a product, to deliver a service or to develop a client.

We have implemented tribe organizations in countless organizations and if you consider to leverage innovation and creativity benefits in your organization – our useful DIY (do-it-yourself) guide may help you. We normally transfer teams into tribes in 5 major steps:

1. Define your value creation responsibility: First you need to have a defined WHY for your organization as well as Goals and Objectives to work towards them. Also you should define your value on how to scale your organization. Define who should be responsible on C-level for the value drivers and define how this value drivers will develop strategically. You need to be precise in areas like: Business Development, New Sales Acquisition, Customer Development, Delivery & Innovation, Service Quality and People Recruiting & Development.

2. Define your Chapters: You should define your organizational levers of the client, service and talent perspective. Also decide on your rules to set up the tribe. For example, the clients should be owned by the service function with the highest impact or the service delivery should be as efficient as possible. Lastly, you should decide on what framework your organization should be set up. But you can be creative. It is not an EITHER OR decision, it can also be AND. For example you can run 2 days a week functionally and 3 days per week customer centric.

3. Define your Span of Control: You should define your span of control. Who has control over what?

4. Define Artefacts: You should define your artefacts. There can be divided between 3 major ones; Roles & Responsibilities, Tools/Artefacts, Events. We propose a scrum process for digital marketing agencies to develop larger accounts.

5. Pilot soft & implement: You really have to implement it, in order to really make it happen.

Apply six rules to leverage your teams to autonomous teams.

The team has a joint vision
Retrospectives are installed
The team has joint values
The team has created atmosphere of trust
Common artefacts are installed
Everyone is a self-leader

So now how can you delegate responsibility in your organization?

Delegating is not an easy thing; especially when implementing tribes. However, we were quite successful in installing delegation levels in transformation. We experienced that for instance the delegation poker is a powerful tool during your transformation process.