This is a long answer, so I figure it deserves its own thread. Want a scaled team? There is one most important thing that matters: the ability to turn problems into instead of a . Way more https://twitter.com/xsvfat/status/1360095973465202694

The more scope you own the more important it is to decrease chaos and increase order. When things are going off the rails (and they always are), the ability for people to identify it and calmly bring it back to order is a life saver. These are problems.

Imagine a friend calls and they have a huge boulder in their yard (). They want to move it but it’s too large to lift on their own. They build a plan, get pulleys, list out the steps, and when you get asked to help your role is clear and it’s hard but within your ability.

You can help with a rock problem. It’s low stress, contained, and doable. If there are 100 people in the same space working on rock problems, it’s busy and sane.

Now imagine a friend calls and they are going away for a weekend and they ask you to babysit their monkey . You don’t know how to care for a monkey, how to feed it, where it would sleep, or whether it’ll chew on things and throw poop everywhere.

An organization filled with monkeys is an unmitigated disaster. Unclean escalations, drama, risks growing bigger and people running around like with no heads.

In practice, the most important skill to teach people up and down your org is the skill to take a reasoned look at their problems and turn them into rocks vs monkeys. Monkey makers cause orgs to barely function.

As a leader, I think of my job as to reduce risk and delegate. Take problems that would be too chaotic or too much for people in the org to handle and get them packaged into hard but doable problems and pass them off to people who are repeating the same process.

How does this look in the real world? A major initiative with a new 3rd party partnership is seeing issues where the partner isn’t scaling to the level we need.

The leader quickly thinks through a problem statement and writes it down, generates a rubric of what’s important, thinks through options and makes a recommendation. They cleanly escalate to you and you have a fast but reasoned conversation to a decision.

The leader freaks out. You hear from another executive in the company that the partner isn’t good. The team is frustrated and trying to push forward. An engineer is trying to get on the phone with the partner to tell them their stuff is shit. It’s chaos and drama.

We’ve all worked with makers. A leader who can teach their future leaders to be solvers and either retrain or manage out makers wins the day in the long run every time.

Teach and reward calmness, judgment, and organization with clean escalation and you’ll find yourself rewarded 100x. People copy what you do and what gets rewarded. Orgs find center of gravity around drama sometimes, you can’t let it happen. /end

Oh ya, this is a core of what I am teaching in scaling product delivery at @reforge this spring too with @ibringtraffic