Teaching scaling leadership: a free session plan for founders, executives and MBA classes

Pre-work (optional, 10 minutes)

Leading leaders: the cascade model

Andreas Pettersson's working model for the point where the people who report to you run teams of their own. What works at ten people breaks at forty, and what works at forty breaks at a hundred. The fix is not doing the same things harder. It is making each habit cascade, so your managers do with their people what you do with them, and checking that it actually happened two levels down.

Cascade delegation

Four moves. 1. Teach it: people usually get promoted because they were excellent at the job itself, which says nothing about whether they can hand that job to someone else. Show your managers how you hand work over and let them try it on something low risk first. 2. Watch it: join one of their handoffs as a coach, not an inspector, and give the feedback afterwards with SBED (Situation, Behavior, Experience, Demands). 3. Ask about it in your 1:1s: "What did you hand off since we last met, and how did you set it up?" A fuzzy answer usually means the work is being kept, or passed on with no reason attached. 4. Check it two levels down with skip level questions: What are you the owner of at the moment? Which decisions can you make without asking anyone? Tell me about the last call you made on your own.

RACI with one A

R, Responsible: the people doing the work, as many as needed. A, Accountable: the single person who owns the result. C, Consulted: asked before the decision, a conversation in both directions. I, Informed: told afterwards, a one way update. The rule: exactly one A. Two owners means no owner. Reach for it whenever more than three people are involved, whenever work crosses a team line, and whenever someone has said "I assumed someone else had that."

The four scaling red flags

The Bottleneck Manager: nothing moves until it has passed their desk, so able people stop taking initiative. Fix: pick three recurring decisions and give them away for good, with a report after the fact. The Reverse Delegator: work handed down keeps finding its way back up, and they accept it. Fix: answer with a question, "If I were unreachable today, what would you do?" The Task Dumper: hands out work with no reason attached, so the team is busy and unsure why. Fix: for one week, every handoff starts with why it matters and what done looks like. The Phantom Delegator: reports that the work has been handed over while it is still sitting in their own head. Fix: make it visible. Work that nobody can see on a shared list has not really been handed over.

The COACH conversation

When a manager brings you a problem that belongs to them, the scaling move is to coach, not to solve. Andreas teaches a five step conversation for it in his manager coaching course. Concern: "What's on your mind?" Objective: "What do you want to happen?" Actions: "What actions can you take?" Commitment: "What will you commit to doing?" Help: "What do you need to succeed?" Every answer stays with the manager. If you leave the conversation holding the action, you have just been reverse delegated to. Managers who are coached this way start running the same conversation with their own people, which is what cascading looks like in practice.

The Bottleneck Progression

Growth ceilings arrive in a fixed order. First the calendar: everything waits on your time. Then the team: the team cannot run without you in the middle of it. Then strategy: the business runs, but nobody, you included, is deciding where it goes next. Fixing one ceiling exposes the next, so the useful question is never "am I a bottleneck?" but "which ceiling am I under right now?" The bottleneck test answers that.

The Valley of Death

The plateau that arrives when a company adds a management layer, directors and VPs, without moving decision rights to it. The market did not cause it. Boxes on the org chart without authority did. The tell is the new layer asking upward for sign off on decisions it was hired to make. Andreas's line to the person in that seat: "To ask for permission is to seek denial." His line to the founder above them is the cascade model: if the decisions did not move, the layer is cost, not leverage.

RACI is a long standing responsibility assignment convention with no single author. EOS is Gino Wickman's system from Traction, and Scaling Up is Verne Harnish's. The cascade model, the one A rule as stated here, the four red flags, the COACH conversation, the Bottleneck Progression and the Valley of Death are Andreas Pettersson's.

Session plans

Pick the length that fits your slot. Every version uses the same test, framework and worksheet.

The free test participants take

Participants take the free scaling readiness test on their own phone or laptop. It takes a few minutes. It asks for a name and email to send the full result, so tell participants that in advance. Results go only to the person who took it, so nobody has to share a score unless they choose to.

The case: the founder who hired three directors and stalled

Discussion questions

1. Which of the four red flags does each of Ana, Luis and Priya show? Which one does Tomas show?
2. Luis sends every large discount up to Tomas, and Tomas approves it. Run the COACH conversation Tomas should have had with Luis instead. At which step would Tomas be most tempted to give the answer?
3. The board wants a chief operating officer. Would that fix it? What would a new COO find in their first month?
4. Rewrite the grocery launch as a RACI with one A. Who should it be, and what does the other director lose?
5. Is Harbourline in the Valley of Death? Which decisions would have to move, and to whom, for the directors to be leverage rather than cost?
6. Imagine asking Harbourline's shift leads the three skip level questions. What answers do you expect, and what would each answer tell Tomas?
7. Every scaling system, EOS and Scaling Up included, comes down to three things: a clear strategy, a meeting rhythm, and clear roles and authority. Which of the three is Harbourline missing first?

Facilitator notes

• The most common trap is two names in A "because both of them really own it." Hold the line every time: two owners means no owner. The question that settles it is "If this fails, who gets the call at seven in the morning?" If the answer is two people, the answer is really nobody.
• The red flags describe habits, not people. Say so before Section 2, and ask for initials only, never names, especially in an in-company session. The most useful finding of the day is usually a leader recognising themselves as the Bottleneck Manager, so ask "Which of these am I?" before anyone fills in a row about someone else.
• Mixed rooms: students and first line managers work Sections 2 to 6 on Harbourline and do Section 1 from the test only. People who run managers work their own team. Pair one of each in the RACI exercise; the student usually asks the sharper question.
• Skip level questions without an opening line feel like surveillance and damage the manager in between. Make people copy the opener into Section 5 word for word: "I am not here to check up on your manager. I want to hear how the work looks from where you sit."
• The scaling readiness and bottleneck tests ask for a name and email before they show results. Tell people before they start. Anyone who prefers not to can read the twelve statements on the test page and self score: count how many are true in each of the four areas.
• If nobody volunteers in the debrief, ask each table for the red flag they saw most often in the case rather than in themselves. Once the case is on the table, people usually volunteer their own version.