Professional Team Management
LINE Corp. in which I’m working for currently has a multifaceted evaluation system, and every six months I receive feedback from colleagues and members who work with me. In those comments, I found a few comments like, “You are doing a great job with your unique management style.” Even when I’m talking with colleagues, I sometimes get feedback like, “Your management style is very original.
The people I’m working with now in LINE’s AI business are all specialists and have a lot of autonomy, so I think that even if there is no leader or manager, the output of each person’s maximum power (100%) will come out naturally.
The mission of the leaders and managers of LINE’s AI business is to raise the level of each person’s 100% power to 200%, 300%, or even higher, with the power of the organization. On the other hand, the structure of LINE’s AI products is complex as well as general AI product, and because of this, the breadth and depth of expertise of the people involved is on an order of magnitude greater than ever before, and also there are many people involved, it’s definitely impossible for me to grasp everything in every detail about it.
I’d like to write in below about my usual (unusual for others?) methodology of how to multiply 100% by several times in that situations.
1. Anti-pattern
First, let me introduce you to the anti-pattern, but I definitely avoid this kind of structure. I’ve never seen a challenging project go well with this structure. First of all, there tends to be a long pathway to get information across, and it’s very difficult to make horizontal connections. And most importantly, it’s hard to extract each person’s strengths because they are role-bound. It tends to be a wasteful organization with individuality buried underneath, and it often doesn’t even produce 100% of its output. It’s easy to manage, but hard to make results. So, I avoid this pattern.
2. Basic Pattern
So what do we do? Here’s the basic pattern of an organization or project structure. Each person is organically connected to the others according to their role and characteristic. They are organically connected, and as the roles required of them as a whole change, they autonomously update and adapt to their roles and relationships.
In this structure, the amount of communication is high, as it gets, and for the most part, communication is inefficient at a certain level (because there are so many connections). If it’s too inefficient, I’ll figure it out a bit, but basically, I don’t mind too much because some inefficiency is a necessary evil. (It’s a common anti-pattern that I can’t resist and change to the hierarchical structure above.)
And it is important that the role of the leader in this style is not fixed. Roles need to change from time to time. This is where the hardest part is, and it requires the expertise to be flexible and change roles without being fixed. People often tell me that they don’t know what they are doing, but I often have trouble answering that they are doing everything for the sake of results.
Aside from that, it’s hard patterning, because you need to subtly change your role and position at any given moment, but if I were to break it down, I think there are about four major patterns.
2–1. The Role of Leading
What you need at this point is vision, passion, and execution.
In the case of the above style, people often talk about not being at the front and supporting it, but of course, there are times when you have to be at the front.
A leader who doesn’t stand at the front of the room when you’re starting a project, or when you have to pivot due to a change in market relations, etc., is not a leader. Of course, I’ll listen to member’s opinion as much as possible in a limited amount of time, but basically, you have to decide what needs to be decided quickly and run and pull in the direction we need to head before anyone else.
Whenever you lead something strongly, there will be conflicts and confusion, but those things will naturally dissolve as the team start to see the results, so you need to push forward without getting too close and without hesitation.
2–2. The Role of Organizing
What you need at this point is the ability to adjust.
Once the direction is set and the direction of each person will be the same, we organize the environment for collaboration. It’s about communication with stakeholders, the office environment, work tools, and, well, most of it is miscellaneous, but we create an environment where members feel comfortable and focused.
As the environment is created, connections between members gradually increase. As the connections increase, a culture is created within the team, and the culture creates a common language. When a common language is created as a team, we realize that we are becoming a good team.
It’s a lot of steady work, but once you’ve created an environment, it’s not easy to break it down, so you have to create an environment to improve your base performance.
2–3. The Role of Communicating
What is needed at this time is the “ability of discussion” and “the ability to ask questions”.
When the environment is ready, the performance of the organization as a whole goes up 120% or 150% beyond the individual performance of each person. However, there are always members whose performance doesn’t go up from 100%. When I find those members, I have individual dialogues with them repeatedly. I’ll repeat the dialogue for hours or days to create a common understanding.
This is a bit off topic, but sometimes a member who have trouble performing are the ones who produce more output than you can imagine later on. In short, they just take longer to get started because they have a deeper level of understanding than the rest of us.
When you have many conversations with a member with such deep potential, you will often find deeper insights from a different perspective that you hadn’t noticed before. Once the environment is somewhat in place, spend time in dialogue with a member who are not performing, which can be a catalyst to further increase organizational strength later on.
