3 Ways to Scale Great Leadership

There he was.

The CEO of our Fortune 500 company was standing at the edge of our contact center floor, unscheduled and unannounced, having come from our corporate headquarters in New Jersey to our operations center in the Midwest.

He was smiling as he watched our teams work. I had no idea how long he had been standing there, but as the VP of Operations, I was curious.

As I approached, he said, “Adam, I love stopping by this center whenever I’m in the area. You can just feel it in the air here. It’s like a breath of fresh air. Everyone is so engaged, and you can see how well they work together.”

Then he said something that surprised me.

“I just wish there was a way we could scale this across our whole company.”

My immediate response was an enthusiastic, “You can!”

I wasn’t surprised he admired the culture. It had become a performance advantage. For five consecutive years, our organization broke its own records across all the major measures, including revenue, sales, customer satisfaction, cost efficiency and employee retention.

We had also earned a national industry award for our culture, and a leading best-practice organization independently studied our approach and published it in its annual white paper.

What surprised me was who was asking.

This CEO was one of the strongest leaders I had worked for in more than 30 years of operational leadership. He was so highly regarded that he had even been pulled out of retirement to help take the company public.

That experience taught me something that has shaped my work ever since: You can be a great leader and still not know how to scale great leadership.

It eventually influenced my decision to formalize the leadership approach I had developed over decades of operating experience and build my consulting company around helping organizations create transformational alignment.

Our company already had an excellent leadership development program. But strong leadership development can still produce capable leaders who define and practice leadership differently.

One leader may define accountability primarily as consequences. Another may see it primarily as coaching. One may recognize employees frequently while another rarely does. One may communicate openly while another shares information only when necessary.

Each may be a capable leader. Yet each is sending a different message to employees.

So, how do you scale great leadership across an organization? Here are three places to start.

1. Clarify the culture and leadership expectations you want to scale

Before leaders can align, they need to know what they are aligning to.

Creating organizational alignment requires intentional design and development. Start by creating shared understanding around the mission, vision, values, foundational beliefs and leadership behaviors required to bring them to life.

What does accountability mean here? What does good communication look like? How should leaders coach performance, recognize success, build trust and make decisions?

2. Align leaders around a shared leadership operating system

Leadership development strengthens individual capability. Developing organizational alignment requires its own intentional design, creating consistency in how that capability is applied across the organization.

In our organization, that alignment came from aligning our leaders around a shared approach to leadership, including how we communicated, coached, held people accountable and reinforced our culture.

I eventually formalized that approach into the 7 Cs to Success® Leadership Operating System. A proven, comprehensive leadership system gives leaders a common language, shared principles and a repeatable approach they can consistently apply across teams and situations.

3. Reinforce leadership in the moments that matter

Training creates understanding, but culture is reinforced in real time.

It happens when a leader gives feedback, recognizes an employee, handles conflict, explains a decision, responds to a mistake or addresses poor performance.

Those moments shape how employees interpret the culture. Organizations therefore need ongoing coaching, reinforcement and tools that help leaders apply their shared leadership approach when those moments occur.

Great leadership scales when leaders share a clear understanding of what it looks like, use a common approach to practice it and reinforce that approach consistently through the interactions that shape the employee experience.

That’s why I believe: Transformational performance begins with transformational alignment.