Scaling Your Leadership

Building leadership capacity and capability in a challenging business world

It’s in the very nature of companies to grow—it’s a fundamental part of the DNA of every business that exists today. Of course, not every company grows, or grows at the same rate. Some companies go happily along with virtually flat sales for decades, while others rollercoaster from highs to lows and back again. Then there are the modern unicorns like Airbnb, Uber, and WeWork that have achieved valuations in the billions of dollars in an extraordinarily short period of time. Regardless, every company has the seeds of growth planted within it.
 

Growth is generally a good thing for a business—it leads to more customers, increased revenue, and often, a healthier bottom line. However, when companies and the men and women who run them aren’t prepared for the demands of growth and the often considerable increase in complexity that comes with it, it creates some very real problems.
 
Companies can increase (or at least maintain) their competitive advantage only when their leaders and the leadership system of the organization develop at a rate that keeps pace with the complexities that come with growth and the accelerating magnitude of global change. And, as organizations grow, their long-term success depends on more than their ability to develop great products and services, or to secure necessary financing, or to hire and retain talented and engaged people. The long-term success of any organization also depends on its ability to scale effective leadership as it grows.
 
Is your leadership built for scale? Or, are you already beyond the level of scale and complexity for which your leadership is optimized? If the latter, you are likely feeling over your head. You may be getting great results, but with diminishing returns on ever-higher expenditures of your time and effort. You may have a gnawing (and correct) sense that working more hours is not the solution. The harder you go, the more you get in your own way. You may even be canceling yourself out as a leader—allowing your liabilities to outweigh your strengths.
 
It’s no secret that leaders in organizations of all sizes and in every industry are under a tremendous amount of pressure today as they lead their people through a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). According to research conducted by an outplacement firm, Lee Hecht Harrison, 67 percent of business leaders are struggling with stress, with 36 percent of managers who manage at least seven people reporting that they experience stress one or more times a day.
 
In our own experience working with hundreds of organizations over the past several decades, we have found that one of the reasons why so many leaders are under so much stress is quite simple: they haven’t scaled their leadership. That is, they haven’t done the things necessary to grow leadership capacity and capability throughout their organizations in these fast-changing times.
 
If you’re trying to scale or grow the business through your own capability alone, and not through the capability of other leaders and teams, then you’re not going to scale, nor is your organization.
 
Leadership and the growth of a business organization go hand in hand. So, at a certain point, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of leaders determines whether or not an organization can grow. Too many leaders have unwittingly allowed themselves to become obstacles to growth instead of facilitators of it. It’s just not possible for a business to outgrow the effectiveness of its leaders—it’s impossible. Any organization is only as strong as its leaders.
 
The good news is that, like businesses, leaders also have the seeds of growth within them. Given the right conditions and the right environment, leadership can grow and scale as their organizations grow and scale. In fact, they must.
 
So, what can leaders do to scale their leadership and the leadership of those who work for and with them? In our experience, the most effective leaders cultivate something called generative tension. Generative tension is the gap between our aspirations and our current reality. It is the same thing as Peter Senge’s creative tension and Hamel and Prahalad’s strategic intent. Leaders establish generative tension at the organizational level by committing to what matters most and then fiercely and compassionately telling the truth about the current situations in which they exist. They lead the dialog that establishes an organization’s identity (mission, vision, values), an honest SWOT analysis, and transformational redesign. These leaders also cultivate generative tension at the personal level by facing their own development agenda.
 
Great leaders lead by openly and vulnerably facing their development gaps and then engaging their leadership teams to do the same, individually and collectively. They first make sure their own leadership is built for scale and then scale effective leadership in their teams and in the organization. They do so by engaging in four specific practices. Let’s examine each.
 
1. Tell the truth about what you want. Create a vision for the future, focus attention on the outcomes you want to achieve together with your people, and then set an intention to create them. Choose to make this intention your current reality, then hold and reaffirm this intention each and every day.
 
2. Tell the truth about how you are creating your current reality. What kind of reality are you actually creating? Tell the truth about the results you are creating right now, particularly those results that are inconsistent with what you want. Dig deeply into how you are creating your current reality, individually and collectively, and look closely at the embedded beliefs driving the behavior that results in outcomes you do not want. Surface those beliefs within yourself and within your team members. Delve into these beliefs deeply enough to see the falseness in them.

3. Rinse and repeat to continue to hold generative tension. Establishing and maintaining generative tension is not a one-and-done exercise. It is an ongoing practice. Continually revisit the truth about what you want and the results you are achieving, naturally holding generative tension as you engage in this practice.
 
4. Practice every day. Experiment every day—taking small steps each time that bring you closer to the results you want. Learn lessons from your experiments and use those lessons to inform your next experiments. Make certain you are:

If you want to change yourself, the collective effectiveness of your leadership team, or the leadership system of your organization, we know what works. It is easy and straightforward to explain. But don’t be fooled: It is very difficult to change deeply grooved patterns in how we show up every day in our lives and our leadership. But try we must—change we must if we want to reach our full potential as leaders and create the organization to which we aspire.

 

Robert J. Anderson is the founder, Chairman, and Chief Creative Officer of The Leadership Circle and Co-founder of Full Circle Group. William A. Adams is one of the founders of Full Circle Group and CEO of Full Circle Group and The Leadership Circle. Together, they are authors of Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results (Wiley, 2015) and the upcoming book Scaling Leadership: Building Organizational Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most (Wiley, 2019). Visit www.fcg-global.com Connect Full Circle Group