Who Is Your Tribe?

LinkedIn Connections and Followers. Facebook Friends and Groups. Communities. Movements. Clubs. Circles. Partners. Couples. Tribes.

People are social creatures. We socialize. We create couples, partnerships. We join the groups. We join communities. We join the companies. I wanted to say we join the countries. But that is a different topic.

In essence, we create tribes or join someone else’s tribe, usually in hopes of the good, some mutual goal, belief, interest, trust, etc. Historically, in tribes we survived. Standing back-to-back, protecting each other and our families from the enemy tribes.

It happened, we met and got in love… We share similar interests… We share common values… We have the same goals… We program the same language… We practice Iyengar yoga… We love flying jets…

This is what generally makes a tribe. Similarities. And trust… If there is no trust, it is not a tribe but a bunch of people.

Let’s take a company you work for.

I found a method to actually match an individual with a company. I wanted to say “to match with the party”, i.e. “the line of the party and the government” as people used to say in Soviet times.

HRs call it the Core Values.

You may have seen the words, such as Integrity, Growth, etc. I was never taking them seriously. To me they were some abstract words hanging on the walls in frames… I used to call them propaganda.

However, there is a meaning.

Nowadays, HRs are mainly the “law enforcement” of the companies.

This seems to change, slowly. At least in words. HRs started to re-brand themselves to Talent Managers, Human Capital, People Officers, etc. I want to believe there will be the time, more people would wake up earlier in their lives, and take responsibility for their lives, so that they would not have to be managed. However, there still would have to be a captain with a steering wheel, since you cannot go in all possible directions at the same time.

When the core values of the company do not match with your own ones, at certain point you may experience various outcomes: misunderstandings, confrontations, burnouts, not willing to work there, etc.

Therefore, it is important to know your core values, so that they would become filters of your choice, the choice of which tribe you join and which you do not.

If you do not know them, let is do an exercise and identify your core values. It may take 5–10 minutes of your time.

Here is a list of the words that may help you:

Feel free to add your own ones.

Let is do some manipulations with these words:

Look at the resulting list and compare with your company’s. How are they compatible? To what degree?

I am not saying, you have to leave the company if your core values are different. But it is good to be informed, having clarity on what you both stand for or where you might get an issue.

I personally doubt majority of people ever think about these things.

I think you should know which flags you stand under, which principles and morale you agree to accept and support, be that the country, the company, the community, the group, the partnership, the beloved ones. The Tribe. So that one day you do not find yourself in the middle of the fire.

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