I don’t want to go!  Please don’t make me go!  Leaving the world of transactional management is a noble idea.  However, many executives cannot seem to take the first step.  They expect natural, organic change that occurs slowly over time.  Blah, blah, blah!  Contemporary thinking requires a deliberate strategy to build tribes that make your workplace “sticky” for talent.  I recently worked with a manufacturing organization where 19% of the employees don’t show up for work daily.  Can you say ouch!  Imagine the costs they are experiencing.   What are the costs in quality, safety, and employee morale?  They have been slowly conditioned to hire more people to cover the absenteeism.  People are strained and over-worked.  This is their new normal.  Does this sound familiar?

There is a solution to this reality that is faced by so many organizations.  Aggressive leaders can accelerate the formation and transition to a culture based on tribal leadership.  Supervisors are the key to the resolving this challenge.  Smart leaders are engaging and reinforcing our natural tendencies to be drawn into tribes. Tribes are sticky.  Everyone has a role.  There is a common purpose.  Great team members actually showupand make a difference.  People are motivated and there is a sense of abandonment when coworkers are absent.  We don’t want to let our tribe down.  Tribes create a sense of “us” versus “me” and the results are powerful.

This will not happen organically.  You cannot just hope things get better.  The progression from talented individual to team to tribe can be accelerated by placing emphasis on the front-line supervisor.  Teach supervisors to understand the difference between a workplace and a tribe and the results can be astonishing.  Teach them to act as a tribal leader (tribal elder) and the team realizes everyone has a role for success.  A team fullofindividuals has no synergy, no comradery, and no purpose.  People merely show up for the transaction of receiving a paycheck.  And frankly, this sucks!  It sucks even more for millennials that constantly crave connections to their tribes.  This has been reinforced by the constant reality of social media.

Today’s migratory workforce requires skills at the supervisory level like never before.  The costs of turnover and absenteeism are crippling bottom lines.  Millennials are making transactional managers pay for the sins of their past.  Simply put, the days of pay for work will not keep top talent.  Tribal leaders understand the need to move beyond teams and create tribes for talent retention.  Three distinct realities canhelpaccelerate the migration.