Titanic Challenges Need Titanic Leaders: 3 Mindset Shifts to Awaken Your Large-Scale Leadership

Close your eyes and slowly count to 30.

Once the lookout aboard the RMS Titanic spotted the now-famous iceberg, there were just 30 seconds left until the fateful collision. If you actually stopped to count to 30 at the beginning of this writing, it might’ve seemed like an almost frustratingly long time to sit and wait. However, when you’re steering a passenger ship that extends to almost 900 feet, 30 seconds isn’t enough time to do anything.

Why? Because scale matters — when you’re steering a ship and when you’re piloting an organization from the C-suite.

May is National Global Leadership Month, and May 1st is National Executive Coaching Day. In the business world, these are times set aside for recognizing the specific struggles and unique triumphs of large-scale leadership. When executives operate in high-stakes environments at the national and international level, the pressure to lead people in the right direction can feel magnified many times over. Still, the ocean never stops moving underneath your ship, and all leaders must keep pushing forward — even if there’s ice in the water.

Leaders who succeed on the national and international level don’t do so by accident. They do so because they’ve made some successful shifts from their small-scale style to a type of leadership that is much more capable of steering a giant ship. After decades of coaching large-scale executives from around the world, these are the three mindset shifts I recommend for anyone struggling to scale up their leadership.

1. Make empowerment the first lesson every employee learns.
   One of my favorite classes to teach is a yearly course I put together in Nigeria centered around “National Development.” The course is designed to empower young teenagers with the mindset that they can effectively impact their own surroundings. One of the first things we do as a group is to talk about how we feel we elevate humanity as individuals. This seems like an especially weighty and complex topic for young teens, but it is a crucial stepping stone to our next discussion, which is what can be done to improve our country as a whole.

   Why is this one of my favorite classes? Because it underscores an important lesson for every leader: Empowerment always comes before engagement. Employee empowerment is directly linked to engagement and innovation, and consistent engagement is everything when you’re the leader of a large organization.

   According to Gallup, employee engagement in the United States rarely reaches much higher than 35%, and a lack of engagement results in a nearly $2 trillion loss in productivity every year. The global average is even worse at an abysmal 20%. Even more shocking than this, however, is the fact that “best-practice” organizations typically engage as many as 70% of their employees. And what did Gallup find to be the number one leadership activity to boost engagement? An empowering weekly conversation with management.

2. Choose education over ignorance every single time.
   Let’s step out of the classroom and talk about a different sort of education — educating your employees on the realities of your organization. This isn’t education that comes from granular research or the lips of a noted scholar. Instead, this education can only occur in the wake of open and honest communication. Dishonest organizations feed off ignorance and opaque leadership. Conversely, transparent organizations choose to educate their employees about what’s behind the scenes. In turn, that education builds trust and creates greater gains at every level.

   Transparency is a bit simpler on a small scale. Face-to-face conversations are a more natural part of daily work, and it takes much less effort in general to thoughtfully disseminate information. What’s more, it’s far easier for dishonesty to take root when a large number of leaders and middle managers are contributing to the conversation. That’s likely why although 88% of leaders recognize the importance of transparency at the workplace, only around half are doing anything about it — and only 13% are “doing great things.”

   Nevertheless, large-scale leaders who don’t master persistent employee education are leaving a lot of their potential on the table. Studies show that employees in high-trust workplaces are 76% more engaged and 29% more satisfied with their lives. This means adding extra transparency to your supply chain network, offering open board meeting notes to whoever wants them, and being brutally honest with your team members about why certain decisions are made.

3. Accept that productivity isn’t success unless everyone prospers.
   Large-scale leaders aren’t simply defined by the bottom line. After all, the black and red numbers for national and international organizations can rise and fall many times before any permanent trends emerge. That’s why successful large-scale leaders are obliged to keep a close eye on employee wellness and satisfaction, including overall retention rates and what those mean about the long-term potential of their leadership.

   Hustle culture is losing favor with the business sector, and for good reason. Seventy-seven percent of workers say they’ve experienced burnout, and that same burnout is estimated to cost companies as much as 34% of those employees’ annual salaries. That said, there are still plenty of large-scale leaders scrambling to evolve into the future. In fact, many of the most well-known companies in the U.S. have some of the worst retention rates in the country. If you already knew that, you weren’t very surprised when Apple, Meta, and Tesla stock all recently took a plunge.

   That’s because a large ship needs a happy crew — especially those ships with their sights set on long-term destinations. It’s not enough to simply assign someone to the lookout and be done with it. After all, you’re in charge of a large ship, and you have a long time until you reach the next port. That’s why the best captains not only prepare their ships to be productive, but they also ensure that productivity is sustainable for everyone who keeps the ship going.

There’s ice in the water… 

But that doesn’t mean you have to slow down or drop anchor. Employee engagement is in the basement, and that should give every large-scale leader pause. Beyond that, employees are also searching for more trust and greater transparency, and not all large organizations are prepared to make those changes. However, if you can smoothly make the transition from small-scale style to large-scale leadership, your role as captain can start the process of turning such a large ship. These three simple shifts are the best place to start.

Written by Dr. Sam Adeyemi.
Have you read?
Safest Countries in the World.
Most Productive Countries in the World.
Most peaceful countries in the world.
Most influential financial centers in the world.