Reads for scaling teams, leadership, and development books
- cgtmconsulting
- Feb 1, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 12, 2024
Reads for Team Development and Leadership
When scaling a company, building a clear understanding of what your company stands for can help you navigate the many competing interests that arise during scaling.
Do you know what your company stands for? Investing time in your alignment, expectations, and ethos will pay off as you scale.
Constructing scalable companies needs thinking that encompasses the broader perspective. Paired with a continuous improvement program that ensures your high-performing team repeatedly wins.
Culture as a foundational layer
Culture is multi-layered, and who you want the company to be will change over time. In scaling, a consistent approach supports teams even as you pivot and face a challenging runway. Each team member should contribute to your culture.
Some questions to consider as a leader include your communication style, data and information approach, preparing your team for success, and how you design goals. Knowing who you want your company to be will help attract new hires and retain staff even when things get tough.
If you're looking for further insights and perspectives from successful leaders, some great books can help. These include "No Rule Rules" by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, "Radical Candor" by Kim Scott, and "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, among others (detailed below).
Questions to consider
Communication and data sharing
How will you effectively communicate your openness to sharing data and information? Information with your staff but also with customers.
For staff, will you openly share everything, as much as possible, only at a high level, or lock down information? Will each member of the team have transparency?
Will you commit to delivering your company goals so the teams are ready for Q1?
Financially rewarding good business health
Business health goes beyond direct revenue. Indirect revenue is anything that improves your ability to increase revenue. Changes in performance because of candid feedback, data hygiene, stopping scope creep, and optimizing their time.
Will you encourage challenges from the junior team?
Do you share your board strategies with juniors and ask them to pick them apart? Allow them to find the strengths and weaknesses that you might miss. When they tell you the issues, do you challenge yourself to explore their ideas?
How will you approach designing the goals?
Do your teams review the data and decide what is achievable? Or do you decide the targets based on the funding needed or investor requirements? Did you consider if they can achieve those targets in their working hours?
If your forecast suggests you'll miss your end-of-year goals, will you shift to short-term thinking or hold to the three-year plan? When scaling, pivoting is a tough call because a pivot may or may not save you.
Your leadership qualities are behavioural.
Do your C-Suite support each other? Is your driver to build trust between them, or do they infight and undermine each other? Have you agreed on how to give each other team feedback?
C-Suite toxicity affects the whole company as politics, back-channelling, and tribes form. When the C-Suite behaves this way, it feeds into the senior management team through to your entry-level roles. This behaviour severely affects efficiency, cross-collaboration, and making revenue.
What happens if a mistake or failure financially impacts the company? Does accountability run through every level of your business?
For example, if the company needs cutbacks, is everyone affected financially? Often, C-Suite’s roles and salaries are unharmed, while all other roles adjust or lose their jobs.
Does your hiring focus on creating diversity? Look at your team, does everyone look and think similarly?
That includes hiring to ensure your process is fair and transparent (much harder to do than it sounds).
A brilliant Ted Talk from Shreya Joshi guides you through challenging yourself to seek diversity in your environment.
If hiring in other countries, are you paying them a fair price for their talent?
Ethical, moral, and financial impacts exist, whatever you choose as your company culture. By considering these factors and continuing to learn and grow as a leader, you can help your team keep winning.
Moreover, the decisions you make on ethics, morality and finance are factors when people decide to apply for a role, take the job, or purchase your product/service.
If in answering the above questions you have more questions than you have answers, this is a good start. These successful leaders mainly now work with enterprise businesses, but most have faced similar dilemmas scaling. The practical advice, templates, and processes shared can help you answer your questions.
Organisational ethos and scaling teams
Process and clear organisation ethics help your team win even in scaling companies. A quick win for everyone is mapping out your roles and responsibilities (RACI's are great for this). It gives security and clarity to your teamwork.
