A Lineup of Nothing but Cleanup Hitters── Is there someone who draws out what makes each person themselves?

Last time, I wrote about a unit made up only of excellent people that ran less smoothly than I had hoped. This time I begin from the other side of that story. Not the total amount of strength, but what makes each person themselves (= their individuality), and the presence of someone who draws it out — that is where I want to turn my eyes. Likes and dislikes are real. Even so, a team that can cross over them and respect one another is what I think of as the ideal.

01Line up cleanup hitters, and somehow you still don't win

It was Monday morning when I first heard the roster of the new review unit (= the group that checks the ads and explanatory materials for medicines). Reading down the list, I found myself sitting up straighter. Every one of them was a checker who would be handed a central role in any other department. One was known for reading the effects of a drug with rare accuracy. One was known for never letting a small detail of wording slip past. One could interpret the rules in ways no one else could keep up with. Reassuring, I thought at first, plainly. With this unit, no matter how difficult the material, we would not fall apart.

But a few weeks in, something odd began to happen. The work of checking kept stalling, here and there. Over a single way of writing one indication in one piece of material, two days passed with no conclusion. Everyone held their own reading. And no one would give way. "This wording goes too far." "No, there's a footnote, so it stays within bounds." Both arguments made sense. That was exactly why nothing got decided. The person who would finally stamp it and take responsibility never got decided either.

Facing the pile of materials, I suddenly remembered a baseball team I had once heard about. They had gathered famous batters at high salaries and lined up cleanup hitters (= the batter placed at the heart of the lineup, the one you rely on most), yet the results were poor. At the time I assumed they had simply been unlucky. Gather strong players, and there is no way you lose — or so I thought.

But now, right in front of me, something similar was happening. Adding up strong people did not, by itself, become the strength of the team. Count the ability of each member and my unit lost to no one. And yet, in the speed of finishing materials, we were losing to the plainer unit from before. This simple sense of wrongness I could not put down for a while.

I learned later that this phenomenon has a name. It is called the too-much-talent paradox (= in English, "the too-much-talent effect": when too many highly skilled people are gathered, the group's results stop improving). The sum of strength and the record of the team are not always in proportion. In the next section I want to look into that research — to find out whether the discomfort I felt on the floor really has some ground beneath it.

02The more the work needs teamwork, the more gathering too many breaks it

That day, two checkers clashed head-on. It was over how a piece of material had reworded a drug's effect. One said, "This wording slightly exceeds the approved range." The other said, "No, read against the original source, this interpretation is correct." Both were first-rate. Both had rescued difficult materials many times before. That was exactly why neither would yield the lead role. The air in the meeting room went stiff, and the cart carrying the material sat stopped in the hallway.

Remembering this scene, I looked into one piece of research. The psychologist Swaab and colleagues examined data from several sports. Consider a sport where the players depend on each other (for example, a ball game where you connect passes to attack). Here, gathering too many outstanding players causes the team's record, past a certain proportion, to stop improving and sometimes to fall. Meanwhile, in a sport where players can perform separately — say, where individual records simply add up — this drop does not happen. The more you gather, the stronger you get.

What is interesting is the cause. It is not a lack of ability. If anything, the reverse: when there are too many capable people, a contest arises over who holds the lead. Swaab and colleagues pointed out that this jostling over status (= the unseen push-and-pull over who stands above and who calls the shots) is one thing that unravels teamwork. In a moment where you should pass, you want to decide it yourself. In a moment where you should yield, you cannot.

Which type is material review? Here my hand stopped. Reading an effect can be done alone, but the final decision that a piece of material may go out into the world is not something one person completes. The person who reads the effect, the person who watches the wording, the person who checks it against the rules. You join their separate readings and bring them to a single conclusion at the end. It is work that needs teamwork.

