In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about three strategies for leading a large organization: being intentional in your communication, expecting constant scrutiny, and leading with a clear, inspiring vision. Today’s post continues with more strategies for leading at scale.
Ensure excellence in every part of your organization. One of the biggest mistakes when leading at scale is spending too much time and energy on the parts of your organization that you know and understand the best while ignoring new areas you find foreign or scary. So a former sales executive focuses on sales even though they now also oversee legal, HR, and facilities. They may fool themselves into believing that they can be largely absent from those areas. “I have strong leaders there. I should just let them lead.”
Instead, own all parts of your organization. Let the needs of the business drive the nature and extent of your engagement in each area, rather than allowing internal biases to cloud your choices. Assess each major part of your organization and ask yourself, “What does this team need from me to help achieve the company’s vision? What does the team leader need from me?”
You can invent a variety of objections: “The leader of one of my new teams is a bully,” or, “I don’t know enough about the function,” or, “I find the function boring.” Surface these unconscious biases as you assess each part of your organization and deliberately set them aside.
Adapt to leading a complex senior team. While some aspects of working with the leadership team under you will be familiar from your past experience, there are unique features of teams that oversee large organizations. (For a great description, see What Sets Genius Teams Apart.) Those teams may require a different sort of leadership.
At these altitudes, senior teams manage significantly more complexity than their counterparts leading smaller organizations, including cultural, geographical, functional and business complexity. The workload, stakes and ambitions are higher. Problems with peers are among the thorniest that leaders face on these exalted teams. Also, relationships among the CEO, board members and investors can be extremely complex.
These dynamics require the team leader to be self-aware, grounded in their core values, and wholeheartedly committed to the business. They also must be adaptable in their team leadership style, moving nimbly from the role of visionary to expert coach, manager, facilitator, mediator and confidante.
The time that the team spends together must be carefully curated. There’s no room for a sloppy agenda, poor facilitation, or time wasting one-on-one discussions that don’t apply to the whole team. Deft agenda design and facilitation are critical both for regular team meetings and for longer off-site sessions. The quality of the preparation, pre-work and follow-up afterwards drives much of the value of team meetings beyond the basics of good meeting hygiene.
Creating psychological safety can be even harder within a very senior team, as they may all play along in the meeting and quietly jockey around challenges with each other offline, unknown by you. One executive I know spent a full day with her leadership team just talking about psychological safety. That’s a worthwhile investment, because a safe team in which members are able to express their true thoughts and ideas makes better decisions based on more complete information. Safe doesn’t mean conflict-free—you want a team that is safe enough to support the kind of robust, healthy conflict that leads to the best decisions.
Finally, as you shape the team, be deliberate in selecting members for their excellence not only in leading their function(s) but in collaborating with others. High performing “stars” who don’t play well with others can negate their value by creating friction and wasted energy for the entire team. (See It’s All About Trust: Creating a Leadership Team That Meets Today’s Challenges.)
For more, read Part 3 in the series.