2–4. The Role of Maintaining Relationships.
What is needed at this time is “observation skills”.
As each person’s performance improves, the last thing that remains is the relationship between people, the relationship between people. No matter how high a performer is, people are people, so there is chemistry. You can generally intuitively know where the chemistry isn’t good when you’re interacting with each person, but I feel like the only way to know is to basically observe. I can’t find anything else to discover this, at least not for me at the moment, other than “feeling and experience”.
By the way, this is the hardest thing to do when leading an organization or project in a multi-site. It’s hard to notice because you can’t observe them directly. In those cases, I observe relationships at a distance through conversations with people who have the same point of view (management style). If it’s difficult to do so, I’ll take a closer look at the conversations on Slack, etc. If I watch a week’s worth of conversations, I’ll notice about 80% of them.
What to do when you find them. The best solution is to be trusted by each of the members who can’t build good relationship. It’s a state of affairs, “If that you say so, then I just follow you”. Finally, it comes down to human skills. In terms of skill set, if you can express the same thing in various languages (business, design, planning, development, etc.), the probability of success increases. But it’s still difficult to do so.
3. How to welcome new member
When a team or organization is molded in this style, when new member come in, the cost of acceptance and role mismatch is very low. This is because good roles and positions are naturally determined through autonomous dialogue.
In terms of the specific process, I often ask a member to start by defining the job in the initial stages, giving you only an outline expectation. Initially, they are surprised at how much I leave them alone, but after a week, they can start talking to the people around them and try to find a mission. Then, after about two weeks, we conduct a 1-on-1 session to discuss the person’s so-called must/can/will. Then we can find a role to work in most efficiently in terms of how the person’s strengths fit into the organization.
Don’t try to define roles too soon if you’re wrong. If you try to define roles prematurely, you increase the probability of role and possession mismatch, and it becomes a gamble to find the optimal positioning. So, even if it takes a little longer, we proceed in a way that will naturally find the optimal solution.
4. Don’t require understanding from out of the team
This style is difficult to understand from outside the organization and outside the project. It is certainly difficult to capture structurally because of the fluidity of the structure and the many communication paths. This makes it difficult to understand the aspects of who is doing what for each role. You don’t need to know who is doing what to get results, but on the other hand, there are a certain number of people who think grasping all information with the old structural management style is good.
There are very few in the company today, but if some of the stakeholders have a hard to understand, I think it’s best not to force them to understand. It’s very difficult and time-consuming to gain understanding. Instead, it seems to you that you should try to make it look like the old hierarchical structure for such people, and we should try to show them.
No matter what the actual situation is, it’s easier to be understood if you can see it in a way that makes you feel comfortable in that person’s eyes. Avoid forcing people to seek understanding because it will only create unnecessary conflicts. Another important role of a leader is to maintain a stable relationship with stakeholders in order to achieve results.
5. Mindset
Methodology is important, but I think the underlying mindset is also important. There are three things I’m always aware of.
a) Respect for all people
The most important thing in working with a number of professionals is respect. To properly respect someone, you need to have a deep understanding of them and their work. It is very difficult, but deep understanding creates deep respect, and deep respect creates deep trust. A trusting relationship based on respect makes communication dramatically smoother.
b) Transparency
The first step is that no information is unnecessarily blocked. A sense of security where you are allowed to say whatever you want, that’s the second stage. At the third and final stage, the opinions of people of any position are respected. In other words, beyond being allowed to say something, even the slightest suggestion is accepted. So, when transparency permeates a high level, it creates a sense of tension that “I can’t say anything badly.” In other words, maximum transparency creates a sense of tension in the organization.
c) User First
It goes without saying. Always make it your number one priority to properly understand who your users are and to deal with them. If you take the lead in being user-first and enjoy it, the entire organization and project will become user-first as well.
6. In the end
As I’ve written at length, the only thing required of a leader or manager is to have a vision, and to do everything to achieve it anyway. That’s why they play the role they need to in that moment.
In most cases, the goal is a challenge that no one has ever accomplished before, so most of the time when you decide to do it, you don’t know if you can do it or not. But if you go ahead with the attitude that you’re going to do it all anyway, if you get in trouble, someone or something will almost always help you out (or it’s just in my case). Sometimes there are things that can’t be done, but if it doesn’t work out, it’s just not possible to do it in the first place, so I forget about it.
God knows what the outcome will be, but it’s up to me to complete the task, so I’d like to continue to practice “just do everything” so that I will always have no regrets.
