Scaling Leadership

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 ...