Even though you and I live in a modern society, we still belong to a tribe... or even numbers of tribes (a tribe being any group of people linked together by a common purpose).
In business that might mean aligning ourselves with colleagues on a team or in a department. Outside work, it may be about the kinship we develop with those who live in the same neighbourhood, village, or town, or with whom we share the same ethnicity, customs, or religion.
Belonging to a tribe is crucial to our development as human beings. It provides us with a sense of identity...a sense of who we are. It's an important part of how we understand the world and find our place in it. It's how we set ourselves apart
and establish links with other cultures. And it's how we establish our thoughts, beliefs and positions in regard to... well, just about everything.
From time to time, we all feel the need to defend those positions/beliefs, and never more so than when we're involved in conflict. Especially if we're dealing with someone from a 'different' tribe and our sense of tribal affiliation and hidden cultural biases/attitudes are overly strong.
This month we're looking at how to manage those defenses; which is to say, how to recognize the signs of an identity-based/tribal conflict, and move past it.
If after reading the article, you're interested in understanding more about the cultural attitudes we all carry (and how we can unlearn them), we suggest you read
Blindspot - The Hidden Biases of Good People, written by Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard) and Anthony Greenwald (University of Washington). You can even take a free test to determine those attitudes... you'll find the link at the end of the
article.