Every organization is a story about belonging.
Sometimes that story feels clear. Everyone knows why they’re here, what they’re fighting for, and what they stand to gain or lose together. Other times, the story feels fractured — like each person is reading from a different page, or worse, a different book altogether.

I’ve spent enough time inside teams to recognize the difference immediately. You can feel it. It lives in the energy between people. It’s the space between words in meetings. It’s the difference between “we did this” and “they decided that.”

That gap is the space where tribes form.

Human beings are wired to belong. The need for connection sits deep inside the brain, alongside the systems that regulate fear and pain. Anthropologists estimate that for almost all of human history, survival depended on being part of a small group — around 150 people at most. In those groups, everyone mattered. Everyone’s role was visible. Everyone knew who would stand beside them when danger came.

Belonging was never optional. It was life or death.

When people walk into work today, they still carry those same instincts. Their environments have changed, but the wiring hasn’t. Their brains continue scanning for safety cues: Who has my back? Who decides what matters here? Do I belong in this circle or outside of it?

These questions shape behavior far more than strategy documents or motivational posters ever will.

Henri Tajfel, a social psychologist at the University of Bristol, once ran an experiment that showed just how quickly our brains create tribes. He brought strangers into a lab and divided them into groups based on arbitrary preferences for abstract paintings — Kandinsky or Klee. The groups were meaningless. The participants knew it. But within minutes, they began favoring members of their own group. They even remembered “their” group’s faces better.

It took less than an hour to build loyalty strong enough to bias judgment.

That’s what our brains do. They divide the world into “us” and “them” at lightning speed, often without our awareness. It’s a survival reflex. In ancient environments, quick group identification meant the difference between friend and predator. In today’s workplaces, it still decides who gets information, who earns trust, and who gets excluded from key decisions.

When leaders ignore this instinct, it doesn’t disappear. It simply moves underground. Small cliques form. Departments protect themselves. People guard information instead of sharing it. Competition shifts from external goals to internal rivalries.

I’ve seen this pattern across industries, from hospitals to military units to corporate teams. The context changes. The biology stays the same.

Leading the tribe means channeling this instinct instead of fighting it. It means creating belonging on purpose.

Belonging begins when leaders define a clear “we.” The mind needs that clarity. It’s how people decide who to trust and where to invest their effort. When the definition of “we” feels ambiguous, people make up their own versions — and those versions rarely align.

The second act of leadership is direction. Every tribe needs a focus beyond itself. In ancient environments, that meant hunting together, defending territory, or raising children. In modern organizations, it means competing against a shared rival, pursuing a mission, or solving a collective challenge. Without that outward focus, energy collapses inward. People start fighting each other instead of the problem.

Finally, tribes need ritual. In early groups, rituals were the glue that kept people connected — meals, songs, dances, and ceremonies that said, we are still us. In modern teams, rituals look different but serve the same purpose. They might be weekly check-ins, recognition moments, shared stories, or even the simple act of pausing to celebrate progress. Rituals make the invisible visible. They remind everyone that they belong.

I once worked with a leader who inherited a team known for infighting. Every department blamed another. Trust was low. Morale was worse. The leader didn’t begin with performance goals. He began with story. At the first all-hands meeting, he asked everyone to write one sentence about why their work mattered. Then he collected those sentences, read them aloud, and created a new statement that wove their words together.

Within a year, that team became one of the most collaborative in the company. The transformation didn’t come from strategy. It came from belonging.

When people feel part of something bigger than themselves, they stop protecting and start participating.

So here is the law.

Lead the tribe or lose the tribe.

Every group you lead will form a tribe around something. It might be the mission you define. It might be the conflict you ignore. The choice belongs to you.

When you help people see where they belong, what they share, and who they serve together, you engage the oldest part of human intelligence — the part that knows survival depends on connection.

Leaders who understand this law create cultures where trust feels natural and loyalty feels earned. Leaders who neglect it discover too late that the tribe has turned inward.

Belonging is the oldest currency of leadership.
Spend it wisely.