Simon Sinek in the video “Why We Form Tribes” says that we're social animals and we seek belonging. We seek out people who have shared values, shared understanding, shared experiences and we create tribes because we're safer in tribes. We trust people with whom we’re in the tribe, for better or for worse. Ideally, you want to try to form around vision and values. For example, if you meet Marines, they always talk about the intangibles, what they mean is the values, the trust, the love, the brotherhood, the sisterhood, honor, and courage. They are a value-based organization and they understand that what makes them a unit are the intangibles, just like in your relationship, what makes you love your spouse is not that they're pretty, what makes you love them and trust them is the shared values, the shared understanding, and the shared vision. When an organization has a clear sense of cause and if it is a values-based organization, it doesn't matter what the politics are but if you take away any sense of vision or cause, what ends up happening is that we start seeking out tribalism and tribal connections based on anything that we can see easily. So, you can get racial divisions, political divisions, you get all of these stupid things that really don’t amount to anything, the greater the division based on superficial or political lines, it probably means that we are not being offered a sense of global vision and something that unites us in common cause. Take any city that has a natural disaster, earthquake, tornado, whatever it is, all of a sudden, politics goes away, class goes away, racial divisions go away and we're all taking care of each other and we're all helping each other. Shared hardship is actually something that releases oxytocin, it creates common understanding, so the fact that we are all going through this pandemic, good leaders will talk about how we're all suffering and we all have to help each other because it's the light at the end of the tunnel speech.
Optimism is not the denial of reality, that’s positivity like everything's fine, everything's good, look at all this opportunity, etc. but we don’t need that because it’s not helpful, that's ignoring the reality. However, optimism is the belief that the future is positive but we can talk in realistic terms about what we're going through now and the fact is that it will be over, it will end. We want it to end sooner rather than later and we want it to end with as little loss of human life as possible and we want it to end with our doctors and nurses mentally healthy when they come out of it. However, that doesn't mean denial of difficulty, that doesn't mean that it's not a struggle but it means now that we can start to work together to work through this and reinvent our companies and reinvent ourselves.
