One aspect of authentic leadership is the attitude and motivation to continually examine the different stages of organizational development. This perpetual diagnoses enables leaders to effectively create change, embed change or manage change to deliberately scale organizations. In other words, the leader must be a skilled change manager who first learns what the present stage of the organization is, unfreezes it, redefines it, and changes it in a way that catalyzes the capabilities of the organization. Accomplishing this goal is more difficult lower down in the organization but by no means impossible in that divisions or departments can be managed just as can overall organizations.

Different stages of organizational development require different kinds of leadership. Organizations are continually trying to emerge, evolve, expand or excel. The approach and capabilities of an organization are often tied to the level of maturity across these four stages. I have termed this the scalability life cycle. The figure below highlights the scalability life-cycle maturity profiles.

As organizations chart their way through the various life-cycle stages, it is imperative that they recognize the factors that drive change and anticipate the challenges to be addressed to progress to the next stage. Initially, results come quickly, but then they plateau as organizations formalize their processes and management structure. In the latter stages, if an organization implements with discipline by adopting formal measurement systems and performance or outcome metrics that are integrated into managerial processes and day-to-day operations, impact begins to scale.

In summary, leaders at different levels of an organization play a critical role at each developmental stage of an organization, but the role differs as a function of the stage. Much of what leaders do is to perpetually diagnose the organization and figure out how to manage in a way that catalyzes the capabilities of the organization.