“We’re trying to sell a Mercedes to someone who doesn’t even know what a car is,” says Leo Bottary, reflecting on the early days of his work advocating for peer learning.
Speaking with Digital Journal while waiting to board a flight, Bottary was in the middle of a multi-city week that included stops in Nashville, Seattle, Toronto and California. Bottary will head to Calgary in June, where he’ll deliver a keynote on Day 3 of ScaleUP Week.
Bottary’s talk, titled The Peer Advantage: Unlocking Scale Through High Performing Teams, builds on nearly two decades of research, advisory work, and writing on what makes leaders and teams thrive.
His central argument is this: scaling is less about strategy on paper and more about execution in practice, and execution, in turn, is driven by how well teams function together.
From solo learner to peer learning leader
Bottary began his career in corporate communications, leading teams at large firms and eventually running his own agency. But a return to graduate school in 2006 was what reoriented his trajectory.
“Education was a solo pursuit in 1983,” he says. “Then I go to graduate school, and I’m part of a learning team. Collaborative learning would have been called cheating back then.”
That shift in mindset took root. After joining Vistage, a peer advisory network for CEOs, Bottary began asking business leaders how they brought new thinking into their organizations.
“They’d say: I read books. I go to executive programs. I hire consultants. But never: I’m in a peer group,” he says. “It wasn’t even in their consideration set.”
That led to his first book, The Power of Peers, and eventually to a broader framework Bottary calls Peernovation, a way of applying what the best peer groups do to the world of high-performing teams.
Why psychological safety is the secret to performance
At the heart of Bottary’s philosophy is the idea that culture beats structure.
“High-performing teams are better than most at bringing on the right people,” he says. “But what separates the best teams from the rest is psychological safety.”
He points to the research of Amy Edmondson and Timothy Clark, describing it as an environment where people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and challenge one another constructively.
That kind of environment doesn’t emerge by chance. It has to be built intentionally, and Bottary’s work helps teams and leaders do just that. He helps organizations examine everything from how they hold meetings to whether their values truly guide decision-making.
He recalls working with a CEO who wanted to turn a half-billion-dollar company into a billion-dollar one. But Bottary observed that the team didn’t connect with that ambition. They saw it as a vanity goal.
What changed the conversation was framing growth as a way to expand impact, reaching more people with a product that improves lives. That subtle shift in communication gave the goal meaning.
Execution starts with your peers, not your plan
For Bottary, the problem isn’t a lack of vision. It’s a lack of follow-through.
“It can all look great on paper, but getting people to actually do it is kind of a whole other bar,” he says.
The title of his ScaleUP Week keynote reflects a deeper insight: the advantage isn’t just in better plans, but in how people work together to bring those plans to life. Teams don’t scale when the founder acts like the “chief everything officer.” They scale when leaders create space for trust, peer influence, and shared ownership to shape how work gets done.
Part of that shift requires seeing influence not just in job titles, but in informal networks within a company.
“I tell leaders, ‘It’s what runs horizontally through your organization that gives its vertical structure strength,’” says Bottary. “There are people in your company right now who aren’t executives but are incredibly influential. When change happens, they’re the ones people turn to for sense-making.”
The ideas Bottary champions aren’t theoretical, they’re already embedded in how Calgary supports business growth.
At Mount Royal University, programs like Growth Catalyst bring together scale-up leaders from diverse sectors to tackle shared challenges in a cohort-based setting, emphasizing real-time feedback, collaborative learning, and peer accountability.
The university’s Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship also fosters peer connection through its LaunchPad program and Founders Circle, helping students and alumni learn from one another as they build and grow ventures.
Bottary also emphasizes that learning doesn’t stick unless it’s social. While most people forget the majority of what they learn at conferences within a day, Bottary encourages attendees to talk to one another immediately after a session. Those conversations, he notes, are what reinforce memory and can turn fleeting insights into lasting relationships.
Looking for learning in unexpected places
As for what Bottary hopes to take away from ScaleUP Week himself, he’s not going in with a checklist.
“I try to stay as open as humanly possible,” he says. “Usually I walk away with a takeaway I never would have imagined going in.”
But he says he’ll leave attendees with a challenge: when the session ends, don’t rush to the next one. Instead, grab someone nearby and start a conversation.
“Engage one another,” he says. “That’s how you remember what you learn.”
Leo Bottary’s keynote takes place on June 4 during the ScaleUP Connections programming at ScaleUP Week 2025.
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.
This article was created with the assistance of AI. Learn more about our AI ethics policy here.