If so, my unit has the same trap. Lining up strong checkers was not itself a mistake. What broke was not the ability but the joints. If it is not settled who takes responsibility at the end, the more first-rate people there are, the more you get grabbing rather than yielding. That sight of the cart stopped in the hallway was born not from too little strength but from too much. Lining up strength and having strength mesh may be two different things.

03The one who pulls it together, the one who thinks it up, the one who finishes it

On the night before a deadline, I always steal a look at the same senior colleague's hands. He reads the last page quietly, at the edge of his desk. His red pen barely moves. And yet, until he says "let's go with this," the pages somehow refuse to come together. He never makes a showy point. Rewriting the text, redoing the figures — usually that is someone else. Even so, a meeting on a day he is absent ends scattered to the very end.

There are people who work the opposite way. A junior in her second year throws out one question everyone else had missed. "This indication — who was this material aimed at again?" The room stops for a moment. She is not especially good at finishing. If anything, careful follow-through is her weak point. But she throws a stone from an angle no one else sees. With that one throw, we end up redrawing the very premise.

Watching these two side by side, I began to remember the thinking of Meredith Belbin (= a British researcher who observed how teams work over many years). Belbin said a team that runs well needs a fixed set of roles. This is not about titles or fields. It is the "flavor" that a person naturally takes on within a meeting. The one who binds the whole together, the one who offers ideas, the one who follows the details to the end. He later divided such functions into about nine.

What matters here is that this is not a story of one role being the important one. What Belbin confirmed again and again was the fact that a team of only the same type falls into a fixed hole. All idea people, and ideas pile up but not one gets finished. All finishers, and the details are perfect, yet if the direction itself is off, no one speaks up. A missing function cannot be filled by high ability. The flavor itself is what is absent.

Line up cleanup hitters and you are strong — that is an easy idea to grasp. But Belbin's view sits on exactly the opposite side. Rather than lining up strong people side by side, mesh different flavors together. Someone to pull it together, someone to think it up, someone to finish it. Only with that combination does a team move forward, step by step. If both my senior and my junior colleague help me, it is probably because the two fill in different gaps.

04When ways of thinking differ, you grow stronger against hard questions

Over one sentence in a piece of material, our judgment split. How far did that sentence step past the approved effect (= the range the country has permitted the drug to be used for)? Read one way, it stayed within bounds; read another, it was plainly outside. On cases like this, staring alone does not firm up an answer. Your eyes keep looking at the same spot.

That day, three of us with different backgrounds read it. One had watched the clinical floor for years. One was strong with statistical numbers. As for me, I have a habit of doubting the turns of a sentence, endlessly. The three of us faced the same sentence from separate angles. The clinical one said, "Read this way, it looks as if it works on patients it isn't meant for." The statistics one noticed that the sample behind the cited figure was far too small. I found a trick where the endings, which were supposed to avoid certainty, added up to certainty across the whole. Alone, each of us could have caught only one of them. Reading as three, all three holes were filled for the first time.

I keep placing this experience next to the argument of Scott Page (= an American scholar who studied diversity and the wisdom of groups). What Page says is that differences in ways of thinking come into their own on hard problems. He calls this cognitive diversity (= that the angle on a problem and the way of solving it differ from person to person). Rather than gathering similar high performers, mixing in people with different viewpoints sometimes reaches a better answer. This has been shown in theory as well (the idea that differences in viewpoint correct the average error, known as the diversity prediction theorem).

Still, I want to write this without exaggeration. Page's claim is not "different viewpoints win at anything." Where it works is on hard questions that do not settle to a single answer, the kind you have to search around for. For simple work with a clear correct answer, it is faster to plainly let the most able person do it. Differences in viewpoint become strength only when the problem is hard. Stated precisely, with that condition, that is what it comes to.

So the more a material splits our judgment, the more I call over people who are not like me. Not to add up fields of expertise. Because I need eyes that see the same sentence from a place different from mine. Rather than lining up three cleanup hitters, read with three people in different fielding positions. Facing a hard sentence, that is far more dependable.

