The Most Important Thing I've Learned About Leadership

After almost three years of building Civics Unplugged, one of the most important things I’ve learned is the following:

“Leaders should do things that don’t scale”

Scalability is critical for just about any business or nonprofit. Your marginal cost to serve a new customer/beneficiary should decrease over time if you have built a scalable organization. In other words, the cost to serve 10x the number of people you do today should not require 10x your current budget.

But just because some aspects of your organization should scale, that doesn’t mean you, as a leader of it, should automate or delegate every aspect your work.

Grunt work (like most data entry) that doesn’t require much human touch should absolutely be automated. And if there are other things that can be delegated, like a lot of operations work, don’t hesitate to hire up and empower others with that responsibility.

But there are a lot of things that leaders should keep doing (or do a version of), even after they transform a nascent startup into an established organization.

These responsibilities are more or less evergreen because they are all about human connection, and employees + community members feel deeply cared for when their leaders took the time to unscalably carry them out. Creating a culture of care is essential to the success of almost any organization, even if the long-term impact of investing in human connection isn’t easily quantified in the present term.

Here are some examples of unscalable, deeply important leadership work related to human connection:

• Meeting 1:1 w/ certain teammates on a recurring basis ??
• Creating the spaces and conditions so that others can form meaningful relationships with one another ??
• Interacting in digital community spaces—reading, reacting, and responding to messages on Discord/Slack/etc ??
• Shouting individual people out for specific work they do ??
• Showing interest in teammates’ lives outside of work ??
• Providing personalized feedback on documents/creative output ??
• Showing up to in-person team bonding activities ??

Speaking from experience, the more an organization grows, the more that unscalable interactions with leadership feel meaningful.

Douglas Conant was more than aware of this. As CEO of Campbell Soup Co., he wrote 30,000 thank-you notes ???to his employees.

Conant, who now runs a Philadelphia leadership consultancy, said expressing gratitude was key to turning around Campbells, which was struggling when he took the reins there in 2001.

He said managers tend to focus on fixing what's broken and forget to celebrate successes. So he started writing thank-you notes—10 or 20 of them each day, by hand, during his train ride home—to company staffers.

"I wanted them to know it was from me, that I was personally paying attention," Conant said. "What I found is, the more I say, 'Thank you for a job well done,' the more engaged the people I work with become; the more they celebrate the contributions of their peers."

Campbells has over 19,000 employees. Imagine getting a note from the CEO. That would make your day!

If you are just starting off in your career or happen to become the next Douglas Conant and Elon Musk, you must acknowledge that some work—that you may be tempted to automate or delegate—will always be important. Being effective means continuing to invest time in your relationships with the people around you to ensure the flourishing of your organization.

Simply put, there isn’t (and in my opinion, shouldn't be) a way around centering human connection as a leader.

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Speaking of leadership, I help run Civics Unplugged, a global community and education organization known for our free, world-class leadership program for high schoolers seeking to become civic innovators.

If you are or know a high schooler ready to build the future and change the world, tell them to apply to CU’s Civic Innovators Fellowship: https://www.civicsunplugged.org/fellowship

Applications are due Feb 1st, and the journey starts Feb 4th.