Humanity helps scale

Growth is hard to achieve without having a dedicated and passionate team acting simultaneously on their own initiative and toward the same goal. Anyone who has had a leadership role understands how difficult it is to get people point in the same direction and focus on a common objective. It is frequently referred to as attempting to herd cats. In frustration, many managers revert to the traditional tools of command-and-control, micromanagement and doing much the hard work themselves. This invariably slows the management process and exhausts the manager. As they enter senior leadership positions, these managers frequently add fear and politics to the mix, creating an environment where everything cannot revolve without them. While those Machiavellian management themes can be effective for a while, they frequently lead to stasis, where agility and initiative are shunned. In a context of growth, they are in no means sufficient. When trying to scale, you need a team that is self motivated and resilient. There is nothing worse than to be surrounded by a bunch of automatons who do only as instructed. To scale quickly, you need to surround yourself with smart people who are infused with both resiliency and emotion. In my experience, dictatorial management styles only serve euthanize both.

As a result of their own emotional paradigms, many managers prefer to forget that we are working with people. People are hard to deal with. It is much easier to be cartesian and treat the art of management as a binary endeavour. People are complex. They have problems, both professionally and personally, and most resent being told what to do. It is much easier to deal with machines; money and time can fix most of their issues. People have personalities, opinions, hopes and desires. To add complexity to the matter, we as managers have our own personal issues, as well. To effectively manage people, we have to take all of these factors into account and to deal with them on both a collective and individual basis. It may seem easier to ignore humanity, but doing so causes teams to regress while slowing robbing them of initiative and agility. Like carbon monoxide poisoning, dictatorial command and control creates an environment of lethargy and paralysis. Growth requires the opposite.

On many levels, scaling is like feeding a swarm. It is about convincing a group of highly intelligent individuals to simultaneously work on achieving a common goal. In order to harness the power of the swarm, a leader must on one hand inspire and on the other strike a fine balance between letting initiative run and having effective supervision reign. None of this can happen without trust. To scale effectively, a CEO need needs to build that trust. Trust is built on humility and self reflection. In order to trust, people must feel your humanity. Humanity, however, is scary, uncomfortable and frequently taboo. Like parenting, managing for growth requires a trust founded on authenticity, logic and empathy.

CEOs who are trying to scale are actually agents of change. Agents of change that are, invariable, minutely securitized by those they are trying to lead. Change requires a profound leap of faith that is easily shaken by any perception of insincerity. Like teachers in a classroom, it is futile for CEOs to attempt to hide the unflattering angels of their natures, as everyone is fully aware of them anyway. Rather, CEOs are authentic when they are comfortable with themselves and embrace their faults, in order to better manage around them. To be authentic is to be true to oneself, no matter the circumstance, and to demonstrates the predictability on which trust is maintained. This perceived vulnerability is in reality a strength as our human frailties makes us all the more relatable. Being relatable fosters understanding and creates the fertile ground that facilitates learning. When the team is willing to learn, the obstacles to scale gradually fall by the wayside.

Everyone likes to follow someone who makes good decisions. Logic is the root of good decision making and good decision-making enhances trust. Logic is reasoning conducted on strict principles of validity and helps underscore the pitfalls of fallacy. Logic allows you to tailor your actions on available facts and channel them through the discipline of the scientific method. The better your decision-making ability becomes; the more people trust you. This comforts them in uncertain times because they have experienced the benefits of your good decision-making process. This confidence adds speed to scale as traditional resistance to change is replaced with enthusiasm.

There are times where we all feel vulnerable and require for us to take more than we give, whether it be in attention, support or understanding. The process of scaling creates anxiety for many and a fear of being left behind for some. This vulnerability causes some people to consciously or unconsciously sabotage efforts to implement change. Empathy for a CEO means being able to put your personal stresses and priorities aside in favour of recognizing another’s reality. At a most basic level, people just want to be seen and understood. Empathy is about acknowledgment, connection and understanding, which are the pillars of trust. Counterintuitively when a CEO models empathy, performance is increased as the bond created by trust transform scale from an impersonal metric to an article personal faith. Once people feel that they are both seen and understood, they often put aside their aversion to change and embrace the thrill of the new endeavour.

Humility allows for authenticity, logic and empathy to manifest a CEOs humanity, which so essential in fertilizing the trust required for sustainable growth. Trust allows for the initiative and agility that a well-guided swarm delivers. If a CEO cannot lead from a position of trust, then stasis and inertia will follow.