Every successful start-up has a built-in trap: The things that made you successful stop working. Though that’s not quite accurate; it’s not that they stop working — it’s that they can’t keep working, past a certain point. A young business typically thrives on a charismatic founder, a lean and hungry team, and a bootstrapping attitude that thinks laterally to solve emerging problems.
To start a business, you must improvise constantly; to sustain a business, you must develop consistent systems. Without this, the very things that brought you initial success become bottlenecks that prevent growth. To solve this problem, you must scale your people. Not in mere numerical terms — in the absence of solid systems, more bodies in the building won’t solve the problem. Rather, you must scale their authority and autonomy.
A small business may thrive on speed, personal relationships, and improvisation; a larger one needs delegation, repeatable processes, and distributed decision-making. This requires employees who have a mindset for solving problems independently, coupled with the authority to actually make those decisions. This is about more than merely delegation; founders who delegate tasks without delegating decisions create the illusion of teamwork while ultimately remaining responsible for everything. And when every decision, relationship, and problem must run through the founder, the founder has effectively become the limiting factor for organizational growth.
This is a bitter pill to swallow for many founders who have absorbed being “the fixer” as a core piece of their identity, and hesitate to give up that leadership role. But the next stage of growth still requires a leader, just a different kind of leader — one who moves away from doing the work and toward building the people, systems, and culture that allow the work to continue indefinitely.
In this model, the leader’s success is not measured by personal output, but by organizational capability. And as that organizational capability increases, truly magical math begins to happen: the business gains capacity without any proportional increase in effort from the founder. Ultimately, this is about understanding a founder’s leverage; exponential ambitions require exponential effort, so a founder must locate the levers he can pull to create that effort: developing employees, clarifying roles, building trust, and optimizing teams are the high-leverage decisions.
Leveraging the SHIFTS Model
My SHIFTS model is a blueprint leaders can use to examine their current bottlenecks and re-tool for exponential success:
- See — Leaders must see three things: What’s working? Where are we stuck? And where are we going? These three things must be communicated as visually as possible to the team.
- Hear — Leaders must take the time to truly hear from their team; what is working for them? What is not? What is the primary friction point they encounter as they carry out their duties?
- Insight — As leaders and team members examine what looks as it should, what doesn’t look quite right yet, and what each is hearing from the other, insight will emerge — often from unlikely sources.
- Formulate — At this point, it becomes the indispensable leader’s job to develop systems that resolve the issues identified by the previous steps. The temptation will be to fix it yourself; the health of your business requires you to fight this impulse. Rather, you must make change sustainable by intentionally building new habits and systems into daily operations, rather than treating leadership as a one-time exercise.
- Transform — It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll get it right on the first try; great businesses understand that this process is rarely perfect and necessarily iterative. Indeed, as you reach for transformation, you’ll often find yourself going back to steps one and two again, taking a walk around the offices to explore what you can see and hear that will make the next plan better than the first attempt.
- Succeed — This is the fun part; with a cohesive vision and a shared vocabulary, awareness becomes action and action leads to meaningful change. At this point, workflows improve, bottlenecks evaporate, and friction disappears.
Moving from zero to start-up requires little more than a great idea and a relentless founder. Moving from start-up to scale-up, though, requires changing behavior, not just intentions: delegating ownership of outcomes, establishing clear decision rights, and allowing teams to learn from mistakes. This is how an effective leader scales his people.
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