There are few companies on earth that can say the following and have it actually be real. Microsoft is one of these companies.
We are not charter constrained, we are leadership constrained.
This is exciting to me because it means if I can help develop and encourage greater leadership within Microsoft the impact we can have knows no bounds.
And this begs the question: how do you scale leadership?
Scaling an organization from startup to large corporation has been studied and there are patterns for growth and scale of organizations. Bob Sutton is the best in the world that I know to teach the scaling of organizations.
The patterns and principles for scaling an organization do not work for scaling leadership.
How do you scale leadership? I do not know but I have a hypothesis.
Scaling leadership requires one on one human connection.
What evidence do I have to suggest that this is the way to scaling leadership?
Charlotte Yarkoni shared with our leaders she spends 30-40% of her time one on one with people at various levels in her organization as I shared in a previous post.
I regularly interview leaders and ask them “what is a habit or behavior you have that has had an outsized impact on your leadership?” – this question has produced interesting answers. The themes that are most prominent are around caring for individual team members on a one to one basis. This includes active listening and knowing each team member well both professionally and personally.
Next steps for me are to create a proper experiment to test my hypothesis. If you have ideas on how I might be able to test this hypothesis or have evidence to suggest this is accurate I would love to hear it. Please reach out to me!
