Scaling Your Influence as a Leader

Leadership is more than just remaining in an ivory tower of your own. As a leader, it is important to reach out to all employees across the organisation to get the job done well. This is where scaling your influence comes in.

To scale your influence across teams is to be able to share the vision that you have as a leader of an organisation with many. This means that your ideas should not just be circulated amongst those that you have direct control over, but also teams that you need to collaborate with. This will allow you to ensure that their actions and behaviour are well-aligned with the culture and objectives of the organisation.

Why Scaling Your Influence Matters

As a leader of leaders, I sometimes feel it is easy for me to keep to my comfort zone and gravitate towards team members that reflect my personality and working style. However, leaders should be aware of their own personality style, as well as the styles of others. Following this, they must then find a mechanism to ensure that the working relationship is driven by the overall vision at hand and larger organisation objectives, rather than personality preferences. As troublesome as it may seem, the best ideas tend to come from having fierce debates that bring in diverse perspectives.

Here is an analogy to help illustrate the importance of being able to scale your influence. Try to picture yourself standing in a national park in Kenya or Tanzania, and pay attention to how the animals are behaving. Every animal, big or small, perceives the environment with their senses, like sound and sight. What they interpret from their surroundings is then immediately translated to a corresponding action by various parts of their body, be it their neck, backbone, or limbs. In order to survive, each of their actions need to be in perfect alignment with how their brains process these opportunities or threats around them.

This idea of effective information transmission can be related back to the workplace. The topmost leaders may devise an action plan every quarter based on a variety of information collected, such as customer needs, threats in the marketplace or potential partners. However, even after it is synthesised, analysed and perfected as an action plan, it will only be effective when every part of the organisation is capable of acting in perfect alignment with the plan itself. Therefore, as a leader, it is important to be able to share that vision and plan across the organisation, be it in a small business with only 50 to 100 employees, or a large multinational corporation with thousands of employees.