What keeps you awake at night? That was the question Thursday morning from best-selling business author Dave Logan to small-business leaders gathered in Charlotte.

The 200 or so attendees at the Vistage International event at the Mint Museum Uptown listed an array of concerns: Finding and keeping customers. Picking which critical issues to address. Dealing with clients who want more service than they're willing to pay for. And managing difficult employees such as the "well poisoner."

Logan, co-author of "Tribal Leadership," published in 2008 by HarperBusiness, said the key to solving any of those problems is building a company culture where commitment to higher goals trumps individual accomplishment.

He says organizations are made up of "tribes" - groups of between 20 and 150 people who share a series of behaviors and assumptions that make up their culture. If they function well, so will the company, the thinking goes.

Logan took the group through five stages of "tribal development," starting with stages one and two, where workers may be hostile or despondent, to stage three - a workplace where the dominant words are "I," "me" and "mine." In this kind of workplace, Logan said, leaders have to spend more than half their time dealing with gossip - creating an environment akin to "The Office" of sitcom fame.

The best tribes, Logan said, operate at stages four and five. As an example, he cited the shared sense of mission apparent in the early days of Microsoft Corp. The key, he said, is good relationships built around shared aspirations. Those aspirations, he said, "have to be something that people see as more important than themselves." If a leader can foster that culture, he said, "amazing things will happen."

Those are the cultures, he said, that are "wired to change the world." That sense of mutual trust and shared mission help illuminate solutions to festering problems. He cited the example of Zappos, the online shoe and apparel retailer. When the company was looking to increase its customer base and appeared to have reached a plateau, a brainstorming session reached a breakthrough in a single afternoon: open the company's freewheeling, informal workplace to tour groups. It worked: the company's profile increased, sales soared, and Zappos was eventually acquired by Amazon.

Vistage International bills itself as the world's largest chief executive organization, with more than 14,000 members. Its focus is small- to mid-sized businesses, which hold an outsized influence over the economy. In Mecklenburg County, for instance, 93 percent of businesses employ fewer than 50 people, according to the Charlotte Chamber.

"Small business," said Logan, "is where this recovery is going to come from."