Scaling People

You can always spot a great manager by the strength of their team. A top-level manager builds a fanatical followership. When they move to a new company, old reports will leave their jobs to join the manager there. Their organization delivers results, their teams perform better, and employees perform better on their teams.

Additional research has found that people who outperform in their fields employ strategies that move them past the autonomous stage of learning, like athletes who use speed workouts to improve their performance. In other words, to make a break-through performance improvement during the autonomous stage, you need to set an uncomfortable pace for yourself.

Self-awareness has three components: understanding your underlying value system, identifying your innate preferences—your work style and decision-making tendencies—and being clear about your own skills and capability gaps.

First, you never know someone else’s story. When you’re finding a report difficult to work with, there’s almost always a deeper reason for their behavior that’s worth trying to understand. Second, some people don’t necessarily understand why they act the way they do. If you don’t understand how your actions are driven by your underlying beliefs, you’ll never be able to adapt them, no matter how hard you try.

Technical problems have a solution and an achievable resolution, while adaptive problems are continuously, well, adapting. They’re an infinite game, if you will.16 A technical problem might be that you consistently miss your customer service-level agreement of responding to an inquiry within two hours. An adaptive problem might be how to set product priorities in the face of evolving user needs and increasing competition. Managers are superb at solving technical problems. Tackling adaptive problems takes leadership. Once you become a great manager, you can get very comfortable. But once you become a true leader, almost every day is uncomfortable. Don’t confuse the two.

reports: Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. Leadership is ultimately about driving change, while management is about creating stability. Stability is important in a work environment, but confronting challenges and realizing new ideas require discomfort. This means that you and your teams must abandon the stable and familiar in favor of an uncertain—but exciting—new direction.

“People work for people if they have a purpose. It took me a while to figure that out. First, I saw it in the military, and I wasn’t sure it would translate into the civilian world, but I discovered that it does. People don’t go to church as much anymore. The thing they have is their company, so they expect more and more from those companies. You need to spend a lot more time on values and purpose than I would have thought. Purpose is everything.” —Charles Phillips, managing partner, Recognize, former CEO, Infor

“The biggest mistake I made [early on] is we did not focus on writing [down] the company’s business principles. To delegate to other leaders, we need to write down our principles on hiring, on firing, on performance, on security, on many things.” —Eric Yuan, founder and CEO, Zoom

As Andy Grove said about goal assessment, the important thing is that “at the end, you can look without any argument and say, ‘Did I do that, or did I not do that?’ Yes. No. Simple.”