Moving from an individual contributor to a manager to a leadership role not only brings an overwhelming increase in responsibilities, but also significantly increases the size of your team. You’re no longer responsible for yourself or just a small group, but a large number of people count on your leadership.
Whether it’s org restructuring, sudden layoffs, budget cuts, or a natural part of your career growth, handling 2x or 3x more people can be a big challenge. As complexity shoots up, more decisions need to be made, meetings fill up your calendar, chat messages pile up, and 1:1s multiply. The sheer volume of things that demand your attention can feel like an avalanche—you may feel overwhelmed and buried with tasks, messages, and unresolved problems.
Without a proper strategy to manage the increased scale, an increase in responsibilities and expectations can feel unmanageable, diminishing your ability to manage and lead effectively. Every day can feel like drinking from a firehose, making it hard to focus and keep up with the demands of the job. Days end not with a sense of accomplishment, but a feeling of relief as you barely manage to survive and get through the day without completely losing your mind.
But you can’t operate like this forever—without scaling yourself, you’ll eventually feel drained, exhausted, and burnt out. To manage a leadership avalanche without feeling buried, you need to be strategic in your approach.
Leadership at scale—and leadership as you scale—means you’re constantly adapting and evolving. You can’t follow a single style or approach. You’re always leading through transitions. Your company is always changing around you. And this means you’re naturally going to have a very resilient kind of leadership, producing a resilient team and company.
― Reid Hoffman
Managing large teams requires a thoughtful approach to how you prioritize, what you communicate, where you spend your time, and which processes need to be eliminated as they’re no longer serving you well. You need to be flexible in your approach—rigidity can make scaling up harder as you refuse to learn and adapt along the way.
Here are the 5 strategies you need to adopt to scale your leadership when tasked with the responsibility to handle a large team:
Reset expectations instead of clinging to old promises.
When working with a small team, you may be quite involved in day-to-day responsibilities, be part of team discussions, and have regular feedback conversations with them. Over a period of time, this builds a certain expectation around your involvement—when to reach out, when to ask for advice, and when to seek your approval. People get used to a certain way of working, as every interaction with you shapes their thinking.
Weekly one-on-ones
Instant reply to chat messages
Getting your inputs without scheduling a meeting
These may be the perks when you’re dealing with a small team. However, as your responsibilities multiply and team size increases, you can’t continue operating in the same way. You can no longer hold weekly one-on-ones with each team member. You may not get the time to reply to their message as you’re held up with back-to-back meetings. Getting your inputs may require blocking a slot on your calendar, as ad hoc meetings may no longer be a possibility.
These changes, unless communicated verbally, can turn into a source of distress in the team—not getting the attention they’re used to can be quite upsetting and demotivating. You’ve to reset your team’s expectations. You’ve to clarify the changes required to function with a large team. You’ve to make them understand that old ways of operating will no longer be effective.
Proactively reset their expectations so that the team is attuned to them from the beginning:
- Decide the frequency of 1-1 meetings and schedule them on the calendar.
- Discuss when/how they can reach out to you—clearly distinguishing between issues that require immediate attention vs those that can be delayed.
- Address any concerns they have around your availability and approachability. Seek regular feedback to make it better.
- Communicate any other changes that may impact how they do their work.
Effective scaling depends on believing and living a shared mindset throughout your group, division, or organization.
― Robert I. Sutton
Any promises you made earlier to your team—directly or indirectly—may no longer be relevant when dealing with a large team. Breaking them without resetting expectations can lead to decreased morale, frustration, and a lack of trust in the team. As soon as your team size multiplies, discuss changes around your involvement and seek their alignment.
Focus on clarity and communicating what matters.
Communication problems are the biggest source of misery in most organizations. They lead to confusion, misalignment of goals, and even friction between people. Long debates, unnecessary meetings, and issues drag on when people in the team aren’t clear on their goals, or they conflict with priorities across other teams and functions. Time and energy are wasted. Deadlines are missed. Blame games and finger-pointing become the norm.
With a small team, communication problems are still manageable as you can give your attention to every issue that crops up and fight your way through it. However, as your team size multiplies, you can no longer rely on a reactive approach. You’ll not have the bandwidth to attend to every issue that shows up or even resolve it in a timely manner. You may not even know about the problems till they have become a big issue. Reacting to communication problems instead of solving them proactively can turn into a nightmare—as you try to keep up and play a catch-up game.
