Impact and excellence go hand in hand. To make a real difference in the real world, you have to be at your best.
But if you have an idea, you want it to scale. You need your impact to grow beyond you. This is why empowerment is so tricky. Leaders, often with more experience and perspective, hesitate to give away something that they could do better.
Without empowerment, impact never scales.
How do you have impact without control? How do you scale past what you can do while maintaining a level of excellence?
Rethinking Excellence
Leaders: if you want to scale you have to learn a new kind of excellence. You have to shift from being the best in the world at creating XYZ to being the best in the world at empowering and leading people who create XYZ.
Doing and empowering a uniquely different skill sets.
To do requires focus, attention to detail, and grit. To empower others does too, but of a different sort.
Your focus must shift from product to people.
Your attention shifts from developing a thing to developing a person.
Your grit shifts from getting it done to creating a culture where things get done.
You must become obsessive about culture.
Next week I’ll describe four traits of cultures that scale.