Want to learn the ideas in Scaling Leadership better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
Video Summaries of Scaling Leadership
We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Scaling Leadership, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams.
1-Page Summary of Scaling Leadership
Scale equals growth, life’s most essential dynamic.
“Life scales, or it dies.” For example, a locust tree sheds millions of seeds. Each seed could grow into another giant locust tree and produce millions more seeds. This is because of scale. Businesses are like this too. The basic business imperative is toward growth in order to survive; without growth and scale, businesses die. To secure financing for sustainable growth, business leaders must scale up with the growth of their organizations by securing funding and recruiting employees as well.”
In business, scaling up leadership calls for the intelligent, effective development of new leaders.
Businesses need to develop leaders to take over as the business grows. They must find high quality leaders and train them so that they can be effective in their roles. Reliable growth requires innovation, adaptability, sustainability, agility and engagement.
Leadership can grow a firm, but it’s not easy to scale. When you have that growth, you might want to hire professionals and move up the corporate ladder. If you’re not ready for that challenge yet, your company could fail. To avoid this problem, work on yourself first by delegating authority and training others so they can lead themselves well; then gradually grow when you feel confident in their capabilities—it’ll be easier to manage them if they are already self-sufficient enough to handle some things on their own.
Leaders who strive to increase their leadership skills engage in a bold spiritual journey.
To be a good leader, you must improve yourself. To do that, you should go through a “spiritual boot camp” where you train to become better people and leaders. By doing this, you learn how to ask for help when needed and understand humility.
Leaders should take three steps to “scale their leadership” and positively transform their companies.
To improve your leadership skills, you should examine yourself using a self-evaluation tool. In their book Immunity to Change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey suggest that leaders who want to change should focus on one big thing—the single change that will unlock their leadership potential.
“Create leadership teams” – Think of your team as a group of leaders. Create an agenda for developing their individual and collective leadership skills.
Build leadership systems by building a developmental organization. This can be done by institutionalizing your development agenda.
Leaders range across a “full spectrum” of three types of leadership.
Leadership comes in three levels. The first level is reactive, where leaders are not very innovative but they can react quickly to problems and challenges. The second level is creative, where leaders are more innovative but less reactive than the first group of leaders. Finally, there’s an integral level of leadership that combines both innovation and reactivity into one package.
Reactive leaders are always on the defensive. They micromanage, stifle creativity and reduce productivity. Their employees become burned out and most leaders are reactive.
Conventional leaders are stuck in their ways and don’t like to deviate from what everyone else is doing. Creative leaders, on the other hand, look at things differently than most people do. They’re open-minded and imaginative. They focus on achieving significant goals rather than just getting by or being average. Creative leaders make it a point to promote creativity within their companies because that helps them succeed more often than not. Firms led by creative leaders tend to be agile, innovative, adaptive and high-performing as a result of these traits.
