This article originally appeared on the blog iDoneThis
Think small and allow you achieve great things. That's the Yoda-esque, philosophy against-intuitive that the Finnish company net game revenue of Supercell million day .
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So really, how do you build a billion dollar business by thinking small?
A key is supercell organizational model of the company. autonomous teams, or "cells" of four to six people position the company to be agile and innovative.
Similar modules - call squads, pods, cell start-up in startups - are the basic components in many others, the agile growth companies, including Spotify and Automattic . The future, as Dave Gray argues in The Connected Company is Podular.
However, small groups of people do not necessarily do a thriving business that the fate of many a fledgling start-up warns. What on cells and model pods that presents not only a viable alternative, but the future of design as we work together?
It retains some of the spark. Returning to the terminology of Supercell.
reflecting both its Latin roots (which means "small room") and what we learn in biology (structural and functional unit of the smallest of a body) cells provide the dynamism and traffic build something together with a few people in the same room. It is not enough that these teams are small, they are often cross-functional and self-management, with members totaling to a single digit and probably eat two pizzas.
The realization of big in this future Podular requires thinking about what makes the little magical performance team more than the sum of its parts and how to make the synchronization that throughout an entire organization and scalable for sustainable growth.
Autonomy / Alignment matrix
Autonomy is a key factor in these small teams are often referred to as start-up in a startup. It is no surprise; Autonomy allows you to move quickly because you do not get bogged down in the decision by the committee and the inefficient coordination.
Autonomy is also incredibly motivating. People seek a degree of control and self-determination to make, build, create impressive things rather than being told what to do.
Yet letting a bunch of people and proclaiming "Go and be independent!" Will likely in chaos, like crushing a bunch of small startups together to create a large business would not work. You have to think which brings the cells together and how to scale the organizational glue.
the consideration of autonomy is aligning as Henrik Kniberg, agile & lean coach who works very closely with the fast growing Spotify says.
in Spotify, engineers and people working products in a kind of matrix organization that evolved from a need to scale agile teams. Their basic unit or "cell" is called a "team", a cross-functional, self-organizing, co-located team under eight who has 'autonomy over what to build and how.
While each team has a mission to work, they still have to harmonize across many levels -. Product, company priorities, strategies, and other teams
The trick Kniberg explains, is not to supervise the autonomy and alignment as poles on a spectrum, but as dimensions. The objective is autonomy / high alignment within this framework.
The alignment is thus allowing autonomy . More alignment, more autonomy than you can give because you do not have to worry that people are going in a million different directions.
What does this mean in practice? "Leader's job is to communicate the problem to be solved and why, and squadrons to collaborate with each other to find the best solution."
Kniberg it sums up: "The key principle is autonomous but not suboptimize. "Global mission of the company simultaneously takes precedence over special squad and individual tasks while giving people the opportunity to head
It comes down to this.". Being a good citizen in the ecosystem Spotify "
The companies adopt these principles in different ways, depending on their needs and cultures. But in the study of similarly structured companies, I noticed three ways that they create their ecosystem to promote alignment / high autonomy and good corporate citizenship.
1. Do not hire jerks
If you build great autonomy / alignment work culture high, hiring is a priority concern You want people in place that will thrive in and contribute to two dimensions
for Supercell CEO Ilkka Paanenen this is the first priority.. " when you set up a business, the only thing - the only thing - you should worry about is the best "
the" best "often gets boiled down to this. who is the most talented and the most skill. But this ignores the fact that people have to work together. The actual "best" and have a balance between autonomy and aligning themselves too. They are both self-directed and collaborative.
For Spotify, then filter out people who do not really care to align with anything outside of themselves - "talented jerks" as Jonas Aman, part of people team operations, puts it. "We do not want to hire people who are very good at what they do, but can not work with others."
To do this, they examine how candidates communicate on the work they have done previously. Do they speak only of themselves? How do they talk to other people?
"The best way to predict the future behavior is to look at past behavior," Jonas reasons.
2. Manage progress and people rather than power
Mini startups can look very flat, but alignment, especially as you resize, requires some management, if they have that title or not.
Take Automattic, which is best known for WordPress, for example. It currently has more than 200 employees, but when it got to about 50 people, the company has grown from a completely flat structure collective mini-start model. managers designated, or "team lead" help spread the work and provide direction.
As a team leader at Automattic Beau Lebens describes her work as "keep running trains - to ensure that as a team we focus, helping priorities planning, or redirect things to another team if they do not make sense. for us "
Beau developed also by email - decision making is
a mixture all the way" up "(overall strategic direction) down by others team leaders (coordination where there is the cross-over team) through me (mainly priorities right and help people focus and do not entangle other things) to the team often decides who specifically work on that, how to address specific projects, how to divide, etc.
Thus, the top-down communication helps provide direction and purpose - the " why "- and the teams decide how to go about finding the best solution - and it is the team who leads largely that everyone is aligned
the more fluid style. emerging management also applies the principle of theprogress the fact that progress is the most powerful motivator.
In high autonomy / high alignment cultures, the work of managers and leaders is to help people make progress and make sure everyone is on the same page on this progress involved. They do this by providing advice, support and make sure people have what they need, rather than management giving turn-by-turn GPS style low autonomy.
3. Enable transparency self-service
Activation progress at all levels also requires transparency and dissemination of information. A Supercell, Paananen sends a great everyday business email with key performance indicators to all employees so that nobody is left in the dark.
He explains, "It is not limited to management, it is the same information published at the same time so that we can all understand on our own what is necessary"
transparency is one of Automattic of the most important values. the Beau iDoneThis team to stay on the same page about what everyone is working on and to measure progress in one place, allowing align his team is distributed across multiple time zones.
in addition, about 80 percent of all internal communications Automattic takes place on its P2 blogs, which are organized by various functions, teams and projects and work on a real-time WordPress theme. Instead of information is hoarded away, decisions and discussions are documented, shared, searchable and visible to everyone in the company.
When everyone has the knowledge they need at hand, they should not wait to get to work or to make decisions, they can just do it. Dissemination of information also means the energy distribution, and sharing of knowledge helps align teams together.
People need autonomy, mastery, and purpose to be permanently motivated and engaged at work, as Dan Rose describes in his book, player. Companies like Supercell, Spotify, and Automattic show how pink ideas can apply to create intrinsic motivation not only for individuals, but people management and focus group at the organizational level.
cellular People, agile teams thrive on autonomy and control - which are elements of self-centered - but they are also guided, online, and even high by objective, which describes pink as "our desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves. "
by definition, as an organization, there should be a collective goal, but it is often difficult to know or diluted by things like unhealthy politics, mismanagement, or even being disagree with the people you hire.
in building organizations and scaling, communication, refining, and helping people to lead this purpose well is essential to creating good citizens working in your ecosystem. As the pods and squadrons and cells, it is the yin and yang to keep the individual and the collective in your mind at once and thinking about how you can grow together .
Remember that we are all made of small things, that small seed can grow into giant trees that small cells and pods can grow under the right conditions to achieve greater things.