Good leadership

You need good leadership to successfully scale a company.

When Angela Ahrendts went to work for Apple after a stratospheric career as CEO of Burberry, it was a tough transition. Everything was different. She had gone from fashion to technology, England to America – and, suddenly, she was the boss of 70,000 people.

Ahrendts knew she needed to communicate her vision to all her new employees. But, as a parent of three teens, she knew that young Apple employees were unlikely to read long emails. So she made a three-minute iPhone video that was natural and real; she didn’t even edit out a phone call from her daughter.

It was an excellent start. The video was such a hit that she made one every week for four years, regardless of where in the world she happened to be.

When your company suddenly scales up, it’s almost like you’re now at a new, larger company – much like Ahrendts’s shift to Apple. Everything changes. To keep employees inspired, it’s important to sustain a steady drumbeat of purpose and motivation.

To do this well, you need compassion, wisdom, and clarity of vision. This means being willing to listen, learn, and take advice – even from those in positions below you. It also means being able to accept constructive criticism. Sometimes, this can mean encouraging opposing viewpoints. Mailchimp founder Ben Chestnut notes that startups are like pirate ships – but when they scale big, the culture makes a necessary adjustment. It goes from piracy to the Navy, with an influx of rules, accountability, and good behavior.

When hiring new staff, Marissa Mayer – Google employee number 20 – didn’t hire MBAs with lots of experience. Instead, she’d hire a smart 23-year-old and give them a huge portfolio – like all of Gmail. Just as they were getting comfortable with their division, she’d have them switch into another division and challenge them to learn something new. This bold leadership move didn’t just give Mayer a nimble, cross-trained managerial team; it also resulted in a tsunami of new ideas that emerged from the synergy of a bunch of smart people being exposed to multiple ways of doing things.

Mayer’s leadership yielded tremendous good for Google – and for the world, as many of these employees went forth and started their own companies. In the best of situations, great leadership naturally flows into the final aspect of scaling big: doing good.