The Secret to Successful Leadership? Make and Break Plans….

Editor’s Note: In the new podcast Masters of Scale, LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman explores his philosophy on how to scale a business — and at Entrepreneur.com, entrepreneurs are responding with their own ideas and experiences on our hub. This week, we’re discussing Hoffman’s theory: to lead an organization to scale, you have to be as skilled at breaking plans as you are at making them.

Leaders should be decisive, have a vision and be self-aware. But they also need to be flexible.

“I believe to lead an organization to scale, you have to be as skilled at breaking plans as you are at making them,” says Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, in the fifth episode of Masters of Scale, a podcast series in which he explores counterintuitive theories to growing a company.

Related: When It Makes Sense to Release an Imperfect Product

Nicole Lapin, a best-selling author and co-host of business reality show Hatched, couldn’t agree more.

“The most important part of being a boss or a leader is being self aware and knowing when something doesn’t work is more important sometimes than knowing when something is working,” Lapin tells Entrepreneur’s editor-in-chief, Jason Feifer, in a video.

This sort of approach takes guts, the ability to make hard decisions and execute.

According to Lapin and Feifer, this helps companies pivot quicker, scale faster and be successful.

Related: Mark Zuckerberg Reveals the 5 Strategies That Helped Facebook Grow at an Insane Rate

Check out the video to see what they both say are other important skills for leaders to possess, their weak points and the need to own up to your mistakes.

Rose Leadem

Rose Leadem is an online editorial assistant at Entrepreneur Media Inc. 

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