Leading at scale: when leaning in harder makes it worse

You know how to lead. You have been doing it successfully for years, and yet...

You’ve landed a much bigger role, a larger mandate, a wider scope. Exciting. But, somewhere in the first few months, a weird, nagging disquiet starts to make itself known. It is not that you are failing, exactly, but something feels a bit... off. Decisions drag. Information arrives distorted. You spend your days in meetings with your leadership team yet feel further from the reality of the business. You are working harder, but the organisation is not moving faster.

This catches almost every leader who makes this jump to leading at scale.

The Difference Between Fifty and Five Thousand

Leading a hundred people is distinct from leading fifty, but the differences are manageable. You still know your leadership team. You maintain genuine relationships with the senior players. If something breaks, you can gather the right people in a room within a day and fix it. Your influence is personal, reinforced by structure, and held together by direct, repeated contact.

Leading five thousand people is a whole different species of challenge. The personal relationships that anchored your leadership now cover only a fraction of the organisation. The culture you built is now mediated through layers (upon layers!) of managers you did not hire and do not know. Security stops you – they have no idea who you are. The decisions that used to flow through you must now flow without you, simply because there are too many of them to handle personally.

The trap is, your old methods still work, but only locally. You can still influence your direct reports. You can still resolve a crisis by pulling the right people together. But the organisation as a whole can begin to drift because the connective tissue of your leadership cannot stretch far enough to hold it all together. And you feel exhausted from trying... right?

From Hub to Architect

Your leadership qualities and strengths must now be expressed through systems rather than solely through personal presence.

In your old role, you were the hub. Information flowed to you, decisions flowed from you, and your personal judgment held the system together. At scale, you can’t be the hub; it just won’t work. There’s too much information and too many decisions. Instead, think of yourself as the architect of a system where good decisions happen without you.

Leaders who make this transition successfully don’t abandon what made them effective – that too is exhausting, and it’s also a highway to nowhere. They still value relationships, clarity, directness and they understand that they still need to be visible as the leader. They recognise, however, that shift is from relying on your influence as the single hub of the organisation to designing the architecture that allows influence to operate in a distributed way, at a distance.

The Instinct to Lean In

When things feel slow or disconnected, the instinct is to lean in harder, have more meetings, send more emails, ask for more reports. Personally review more decisions. The logic goes: if the organisation isn’t moving fast enough, drive it harder.

But uh-oh... usually, leaning in harder at scale creates bottlenecks and paralysis, not momentum. Why? Every decision that waits for your (actual or perceived) personal approval is a decision not being made by the person closest to the problem. Every meeting you attend to "stay across things" and “provide some impetus” is a meeting where your presence inadvertently suppresses the initiative you are trying to encourage.

To be robust, rather than one hub, systems need multiple nodes distributed throughout – operating within a system where you, as leader, set the vision and the tone. The harder you try to be the single central hub, the more fragile the system becomes. So exactly how do you let go? More on that next week – but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts. How have you made the shift to leading at scale? Where have you seen it done well... or not?

Stepping up means letting go. If you are navigating the transition to leading at scale and need support reshaping your leadership approach for a larger system, let's talk.

Until next week,

Madeleine

I help accomplished professionals untangle difficult career questions so they can thrive in work and life.

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