Scaling Leadership: Building Organizational Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most

By Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams and Ed Catmull

Transform Your Organization by Scaling Leadership

How do senior leaders, in their own words, describe the most effective leaders—the ones that get results, grow the business, enhance the culture and leave in their wake a trail of other really effective leaders? Conversely, how do senior leaders describe the kind of leader that undercuts the organization’s capacity and capability to create its future? This book, based on groundbreaking research, shows how senior leaders describe and develop leadership that works, that does not, that scales, and that limits scale.

Is your leadership built for scale as you advance in today’s volatile, uncertain, dynamic, and disruptive business environment? This context puts a premium on a very particular kind of leadership—High-Creative leadership capable of rapidly growing the organization while simultaneously transforming it into more agile, innovative, adaptive and engaging workplace. The research presented in this book suggests that senior leaders can describe the High-Creative leadership with surprising clarity. They also describe with equal precision the High-Reactive leadership that cancels itself out and seriously limits scale. Which type of leader are you?

You scale your leadership by increasing the multiple on your leadership in three ways. First, by developing the strengths that differentiate the most effective leaders from the strengths deployed by the most Reactive and ineffective leaders. And second, by increasing your leadership ratio—the ratio of most the effective strengths to the most damaging liabilities. Third, by developing High-Creative leaders all around you.

Scaling Leadership provides a proven framework for magnifying agile and scalable leadership in your organization. Scalable leadership drives forward-momentum by multiplying high-achieving leaders at scale so that growth, productivity and innovation increase exponentially. Creative leaders multiply their strengths beyond technical competence by leading in deep relationship, with radical humanity, passion and integrity.

Drawing upon decades of solid research and experience enhancing individual capability and collective leadership effectiveness with Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, the authors provide an innovative and efficient framework to help you:

• Take stock of your own personal balance of leadership strengths and weaknesses
• Scale your leadership in deep relationship and high integrity
• Proliferate high-achievers throughout your organization’s leadership system
• Identify ineffective leadership and course-correct quickly
• Transform your organization by transforming leadership

Scaling Leadership is an invaluable tool for executives, managers, and leaders in business, academia, nonprofit organizations, and more. This innovative resource provides effective techniques, real-world examples, and expert guidance for organizations seeking to improve performance, align and execute strategies, and transform their business with scalable leadership capability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781119538301

Book preview

Introduction

Life scales, or it dies. Growth is built into all living organisms. I (Bob) stepped outside my front door one morning to find the sidewalk carpeted with a thick layer of tiny seeds from a massive locust tree. Each one of these seeds is capable of scaling into a massive tree that will one day produce millions of seeds every season. In that sense, each seed has within it the potential to become a forest.

Businesses are not that different from the trees in our yards. They seek to grow, and they either achieve growth or they die. So, in a sense, scale is life. And yet, we are living in a time when unrestricted growth threatens our planet. We must scale much more than the size of our organizations. We must scale new and innovative solutions to complex business, organizational, and global problems. And we must do so in a world that's becoming increasingly complex, uncertain, and volatile. This capability is now both a business and global imperative. The key is leadership.

Leaders must learn to scale themselves by scaling leadership. But not just any kind of leadership will do. We need leaders who are both effective and conscious—capable of scaling innovation, adaptability, sustainability, agility, and engagement as the organization's growth strategy. Furthermore, we need leaders capable of growing organizations in such a way that all stakeholders thrive. Ownership, and its return, is but one of the stakeholders. Employees want a workplace where people thrive. Customers want to buy from a great company that serves them exquisitely and to which they are wildly committed. Suppliers want win-win, long-term relationships. Communities deserve to be uplifted in our places of business. The planet and its ecosystem must be tended, sustained, and enriched. Great businesses scale on all these fronts and optimize the interdependent welfare of all their stakeholders.

The only way for this to happen is for conscious leaders to scale conscious leadership. This is the future of leadership.

Scaling Leadership is about how senior leaders develop conscious leadership at scale in their organization. It is about you becoming that leader and how we, collectively, become leaders who rapidly develop the leadership that is required to grow the organization in our increasingly complex and disrupted world.

