Go Larger Or Go Smaller? Understanding This Choice Will Impact Your Ability To Lead

There have been many times I have spoken with individuals who have asked some form of this question:

Based on X, should I am to go bigger or should I focus on going smaller?

Sometimes this is in reference to Goals - should I try to create a huge goal, or start with smaller goals?

Other times it is in reference to research - should I look at the bigger picture, or should I deep dive into something smaller?

Still, there are times this is in reference to building a team - should I grow my team larger, or should I focus on what my team is doing now and drill further?

The technical terms for this would be "Atomization" (Going Smaller) and "Holism" (Going Larger).

So - which is it?

Go Larger?

Or Smaller?

The Surprising Answer

I asked a form of this question once to one of my mentors.

This is what he said:

"It's a false dichotomy."

This means that there isn't a difference between going larger or going smaller, they aren't "separate".

There is no "dichotomy".

You need to go both Larger and Smaller to get to the highest levels of success.

How I've Applied This To Leadership

This is how it has played out for me (so far).

I started working in Leadership Development about 6 years ago.

I went smaller and tried to learn the best information from the best teachers that would have the most impact.

Then I went bigger and when I looked at the Leadership Development Industry as a whole, I discovered it fails 80% of the time.

So then I had to go small again and analyze why this was true in the macro.

This led me to discover the larger answer that Leadership Development failed primarily for 2 reasons.

1. We couldn't agree on a definition of "Leadership", with over 850 academic definitions as of 1995
2. We completely ignored the Psychophysiology that impacts a Leader's success - the skills mean nothing without proper Psychophysiology

This large answer forced me to design a new category of Leadership (which is today Legendary Leadership) to have a "pure" definition of Leadership that I helped people with, and it forced me to again go smaller into the psychophysiology.

I've done a number of certifications since this discovery to get smaller and smaller into psychophysiology to understand all the mechanisms.

From there, I had to ask the larger question of how this applies to Leaders.

None of these certifications in psychophysiology were designed specifically for Leaders.

So I went small again and began to put pieces together to be able to utilize them in specific ways, not for "health" or for "athletics", but for Legendary Leadership.

In doing this, I came to another Large overarching conclusion.

Most Leaders are failing today due to a huge lack of understanding of the biomechanics of how Stress (and more specifically Dis-Stress) works in our lives.

It's also not any Leader's fault that we don't understand this.

I did not see this until I zoomed out (went Larger) from understanding a lot of extremely tiny things in our psychophysiology (went Smaller), down to the intracellular level (ie inside our cells).

In fact, I'm not aware of anyone else who has actually looked at the scientific literature to this level and decided to apply it to Leadership specifically.

Most of the people who are looking at the scientific literature are either looking at hyper-specific things without looking or applying it to the bigger picture (too small) or are only applying it to overall health without getting a fuller understanding of the many components that are involved (too large).

To get where I am in my career, I have needed to go both extremely small AND extremely large to understand things well enough to be able to talk about them.

If I had failed to go larger and at the same time smaller at any one of these points, I would only have a small part of the overall story.