Using Dashboards to Connect Your Tribe

The best business solutions generally don’t come from leaders telling people what to do – they come from inciting a movement of an idea within a community, when peer support leads people towards doing what they always knew was the right thing. Power comes from establishing good connections – not commands.

Dashboards provide information that connects people with concepts, performance and ideas. Information itself is a power to see a solution, and a way to connect diverse parts of an organization, to spread the word and organize a start towards a solution.

According to Seth Godin, it only takes two things to turn a group of people into a tribe:

Shared interest
A way to communicate

The shared interest is the organizational vision, communicated via its strategy and dashboards. But communication can be one of four kinds:

Leader to tribe
Tribe to leader
Tribe member to tribe member, and
Tribe member to outside party

Dashboards can be developed to communicate in the same way. They transform shared interest into passionate goals and a shared interest in change.

Being well connected is about communicating up, down and sideways. Connecting to a passion, and a mission, not just a common idea. These new tools are transforming what it means for tribal communications. Smart leaders will embrace such tools and put them to work.
When people see the truth in such clarity, behind the performance, they know instinctively that something has to be done – using the analytical tools they can find out exactly what has to be done. A leader no longer has to go into meetings cold – sharing bad news and telling people what to do. The team already knows. It is about motivating, connecting and leveraging natural tribal movement.

When you have information you can highlight the breakthroughs and successes to inspire others to want to get involved and be part of the growth.

A leaders job is not to grow the business, it is to communicate in ways that enable the business to grow itself. This passion led communication converts a crowd to a tribe.