So, how do we do this? Where does the time, bandwidth, and attention come from in a world that's already full 24/7? If you're like most of the leaders with whom we work, you're extremely busy. Most of us are underwater, over our heads. We have no more time to give, yet the organization wants to grow, pushes us to grow, pulls us internationally. It wants to double or triple revenue over the next five years. Suddenly, you have 20 business leaders reporting to you and none of them are in the same country. You are good at what you do, but you are promoted to a level of scale and complexity for which you feel unprepared. If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. You are likely reaching the limits to scale in your own leadership, individually and collectively.

We see this happening everywhere we go and we, the authors, are in it with you. It is ironic to be writing a book about scale when we are profoundly challenged with scaling our own business. Rapid growth solves a lot of problems and brings with it a whole lot more. Suddenly, the systems, technologies, and processes we developed and implemented over years are inadequate for the volume and complexity required. They must be redesigned. Leadership that worked well (or at least we thought so) when we were smaller, no longer serves the organization. We are challenged to reinvent ourselves. When we did an organizational culture survey during all this, we realized we needed to take our own medicine. Our leadership was neither scaling, nor was it creating the kind of thriving culture we promote through our work.

So, we wrote Scaling Leadership right through the middle of meeting the limits of scale in our own leadership. It has not been easy. This book, if you let it, will confront you. It did us. It will challenge you to evolve your leadership. It will point out the ways you lead that are working for you. And it will show you how you are getting in your own way. As such, this book is a double-edged sword.

All we can say is that we are in it with you. We do not write this book from a place of being above it all or on the other side of the steep learning curve we face as leaders. Rather, we write from a place of compassion and humility in our shared humanity. We are learning together how to lead effectively in a world that is faster paced, more volatile, more ambiguous, more complex, and in more peril than we ever imagined possible.

The only way out is through. This book will point the way through, but it will not be us doing the pointing. Our peers in leadership will do the pointing. This book is unique. In it, we turn to leaders like you to teach all of us.

This book is light on theory, and we hope, pontification. It is about what leaders have to say about leadership. How do leaders talk to other leaders about leadership? To learn about that, we turned to the written comments within our huge 360-degree assessment database. We sorted it, and we studied what's in it. We wanted to learn how senior leaders talk to other senior leaders about leadership. We let leaders teach us, and in this book, we pass along what we have gleaned from them about the kind of leadership that is capable of scale—and the kind that is not.

This is not another book about business growth strategies (e.g., how to grow your business within your industry). It is about how we increase the multiple on our leadership and scale it. How? By becoming the kind of leader who is more and more capable of leading growth and continuing to lead effectively with the complexity that comes with growth, especially rapid growth. In short, we scale the organization by scaling leadership—by being the kind of leader who develops other leaders.

Scaling Leadership is about how leaders successfully transform themselves and then scale that as they transform their organizations. In the first half, we describe the core findings from our study of leaders' written comments. We discuss what we learned by listening in on these feedback conversations. We explore what leaders are telling us about what works, what does not, and how all that relates to the kind of leadership that can scale leadership as a strategy to transform the organization. Finally, if the arguments we make are compelling, and you want to scale leadership and transform your organization, we end the first half of this book (Chapter 8) with how to do exactly that.

Because Scaling Leadership is about taking your leadership to the next level of effectiveness, the second half of this book goes deep into the individual journeys required of us to transform ourselves. While development theory and research are greatly helpful, our chapters are intentionally light on theory because we are most interested in how leaders describe, in their own words, what happens to our leadership as it matures. As it turns out, leaders are quite precise about this.

To help you scale your leadership, we have two companion products. We offer a Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) Self-Assessment and a Leadership Development Plan (LDP). Both are free with your purchase of this book and can be found at www.leadershipcircle.com. Simply click on the link for the Self-Assessment and, after you complete it, we will send you the results and a Leadership Development Plan that follows along with action steps we suggest throughout this book. Let this book guide you through a series of powerful activities that, if you take them seriously, will transform your