Midway up Mount Baldy, Leo Bottary’s daughters were ready to call it quits.
The air was thin, the summit still looked impossibly far, and their confidence was shot. “Dad, I think the view looks pretty good from here,” one of them said. It was the beginning of the end.
But Bottary, author and founder of Peernovation, had a trick up his sleeve. He made a mental note of a giant rock beside them and convinced them to climb just 15 minutes more. When time was up, the peak of the mountain still looked impossibly far away, but when he pointed back to the rock, they looked back and realized how far they had come.
That small shift in perspective changed everything.
They kept going and reached the summit.
Bottary shared the story at ScaleUP Week in Calgary as a lesson for leaders trying to help their teams scale. Not through burnout or pressure, but belief.
Progress, he said, needs to be marked and celebrated if you want people to keep climbing.
“This idea of celebrating those small wins, celebrating how far we’ve come, is so essential to giving your people the fuel and the energy required to hit those longer-term goals,” he said.
This is how scale actually happens. Not in the spreadsheet, but the climb.
Why we’re talking about this
Bottary’s keynote at ScaleUP Week wasn’t focused on the typical growth playbook. There was no five-year strategy deck, no emphasis on operational efficiency or productivity hacks.
Instead, he mapped out what actually enables scale in a team or organization. A practical, people-first model grounded in trust, communication and peer influence. At its centre was the learning-achieving cycle — a loop of continuous improvement that combines learning together, acting on it, and celebrating along the way.
“We know we learn better when we learn together,” he said. “Collaborative learning theory has been teaching us this for decades.”
The cycle is supported by five structural factors and three key team dynamics. And it all connects back to what Bottary calls the four Cs.
The 4 Cs of real team performance
Each of the four Cs — clarity, communication, collaboration and capacity — reflect a breakdown point Bottary has seen in scaling companies.
Start with clarity.
He described an exercise where leaders step out so teams can speak candidly about what they need.
“The top thing that employees ask of their CEO or ask the leader of their team is, give us more clarity,” he said. “I would swear it’s got to be 90% of the time.”
It sounds simple. But most leaders underestimate what that really means. Clarity of direction. Clarity of role. Clarity of value. Bottary compared it to a baton pass in a relay race — something he learned the hard way as a ninth grader when a botched exchange left the baton on the ground and cost his team an undefeated season.
“You never let go of the baton until you know it’s within the other person’s grasp,” he said.
The lesson, he said, applies to how leaders must ensure clarity in direction, expectations, and communication. It’s not enough to deliver a message, you have to make sure it’s fully received.
Which brings us to the second C: communication.
Bottary cited research showing poor communication costs U.S. companies $1.2 trillion a year. And most people don’t realize they’re part of the problem.
Everyone thinks they’re a good communicator, he said, but, “no one’s ever going to look in the mirror.”
“The power of we, I think, begins with you, begins with me, begins with all of us. How can we make sure that we’re not contributing to that $1.2 trillion?” he added. “I have to recognize that I, as a communicator, need to get better.”
He urged leaders to audit their communication systems. Most companies layer new platforms on top of old ones. Eventually, no one knows what to pay attention to.
“After a while, the rules for that platform go out the window, and now everything’s being used for everything,” he said. “You have balls being dropped.”
Third is collaboration.
Too many teams operate in silos or default to politeness instead of candour. Bottary shared a story about the ad agency MullenLowe Global, which he described as the most combative working environment you could imagine — with the most “incredible mutual respect for one another.”
Meetings were intense. Arguments were common. But everyone came prepared. And no one held back.
“They weren’t fighting against each other,” he said. “They were fighting for the best idea.”
That kind of challenge only works when people know each other’s strengths and feel psychologically safe.
Which brings us to the fourth C.
You can have all the clarity, communication, and collaboration in the world, Bottary said, but if you’re asking your team to do more than they can actually handle, “you’re gonna have a capacity problem.”
He shared a two-by-two framework from Harvard’s Amy Edmondson to visualize how to balance capacity.
If both psychological safety and accountability are low, the team sits in apathy. High accountability without safety lands them in anxiety. Too much safety and no accountability leads to comfort. But when both are high, teams operate in the learning zone.
That’s the zone where scale happens.
The power of peers
One of Bottary’s central themes was that formal leadership isn’t what builds trust — people trust the people around them.
He pointed to the Edelman Trust Barometer, which has tracked global trust in institutions since 2001. In 2006, it marked a turning point. The most credible source of information was no longer the government, media, or CEOs. It was “a person like me” — someone with lived experience, not a title.
That shift, Bottary said, is just as relevant inside companies. When a big announcement is made, employees don’t just take it at face value.
“What do they do?” he asked. “They engage with one another in sense-making exercises.”
He called this the horizontal strength of an organization. It’s the peer-to-peer conversations (often informal and invisible to leadership) that shape how strategies are received, and whether change takes hold.
Read more: The peer advantage: How scale happens when leaders stop going it alone
That’s why identifying internal influencers is so important. Not for marketing or morale, but for momentum.
“You want as many ambassadors in those sense-making conversations as humanly possible,” he said.
Building belief over time
The rest of Bottary’s framework focused on how teams move from good to great. He outlined five enabling factors — psychological safety, productivity, culture of accountability, servant leadership, and having the right people in the room.
He also made a clear distinction between groups and teams.
Groups are designed to support individual members in reaching personal goals, while teams focus on achieving a shared outcome, but he added that “it’s eerily similar what makes both of them successful.”
At the core of it is the belief that great leadership is not about control. It’s about creating the conditions for others to succeed.
Bottary said his favourite definition of leadership comes from Peter Senge, who describes it as “the capacity of a human community to shape its future.”
That kind of shaping doesn’t happen through one-off events or all-hands meetings. It happens through trust, repetition, and following up — checking in, sharing progress, asking what’s working, and celebrating effort, not just outcomes.
The keynote ended not with a call to scale, but a call to connect.
“Your greatest assets are the people beside you,” Bottary told the room.
The same goes for your company.
If you want to scale, stop trying to be the person with all the answers. Start building the kind of team that learns together, supports each other, and celebrates how far they’ve already come.
Bottary told the audience that his daughters, who are now grown up, each lead their own teams today. And when a project starts to feel overwhelming, they gather their people, look back, and remind them how far they’ve climbed.
That’s the power of perspective. That’s how teams summit.
Digital Journal is the official media partner of ScaleUP Week 2025.
This coverage is supported by the Calgary Innovation Coalition (CIC), a network of 95+ organizations working to accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship across the Calgary region.
