Scaling is about multiplying something, whether it’s a product, service, revenue, effort, or something else. There are many ways to scale, but whether they entail installing the latest software or hiring new workers, they have one quality in common: functionality. After all, to multiply the ends, you must increase the functional, productive means.

Functionality is critically important in any system or organization. It’s how the work gets done. But an unfortunate result of this reality is that we sometimes treat people more like tools than like people, especially within those contexts or systems in which those people have certain functions. We can easily forget that people are more than the functions they fulfill. 

This brings us to the other way to scale: developing people as people. Personal growth and development cannot detract from how well someone does his or her work. It can only make it better. The person who becomes aware of the wrong belief he had held or the possibility she had not considered can experience a tremendous influx of energy that he or she can bring to every facet of life, including work. But investing in people as people seems less efficient than investing in their functionality. So we drill. We work on sharpening the skills. We increase professional knowledge. All these are useful, but they leave full potential untapped. 

How can we best unlock that potential? A relationship in which a person experiences both high challenge and high support is the most powerful means of his or her personal development and transformative growth. This is what a good executive coach provides. 

In itself, this (and any) relationship does not seem scalable. We can’t multiply relationship in the same way we can multiply a product or service because relationships live in “real” time and have a finite quality to them. Relationships are live and personal. There’s a difference in quality between one of the thousand Facebook “friends” we might have and the far fewer people with whom we actually spend real time. 

But perhaps a relationship does actually scale. Maybe the time we invest in the transformative growth and development of someone else can be multiplied by the greater good they consequently do for others and the greater health they consequently bring to their other relationships. You can’t measure that. You can’t control it. And you won’t even know about it unless someone else tells you. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.