Three’s a crowd, the saying goes. But not so in the business world, it turns out, where it’s been found that the most valuable relationships are made of three people, not two.
The third person stabilises and grows the relationship between the other two. It’s called a triad, and the more you create, the stronger your network. That’s one of the conclusions of a study by John King and Dave Logan.
Related: There’s Strength in Teams
Their bestseller, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organisation, found that 76% of corporate cultures are ineffective. Those that are effective had one major difference – they met in ’triads’.
The secret is stability
A triad is a relationship where each person is responsible for the quality of the relationship between the other — each member has the other’s back and they work to promote mutual interest.
In the book, the triad structure is described as follows:
- Every person in the group shares common values
- Each person is committed with the others to execute a small strategy together that gets specific results, making it an agile approach
- Each person in the group takes responsibility for maintaining the quality of the connection between the other two people. When conflicts arise between two people in the group, the third person is responsible for helping them patch things up. That is what makes the relationship stable.
Related: 3 Steps to a High-Performance Culture
The authors argue that triads are a powerful way to scale agility from teams to ‘tribes’, described as ‘groups of up to 150 people’ that exist informally in every organisation.
