Scaling Up Excellence summary

So, you want to spread excellent behavior in your firm? Before you start any kind of scaling effort, put your running shoes on – and you’re not just going for a sprint! Scaling is like running a marathon, so be prepared for a long, strenuous journey before feeling the satisfaction of finishing the race.

When setting out to improve your organization’s performance, you need endurance to overcome unforeseen setbacks and nasty roadblocks.

Now that you’ve decided you’re in it for the long term, it’s time to learn about one of the most important trade-offs on your scaling endeavor.

When trying to spread outstanding performance, you’ll most likely navigate between two poles.

Imagine you’re at the beginning of your scaling endeavor. Where exactly will you start?

Your first step is communicating the scaling effort in a way that motivates your organization to want to scale. There are two ways to go about this message: either you target people’s beliefs or their behavior.

So you’ve taken the first few steps in your scaling journey. Now what?

As your scaling effort grows, you’ll need to bring in more people, more organizational layers and more resources to keep it growing. However, one of the main pitfalls of scaling up is adding too much complexity before it’s necessary.

Involving the right people in your scaling effort is critical to its success.

But you don’t only need excellent people with the right skills and training, you also need people who are accountable and act in the company’s interests at all times. The difficulty is to find people with both excellent skills and accountability.

What’s even better than having excellent and accountable people who spread exemplary behavior throughout your organization?

Deep connections between as many of them as possible: the power of spreading good behavior lies, not only in people, but in numbers. In other words, diversity will help spread good behaviors more reliably than anything else.

One of the biggest threats to your scaling effort is bad behavior: it is extremely contagious and can cancel out the benefits or even destroy excellent behavior.

Many of us have lived through it before: we’ve worked in a team where one member undermined the entire group’s performance by lying or taking credit for others’ performance.

There’s just one last piece of the puzzle necessary for completing a successful scaling approach.

Namely, positioning yourself in the future and imagining that your scaling initiative has already been completed. Experts call this technique performing a project premortem.