Scaling leadership for compounding business outcomes
Updated: 3 days ago
As a business head, you know that next year your business has to deliver more. More revenue, more markets, better margin. Probably without proportionately more people. Barring attrition, the people who will deliver it are the people you have now. The same names, in the same roles, with the same hours in a week.
So the plan is relying on those people getting better. Not marginally better. Better enough to cover the distance between this year's numbers and next year's. It is a simple assumption made, every year, by everyone.
One of the key methods to make this assumption true is 'skill building' that translates into better leadership, which then translates into better business outcomes.
With the uncertainty created by macro economic factors and AI , this method seems incomplete for what it can offer. Here is why.
What do we see in the business world today is that the nature of work and job descriptions has morphed. Execution timelines are being compressed by AI. Analysis, drafting, synthesis and reporting that used to occupy a team for a week now take an afternoon.
All this with the downside: BCG reports that 82% of CEOs are more optimistic about the return on AI than a year ago, while 6% of companies are seeing meaningful value from it in reduced cost or increased revenue.
Work slopping is killing productivity in a different way.
Hence, leaders of today are tested each day to ask:
What the business does differently now that execution is crashed?
What are they not seeing yet?
What are the strategic bets?
What stops, so that freed capacity becomes something rather than quietly filling up again?
What else can a human provide?
In essence, the context is asking leaders to be and do more, to scale in the role they hold, and to be ready for the one above it.
What scaling leadership looks like at each level
At the top CXO level, the ask is that leaders work on future proofing the organisation. The opportunities that are not obvious yet, the threats that are not urgent yet.
For business heads, it means defining the problem worth solving. Which bets are worth the investment and which are not, what gets refused so something else can be resourced. That is strategic thinking in its working form, a sequence of bets and commitments.
In the middle management rung, it means flawless execution through high performance teams. The work is delivered by people who make the calls at their own level, instead of through one pair of hands that everything passes through.
The next year results becomes a challenge when each level operates at one rung below than where they should.
This is not going to get closed by the way of siloed trainings. So a good learning programme is necessary and not sufficient condition for scalability. The question is what else has to be true around it.
Real capability development needs a Long haul:
A pattern of choices that formed over five years does not change in two days. A leader has to make the uncomfortable choice repeatedly, in live situations, before it becomes what they do by default. That is months of real work rather than an event in a calendar.
Development needs to create coherent capability not just a skill:
Leinwand and Mainardi's work on capabilities driven strategy makes a distinction worth borrowing. Advantage comes from a system of a few interlocking capabilities, coherent with how the business creates value, rather than from a long list of competencies. Their capabilities are organisational rather than individual, and that is precisely the bridge leadership development has to cross.
Reinforcement.
The gap in capability exists between sessions, which one time miracle sessions cant fix. Behaviour change happens with continuous reinforcement done at a systemic level, across provider and organisation.
What this means depending on where you sit
If you run a business: The question is not who to send on what. It is which of the three levels is most uncovered right now, what can move the needle and what can be absorbed.
If you are the CHRO: This is a capability argument rather than a programme argument, which means it belongs in the strategy conversation. The useful question to put to the business is which capabilities the next year plan assumes, and at which levels.
If you run L&D: The brief you are handed will name a level and a topic. The more useful first move is to ask which capability the business is short of and across how many levels, because the answer changes what you commission rather than just who attends it.
Your plan already assumes your leaders will scale. The only open question is whether that happens by design or by hope.
Written by: Priya Venkatesan, Founder & Partner, Ālokana.
About Ālokana
Ālokana is an executive coaching, training and advisory firm.
We build leadership capability at three levels: future proofing the organisation, with CXOs and top teams (Atlas); choosing the bets worth making, with business heads (Apex); and execution through high performance teams, with senior managers (Ascent).