You can’t avoid all communication problems, but you can definitely minimize the gap by adopting practices that can make communication less painful and more productive for everyone. To do this:
- Seek alignment on priorities and agree on a common measure of success. Success is more likely when everyone works on shared goals.
- Speaking up is important to communicate your ideas and opinions, but it shouldn’t refrain you from also listening to others. Communication isn’t a one-way street. Treat it as a two-sided road.
- Expecting others to register key information by saying it once is a big mistake. Unless you repeat it multiple times, it will not get the time and attention it deserves.
- Good questions have the power to unlock creative thinking and surface out hidden problems. Use every opportunity to explore your curiosity by asking questions.
- Assumptions when not validated can lead to gaps in expectations. Avoid frustration, angst, and anxiety by seeking alignment upfront.
- Blaming, shaming, and complaining do not solve problems. Instead of pointing fingers, identify what caused these communication gaps and how you can avoid them in the future.
- Avoiding conflicts or delaying them makes the situation worse. Step out of your comfort zone and embrace the discomfort.
Over-communicating is the glue that holds a high-performing team together and keeps them focused in the same direction. And, it circles back to clarity. Without good, consistent communication, you don’t have clarity.
― Lee Ellis
Communication can be less chaotic in a large team when you’re proactive—clarifying goals, seeking alignment, handling conflicts, and repeating important information often to ensure it doesn’t get missed. Stay on top of your communication game—it can keep you afloat even during the most challenging and stressful times.
Multiply your impact through coaching, not instructions.
When working with a small team, you may be involved in the nitty-gritty of every project and every task, enabling you to delegate work without losing your sense of control. You may keep a close watch over every task, be involved in how each one is done, and step in at the right time to unblock people and help them make progress on their goals.
However, as your team scales, you can no longer pay attention to every detail. You can no longer be involved in every issue or each decision. You need to shift from a 10-foot view to a 100-foot view—you have to start assigning not just the task, but a larger scope of work. You have to delegate not just what needs to be done, but also how it must be done.
You can achieve this only by empowering your team—helping them build the essential skills to make decisions, solve problems, navigate complexity, and take accountability for their actions. Trying to micromanage will prevent your team from building the essential skills to learn and grow, limit your team’s collective outcome, and cause you to feel stress and burnout. This requires letting go of control and a mindset shift from doing to leading others.
To delegate responsibly to a large team:
- Break down your goals and map them to different team members based on their skills or the opportunities they need. Be careful to avoid delegating work that shouldn’t be done at all or a task that only you need to fulfill.
- Delegate the “what” of the problem, support it with “why,” and empower your team to work out the “how.” Stating the expected outcome without the method enables your team to achieve better results.
- Don’t abdicate your team. Support and coach them to make the right decisions and continue making forward progress.
- No process can improve without incorporating the feedback loop. Work with your team to determine how you are doing and what you can do to be better.
Delegate responsibilities, not tasks. In Start, you are delegating tasks, since you’re still involved in all the decision-making. But here in Scale, you’ve got to stop delegating tasks and instead move entire responsibilities to members of your team so that you’re not having to think about every item every day.
― Colin C. Campbell
Trying to keep a tight control over your team by dictating every task, every decision, and their every move will prevent you from scaling and achieving org goals. Instead, invest in building your team’s skills. Trust them to handle bigger and better responsibilities. Coach them to think and act independently.
Reduce clutter and eliminate drag.
You may establish a set of processes when working with a small team that enables them to be efficient in working together and getting things done. For example: A stand-up meeting every morning, design discussions with the entire team, conducting pre-mortems for every project, or multiple levels of code reviews.
These processes that worked well with a small team can tremendously slow down a large team—people in the team can waste a lot of time and energy by sticking to old methods of working that no longer keep them efficient. Whether it’s tech processes, collaboration practices, or communication methods, you can’t stick with them just because they worked in the past. You’ve to identify the elements that can create unnecessary drag and reduce your team’s productivity instead of speeding it up.