Organisational ethos and scaling teams
No rules rules (Reed Hastings/Erin Meyer)
Principles (Ray Dalio)
Range (David Epstein)
Extreme Ownership (Jocko Willink & Leif Babin)
The five dysfunctions of a team (Patrick Lencioni)
Fix the system, not the women (Laura Bates)
Unmasking Autism (Dr Devon Price)
Feedback and coaching teams
Giving constructive feedback and improving employee engagement starts with you as C-Suite or the team leader. Your team expect feedback and coaching so they can develop towards success. Deploying these tasks with emotional intelligence within time-poor and exhausting environments is difficult.
To be a good leader you need to deliver great coaching and feedback. These books give frameworks and practical advice on how to overcome some of those challenges.
Kim Scott and Brene Brown are also brilliant speakers on developing people through kindness and honesty.
Feedback and coaching teams
Radical Candor (Kim Scott)
Dare to lead (Brene Brown)
The Culture Code (Daniel Coyle)
Atomic Habits (James Clear)
Coaching for performance (John Whitmore)
Organisational alignment
Scaling a team and measuring success can be a challenging task. To grow and develop the team effectively, it's important to know what success means and have a clear understanding of it. One way to measure success is through organisational alignment.
Organisational alignment means how well the team's goals, values, and strategies match the organisation's overall objectives. Team members must share the organisation's mission and vision to ensure they all work towards the same goals.
To achieve organisational alignment, leaders must adapt their leadership styles when building a global team. Understanding diverse cultures is crucial for effective leadership, as each culture has unique expectations and ways of working. This requires a level of cultural intelligence and the ability to adapt your approach to suit different cultural contexts.
To effectively measure and improve organisational alignment, it is necessary to scan the comprehensive picture and analyze metrics and teamwork. This means looking beyond surface-level indicators of success and delving deeper into the team's dynamics and performance. By understanding the factors that contribute to alignment, leaders can identify areas for improvement and implement strategies to enhance teamwork and collaboration. Also, ensuring the architecture of your OKRs, KPIs and all drive towards the business strategy and deliver success.
In addition to organisational alignment, scaling a team also involves scaling people. This means developing and nurturing the skills and capabilities of team members as the team grows. It is important to invest in training and development programs. Enabling individuals to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing environment is a priority.
To support the growth of individuals within the team, leaders can draw insights from books such as "Scaling People" by Claire Hughes-Johnson. Claire provides valuable guidance on how to effectively develop and empower team members. Ensuring that they have the necessary skills and resources to contribute to the team's success as you grow.
Furthermore, understanding the cultural nuances and differences across diverse teams is essential for effective scaling. "The Culture Map" by Erin Meyer offers valuable insights into how culture impacts communication, decision-making, and collaboration. By understanding these cultural differences, leaders can navigate challenges and foster a more inclusive and collaborative team environment.
Consider when scaling a team, how do you measure success, and how do you overcome cultural challenges? As you look to build a global team, are you adapting your leadership styles? Do you know how people receive you across diverse cultures? Are you able to scan the comprehensive picture and pick apart your metrics and teamwork?
Organisational alignment
Measure what matters (John Doerr)
Scaling people (Claire Hughes-Johnson)
The Culture Map (Erin Meyer)
Scaling start-ups and scale-ups
When it comes to scaling start-ups and scale-ups, many books offer valuable insights. These are a few of my go-tos.
"Zero to One" by Peter Thiel provides a roadmap for building successful companies from scratch. While "Hacking Growth" by Sean Ellis offers strategies for accelerating business growth. "The Lean Start-up" by Eric Rees provides a framework for testing and iterating business ideas. "The Innovator's Solution" by Clayton Christensen offers insights into disruptive innovation
Scaling businesses
Zero to one (Peter Thiel)
Hacking growth (Sean Ellis)
The Lean Start-up (Eric Rees)
The Innovator’s Solution (Clayton Christensen)
Thank you for reading!
If you want to talk in more detail, then please don't hesitate to reach out. I love a debate, especially about GTM. Also, networking in the industry is key and I'd love to hear your perspective.
Claire Cooper
Lead consultant at CGTM Consulting
Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
#company goals
#team work
#being a good leader
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