Jens Heitland

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From Caveman to Boardrooms: How tribalism still impacts our daily lives

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Transcript:

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We're essentially grownup monkeys or grownup cavemen. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way at all. I mean that in a, in an evolutionary term, but essentially, we rely on tribalism to create a sense of safety, to create a sense of belonging, to fuel our identity, and to be something that we're making an impact for.

So, if you think about it from a, let's go back in time, a few hundred thousand years caveman. If you were the lone wolf versus the member of the tribe, you were far more likely to go hungry, to be at risk from predators to be left in the cold and to not have the firewood that you needed to keep warm.

If you were part of the tribe, you had somebody to watch you back. You had some friends, you had some people to tell stories with you had somebody to watch out for the sabertooth tiger that might come along and things were a lot better. You fast forward those couple hundred thousand years, our brains are essentially exactly the same.

We just have a different context now. We have a boardroom, not a cave, and our tribal mechanics that work on in our brain. So the things that trigger us and put us into a scarcity or an abundant mindset are exactly the same. What we talk about in the book is welcoming new people to the organization.

How do you onboard them effectively so they feel part of your tribe and how do you keep 'em safe? And then the second piece of connecting people is creating networks. So it's building your tribe. And whether that is your internal cultural tribe, or whether it's your stakeholder relations tribe, the concepts are the same.

You have to go and connect people first. So the role of a leader is twofold. It's onboarding and networking.