A Guide for Leadership Development through Scale

A practical guide for developing leaders as they progress from managing 1–300 people.

Leading yourself

Before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself. This means you know how to work in an organization. You have mastery of the foundational skills of working in a professional setting, including being responsible, reliable, hardworking, organized, communicative, and collaborative. You also tune into the norms of your company culture and adapt your working style appropriately.

Leading a team

To successfully lead a team, you need to know how to lead and manage a group of Individual Contributors (ICs). Typically, your team size is three to ten people, you manage 1–2 “people issues” at a time, and you may do both IC and Manager work.

Management Skills

• Operations: Effective leaders are careful to get their “meeting operations” in excellent order. This means they master the type, frequency and content of their most important meetings. At “leading a team” stage, the most important meetings include: 1:1s, team meetings, and offsites.
• Practices: Leaders must know how to execute on key practices such as performance reviews…