Reduce and declutter superfluous processes by following these steps:
- List down the different practices and processes followed by your team.
- Talk to your team members, identify what’s working and what’s adding to the burden. Pay close attention to things that feel unnecessary or impractical with a large team.
- Gather inputs on what they might be missing, which can ease out goals progress and help your team achieve success.
- Introduce small changes at a slow pace. Sudden large disruptions in habitual processes can make team members resistant to change.
- Set up regular feedback discussions to learn, change, and adapt because what works today might be completely irrelevant tomorrow.
A great process isn’t designed; it is evolved. So, the important thing isn’t your process; the important thing is your process for improving your process.
― Henrik Kniberg
Pay attention to how your team operates on a day-to-day basis—what makes them go full throttle and what adds useless pauses to their momentum. By safeguarding your team’s time and channeling it towards constructive processes, you can reduce the mental clutter and create a positive work environment.
Manage your energy, not just your time.
When the scope of work is small and interactions limited, you may not feel drained at the end of each day. You may find yourself with plenty of energy to make decisions, solve problems, and guide your team.
However, as your team size increases, the number of decisions you have to make in a day shoots up. A series of these small decisions scattered throughout the day may seem harmless as they demand only a small fraction of your mental energy, but as the day goes on and you continue to expend from this seemingly reserved pool of energy, your mental capacity to make decisions starts depleting.
Unlike physical fatigue, which you can feel and instantly express, the mental fatigue that comes after making multiple decisions is not visible to you. It makes you reckless—you start acting impulsively instead of taking the time to think through the consequences of your decisions. You look for the safest and the easiest option, which is to stick with the status quo, and resist the idea of a change since it’s uncomfortable and demands a lot of energy.
A tired mental machinery also makes it hard to process information and separate noise from signal. This may lead to overthinking—the tendency to think too much and move back and forth on ideas without the ability to give them a specific direction. When fatigued, your brain’s regulatory power weakens, causing you to lose control over your emotions. This makes everything around you feel more intense than normal—small mistakes can make you furious, disagreements may cause irritation, and you may react aggressively to things that are not in line with your expectations.
Not managing your energy—both mentally and physically—can feel quite suffocating as depleted energy makes it hard to focus and handle the demand and pressure of the job. To conserve your energy and use it well:
- Control the number of decisions you make by choice—declutter and delegate—and put all your energy into getting them right.
- Block a dedicated slot every morning or the previous night to plan what you wish to achieve each day. By not spending mental cycles in deciding every instant what to do next, you can avoid decision fatigue and free up more resources to do the real work.
- Tackle your most challenging task first, one that demands your mental capacity to process information at its best.
- Pay attention to your body—eat and sleep well, incorporate regular breaks into your schedule, exercise, and stick to other healthy routines.
Managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Great leaders are stewards of organizational energy. They begin by effectively managing their own energy. As leaders, they must mobilize, focus, invest, channel, renew and expand the energy of others.
— Jim Loehr
Trying to save time without optimizing for energy can be useless, as you may have plenty of time left, but not the energy to be effective. By consciously adopting practices and routines that minimize energy consumption and maximize outcomes, you can achieve the desired scale.
Summary
- Your involvement with your team can dramatically change when shifting from a small group to a large one. You can no longer be available and approachable in the same way. To ensure your team understands the changes around your involvement, explicitly reset expectations.
- Doubling down on communication with a large team is a smart strategy to ensure team members are clear on roles, aligned on goals, and there’s less confusion and misunderstanding. Communicate often, repeat information that needs extra attention, and ask questions to seek alignment across teams and reduce gaps in expectations.
- Scaling a large team requires empowering team members to go above and beyond their roles. You have to trust them to handle bigger and better responsibilities. You have to let go of the desire to dictate how everything must be done. Coach, don’t spoon-feed.
- Processes that allow small teams to stay productive can slow down a large team. Instead of sticking to old methods and ways of working, identify what can speed things up and what may get in the way of making progress and moving forward.
- Your energy, just like your time, is a precious resource, which, if not managed well, can get in the way of scaling a large team. Your energy gets depleted with every decision you make, and not paying attention to how and where you spend it can lead to poor choices and terrible decisions. Conserve it for when you need it the most.
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