Q: What are the top mistakes leaders make that kill their tribes?

A: Mistakes are not terrible and mistakes will not necessarily kill your tribe. The key is to recognize that you have made a mistake, learn from it, and not repeat it. When a leader focuses so much energy on not making a mistake to begin with, it creates stress for the leader and the tribe, which leads to hard feelings and lack of enthusiasm This emotional turbulence can kill a tribe sooner than any mistake could.

Characteristics and actions in a leader that can lead to the death of the tribe include:

• Inability to learn from a mistake
• Pitting members against one another
• Forgetting that a tribe has a life of its own rather than existing as an extension of the leader
• Not delegating (“I am the start and finish of all decisions.”)
• Making decisions based on personal agenda rather than on tribal agenda
• Thinking they cannot learn from their members and worse, thinking they know everything
• Taking a command-and-control approach by:
• Limiting or moderating communication within the tribe
• Exercising hierarchical authority
• Conversely, being too passive and standing by as factions form and turf wars take place
• Allowing drama to exist by:
• Listening to and responding to gossip
• Allowing rumors to circulate and grow
• Devoting time, energy, and resources to deal with personal issues or conflicts
• Passively allowing these activities to exist even if they don’t take part

Q: Is it possible to earn a living leading a tribe? How? Should you be driven by profit?

A: To paraphrase something Seth Godin wrote:

The people making millions of dollars a month DID NOT sign up to make money. The people making pennies a month DID. The best, widest-spreading ideas are done for the sake of the idea, not for the dollar.

So is it wrong to start a tribe for the money? Is it possible to do something you love AND get paid for it? Should you avoid all opportunities to support yourself leading your tribe?

No. But you should take a good look at your real, honest reasons for building a tribe.

A leader finds others who share his/her same passion and provides the tools for the tribe to connect and communicate.

When you interact with a large number of people genuinely, when you find something the tribe needs that you can provide, or when you find something the world needs that your tribe can help you spread the word for—as long as it is genuine and real and aligned with the values of your tribe, NOT merely a mechanism to make you money—the theory is that it will all just WORK.

Selling goods (such as concert tickets, albums, or T-shirts) is NOT what makes you a living. Connecting people and giving them a place in the world IS. There is a huge difference between focusing on one and focusing on the other. Making a living—making money—is only a pleasant side effect of doing this right. But it is a side effect that happens all the time.

If you are lucky (or if you are a person that directs your message and drives your own luck), you can merge the commercial and the personal in one of these revelatory ways.

However: a. You must have a valid economic engine to drive the business and enough of a potential market to work with. b. You must have a passion to build something remarkable from the ground up and a desire to create something you can be the best in the world at.

The major stumbling block for most people who want to set out on their own and create/lead a passion-based business is the fact that tribes rarely assemble overnight. You cannot quit your “real”job on Wednesday and “launch”your profitable tribe on Thursday. Perhaps you will have someone who will support you as you start from square #1 and build your following. Perhaps you will keep your “real”job while your passions take over in the evening and you start to build your tribe. Either way, it will take time…but it will happen. If you want it enough, it is there for the taking.

It’s a series of small steps, in much the same way you build a roaring fire not with logs, but with small pieces of kindling. Small things over time add up to large things happening.

Following Seth’s point—that the best, widest-spreading ideas are done for the sake of the idea, not for the dollar—is a matter of reframing your mindset from “I’m doing this for me”to “I’m doing this for others, who will then support me to do this for an even wider audience.”It changes from “I’m going to go out there and take what’s mine”to “I’m going to give first.” Then, any profits made are generated honestly—and your tribe will know it.