7 Proven Tips for Building Enthusiasm and Ownership of the Scaling Up Process Among All Employees

Your executive leadership team is enthusiastic about the Scaling Up process and its ability to increase your organization’s cash flow, profitability, and valuation, while reducing the time required to manage the business. 

But how do you get the rest of your employees on board – especially with the changes they’ll need to make in their daily work lives to ensure that the process works? 

Here are 7 proven tips for rolling out Scaling Up beyond the executive leadership team. 

1. Ensure Transparency and Accountability.  

To achieve the results promised by implementing Scaling Up, you need to keep the entire organization focused on and working toward a set of clearly defined goals, priorities and numbers. This process becomes easier when everyone can see and understand the scoreboard. 

Just as in sports, the scoreboard is the place that anyone within the company can reference at any time and know, with a simple glance, how the organization as a whole, as well as individual teams, are doing on achieving priorities. 

As you can imagine, the use of a company-wide scoreboard brings transparency and accountability to the implementation process. For example, let’s say your Critical Number for the year is to sign 100 new clients. In the past, the sales department and executive leadership team would be aware of progress toward this goal, but the rest of the company would likely be left in the dark. With Scaling Up, however, the scoreboard would reveal up-to-the-minute progress on the Critical Number – plus how all other departments were doing on their own priorities that support organizational priorities. 

For the scoreboard to do its job, it needs to be a living, breathing part of everyday operations and something that is easily shared with your team. What type of scoreboard should you use? 

• Good: A spreadsheet is a basic tool to get started. But you’ll likely find that a spreadsheet is too cumbersome to use for long. 
• Better: Project management tools such as Asana or Monday.com. Advanced versions often have the ability to set and measure progress toward goals. 
• Best: The Scaling Up Scoreboard, software built specifically for use with the Scaling Up process. 

2. Leverage Middle Managers.  

To unleash the full power of Scaling Up, the executive leadership team should spend more of its time on vision and strategy. Since one of the goals of Scaling Up is to reduce the amount of time needed to manage the business, this means finding ways to free up time – not increasing the number of hours the management team works. 

In other words … delegation. All members of the executive leadership team should review their individual responsibilities and find items that can be shifted to middle management. A key rule of thumb is that if someone else can handle a responsibility at least 85 percent as well as you can, it’s time to delegate that task. 

When middle management picks up their share of the responsibility for implementing Scaling Up, the executive team will have the time they need to focus on charting a path forward. 

3. Consistent Delegation and Implementation Across All Departments. 

If the executive team delegates more of its responsibilities to middle management, you’ll end up with bottlenecks at the middle management level – unless they, too, delegate more. Here lies a secret for successful Scaling Up implementation: All departments should be cascading responsibility downward consistently. 

Having a good platform helps manage this process. Ideally, planning, execution, and communication activities should be stored in a centralized tool. Responsibilities and accountability can then be shared across the full team, while dashboards keep everyone on track with real-time progress updates.  

4. Vertical Alignment.  

When it comes to achieving the Critical Number and other organizational objectives, “Many hands make light work” is definitely true. Achieving company priorities is nearly impossible if only the executive leadership team is focused on these goals.  

When exploring ways to roll out Scaling Up beyond the executive leadership team, check to ensure that priorities at the departmental and personal level are aligned with company-wide priorities. Not all departmental priorities rise to the level of an organizational priority. However, it’s generally the case that all organizational priorities flow down to departmental priorities. 

Keep in mind that delegation of responsibilities and setting of priorities isn’t enough. Also make sure that the executive leadership team is continually reinforcing engagement and encouraging contribution toward organizational priorities. Acknowledge, recognize and reward the behaviors you want to see from your employees.  

5. Create a Consistent Meeting Cadence.  

Scaling Up involves the use of four specific types of meetings. To roll out Scaling Up beyond the leadership team, the annual and quarterly planning meeting is particularly important. 

The main agenda for these one- to three-day offsite planning meetings is to work through and update the Growth Tools. Set these meetings well in advance, and try to get in a consistent rhythm – for example, the second Tuesday and Wednesday before the end of the quarter.  

To create momentum going into the new quarter, hold your quarterly planning meeting a few weeks before the previous quarter ends. This allows plenty of time to set objectives and priorities at a departmental and personal level before the quarter starts. To add a bit of fun to the process, consider using a quarterly theme to engage the entire company in a top focus, critical number, or other priority. 

The City Bin Co., a waste collection business in Dublin and Galway, Ireland, has chosen themes focused on the biggest constraints facing the company each quarter. Quarterly themes are announced with a launch party, and achievement of goals is celebrated, as well – in one case, by taking the team to the dog races.¹ To raise profitability, the company ran a Las Vegas themed “Life Begins at 40” campaign to focus attention on increasing earnings to 40,000 euros a month, through recurring revenue or annual savings. Another quarterly theme, “Bin It,” asked employees to submit ideas about wasteful practices and unnecessary tasks they wanted to stop doing. The company binned more than 150 activities, clearing employees’ time to focus on more important projects and activities. 

6. Develop Consistent Messaging. 

When you want to get all employees aligned with the same organizational priorities, proper communication is vital. Verify that key messages coming out of the executive level team are consistent across the board.  

For example, one goal of the quarterly planning meeting is to identify your critical number for the coming quarter. During the meeting, you should develop the message to be disseminated throughout the organization, such as “We’ve decided that our critical number for this coming quarter is X, and the reason is Y.” Every leader should take this message verbatim to their teams. 

7. Encourage Sharing and Peer Support.  

If your organization is like most others using Scaling Up, you’ll find that implementation progress is uneven. When one group is struggling, another one isn’t. Although it may feel frustrating and even confusing, this pattern is completely normal. 

Rather than having the executive leadership team try to unearth and solve the problem, encourage teams to help each other. Have the team that is doing well pull back the curtain and share details about what they’re doing. Task them with supporting the struggling team by offering ideas with which they can experiment. 

Start with the Dream, Then Adjust Your Course 

Scaling Up is a massive cultural shift, and one of the biggest changes is for the executive leadership team to share responsibility for implementing the system with all members of the organization. 

Start with the dream of what you’re trying to create, and then guide and encourage all employees to take consistent action to make the dream a reality. 

Implementation takes time. It takes practice. And not all departments will do it the same, and not all departments will do it well. Even brilliant teams at relatively small organizations can take months to find their groove. 

Celebrate the little wins, and keep your eyes – and your team’s focus – on the dream you created together.