Your path to scale is littered with all kinds of deadly traps. And many leaders only learn about these traps the hard way: by falling into them. 

On today’s Masters of Scale, you'll hear from scale leaders who've encountered these traps, learned from them, and propelled themselves beyond them. You’ll hear stories from Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi, Ariel Investments’ Mellody Hobson, Union Square Hospitality Group’s Danny Meyer, LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner, and more.

These are 6 critical insights about some of the most deadly pitfalls that business leaders face — at all stages of scale.

Trap 1: Organizational jam

No one likes bureaucracy. But every organization has its own rules and culture. Ideally these help us lean into our strengths and maximize our advantages.

Sometimes, though, things can get so jammed up with processes and rules that rigor mortis sets in, and it gets difficult to get anything meaningful done.

Trap 2: Being a bullhorn

All good leaders know the importance of communication. However, it can be hard to realize how your attempts at communication are perceived by different stakeholders, employees at different levels of seniority, and across different company cultures.

In the worst cases, you may actually be causing problems with your eagerness to communicate. The more you talk, the less you may learn about the people around you.

Trap 3: Bloated meetings

This is one of the more obvious traps — meetings that eat up the day and leave precious little time for actually running your business.

And this is a dangerous trap because time is our most precious resource. So how do we make meetings more worthwhile and effective?

Listen to today’s episode to find out how to tackle these 3 traps — and more.

This Action Item is inspired by Marissa Mayer's story in today's episode about fighting through bureaucracy at Yahoo.

Here's how it works:

Go to your email, and compose a new message. Subject: PB&J.

In the body of the email, write: “I’m asking you to send me one process, bureaucracy, or jam that you run into here at the company that doesn’t make sense to you. And then, propose one solution. I’ll compile these answers and report back next week.”

You can take a moment to make this message your own, but we strongly encourage you not to add too much. This is a fast exercise, so the messaging around it should be fast too.

Send this email to your core team, or take a page from Marissa and send it to everyone at the company. Once you’ve sent the email, give yourself a week to collect the answers and share them back to your team. Any solution that seems like a good one – go ahead and implement it! Move like a Red Tape Machete and set your team free to run.

This Strategy Session is presented in alliance with Capital One Business, and is part of a 6-part series for 2023. By registering, you'll not only receive the link to join on January 26 but you'll also automatically get registered for the remaining sessions in the series. Attend every session to hear unique, timely insights with different topics each month.