Tribalism affects business, too.
The purpose of a manager should be to coordinate, facilitate and regulate the workforce. Coordinate by getting the workers where they need to be, when they need to be there, understanding what they need to do. Facilitate by giving them the tools, the training and the support they need to do the work. Regulate by making sure everyone is on the same page about what needs to be done, what each individual’s role is and making sure everyone understands this. A manager should track the progress of projects, make adjustments when needed and report important changes and other information up the chain of command.
A manager should allow the greatest amount of worker autonomy as is possible. Allow them to develop their own methods. This gives his company the advantage of distributed knowledge and turns the workforce into a “Best Practices” laboratory. The manager should align worker incentives with the incentives of the company. If the company is being paid piece-rate, the workers should be paid piece-rate. If the company is being paid hourly, the worker should be paid hourly.
Avoid, at all costs, micromanagement. Micromanagement is inefficient, demoralizes and disempowers the workers who drive production and the health of the company; it increases the management load, thereby increasing the need for more layers of management which decrease the profitability of the company and rob the company of the “Best Practices” laboratory.
Management is non-productive. It should be kept to a minimum. Worker incentives should encourage self-management and highlight those who can’t self-manage, so that they can be replaced by those who can.
Expenses shouldn’t be reimbursed for employees or contractors. The firm should pay enough up-front to compensate for reasonable expenses and that will incentivize the workers to make economic decisions about expenses which can allow them to profit from wise economic decisions.
However, people are people. They’re tribalists. They will tend to make decisions the way tribalists do, by picking up on subtle social queues and implementing processes and practices that are accepted by the business community, whether or not they are optimal, or if they even make sense. This is the struggle for the very small percentage of people who have a high intellect to tribal survival instinct ratio, trying to figure out ways to convince the tribal to make decisions logically.
