Should team members share the same character

As mentioned in another section, gathering people with aligned context works very effectively when speed is the priority.

Here I want to talk about character as culture.

Where does culture conflict actually arise in the first place?

One typical pattern among the many cases I’ve seen is “conflict over rigor.”

People whose careers have mostly involved contracted work generally hold a high standard of rigor regarding specifications and contracts.

Overturning a specification formally agreed with a client later on takes a great deal of effort, and it’s not at all rare to stumble onto some exceptional clause buried in a contract and end up in litigation as a result.

People whose careers have mostly consisted of releasing their own company’s products, often on a one-off basis, frequently arrive at their current position without ever having developed much awareness of preserving specifications or, depending on the case, even design data.

What complicates matters further is that sometimes a person with the former kind of career joins a company thinking “this time it’s the latter,” and sometimes a person with the latter kind of career joins thinking “this time it’s the former.”

Left unaddressed, this kind of alignment rarely happens naturally.

Clear leadership is therefore required. Someone needs to set direction, put structures in place, and have experienced members model the right behavior. How rigor should be understood is something each company decides for itself. There is no single correct answer for development processes, internal approval procedures, or client communication. But if you can present a clear guideline along the lines of “here’s how we think about this,” you can probably keep this from turning into a major problem.

The next pattern I often see is what I’d call “conflict over the degree of information penetration.”

This is a somewhat roundabout way of putting it, but in essence it’s the conflict that arises from differences in sensibility over how far, and in what way, information such as executive discussions or the progress of special projects “should” be circulated within the company.

For example, J, who was my boss back in my America days, hated having a large number of people in CC on emails, and every time a reply came back from J, the number of people in CC would have shrunk. I once asked J why he did this, and the answer was, “First, because it’s ‘unnecessary.’ Also because it becomes unclear who has and hasn’t been sent something.” J, incidentally, was formerly at Apple, and apparently once ran the development project for the Macbook.

One typical pattern where the circulation of information turns into a troublesome situation is “when someone leaves the company.”

Naturally a handover becomes necessary, and when both the person leaving and the people receiving the handover are “used to leaving jobs” or “used to having people around them leave,” the process tends to go smoothly. Even then, some amount of gaps and omissions usually occurs, greater or smaller.

Workplaces that already have a high degree of information circulation naturally reduce the risk of this kind of case occurring.

Also, in situations like “when part of a project is in crisis,” sharing information within the company early and pooling collective wisdom is effective for avoiding things getting worse. The longer information transmission is delayed, the worse the situation becomes.

This kind of conflict mostly surfaces through “individuals’ day-to-day behavior,” which can make it hard to spot and address. And in practice, each individual instance seems too trivial to be treated seriously.

But these conflicts gradually produce small distortions, and at some point, somewhere, they can form a large pitfall. It won’t necessarily always happen, but judgment is needed as to how much of that risk to factor in and translate into actual hiring decisions.

By the way, in America there were occasionally people who deliberately blocked information from flowing out from under their own hands. I understand this as a form of self-defense. In other words, by building a small silo of their own, they protect their own position.

This type of person has no habit of keeping information organized on a regular basis, so once they’re actually leaving, they suddenly start scrambling to pull it all together. Naturally it’s full of gaps. This can become a significant risk factor, so care is needed at the time of hiring.

The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please pick up a copy.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/1189/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.