05Can you respect one another across likes and dislikes?

Let me write it honestly. I too have a colleague I find hard to deal with. He is sharp in how he speaks, and when opinions clash in a meeting, he catches the tail end of my words and throws it back. Before we even meet, I brace a little. That is the kind of person he is. I cannot come to like him. This feeling probably will not disappear.

On one case, I was paired with him. It was work to check the patient-facing explanatory material for a blood-pressure drug (= a booklet that tells patients how to take the medicine and what to watch for). We set a check sheet between us (= a list to cross-match each other's misses; a table where the items one person looked at could be traced again by the other) and put our desks side by side. My heart was heavy.

But as the work went on, his sure eye saved me again and again. A sentence I had skimmed past (a phrasing that could make the effect look larger) — he stopped it with his finger. "Here — this doesn't match the number behind it." A short line. The temperature of his feeling stayed low. But the point was right. I admitted my miss and fixed it. The feeling that he was hard to deal with stayed inside me the whole time. It had not disappeared. Even so, my respect for the work stood in a different place.

Jon Katzenbach, who studied team-building for a long time, drew a line between a real team and a merely friendly group. At the core, he said, is joint responsibility (= a relationship where you carry responsibility for the result to one another). It is not about being on good terms. Whether both of you can, in earnest, hold responsibility for the same result. That, he said, is the dividing line. This framing is close to what I felt. He and I never warmed to each other to the end. But on the one point of "making this material something patients can read with peace of mind," we could share the responsibility.

There is something to be careful of here. To respect is not to erase feeling. There is no need to force a "he's actually a good person" over the feeling that someone is hard to deal with. A difference can stay a difference. Holding it as it is, you bow your head to the sureness of the other person's work. Not a cancelling-out of feeling, but respect while still holding the feeling. I would call this not erasing but keeping.

Likes and dislikes exist, because we are human. Try to erase what cannot be erased, and the strain shows instead. You need not erase it. You only need to cross over. To cross over is to set your own uneasy feeling and the sureness of the other's eye on the same desk, side by side. Those two can hold together. On that case, I confirmed it in the palm of my hand. The core of a team is probably right there.

06I want someone who keeps an eye on each person

A newcomer was stuck on a detail in a material. Before a sentence explaining the side effects of an anticancer drug, her cursor would not move. Whether she could rewrite it, or whether there was a reason behind the original wording, she could not tell. That she was hesitating to speak up came through from her back.

The unit leader quietly took the chair beside her. Not a command to everyone. He chose his words for that one newcomer. "At your last workplace, how did you write this kind of side-effect explanation?" First he asks the road she came by. Then, "Here, don't frighten too much, but don't hide it either. Which way would you lean?" — leaving room for her to decide. Rather than handing her the answer, he pushed her half a step toward where she still had room to grow.

Watching from the side, I thought: if I were the subordinate, I would want one person like this. Not a boss who pours the same command over everyone, but someone who looks at my circumstances and at the part I can still grow. Whether that person is there or not changes, completely, how you grow in a workplace.

Bernard Bass, who studied leadership, called a way of guiding that lifts people transformational leadership (= a way of leading that draws out each person's motivation and growth rather than forcing obedience through orders). One of its pillars is individualized consideration (in English, individualized consideration = keeping an eye, one by one, on each subordinate's growth and circumstances). Do not fit everyone into the same mold. What does this person need, and what does that person need instead? Look at them one at a time. What the unit leader was doing was exactly this.

Sharpening one's individuality is, in the end, the person's own responsibility. No one grows it for you. Even so, when there is someone beside you pointing toward where the light falls — where that bud can grow — the speed of growing is different. Just as lining up only cleanup hitters does not make a lineup, each person's flavor begins to work only when there is someone who sees it and draws it out. The responsibility to sharpen individuality is the person's. The role of drawing it out belongs to the one who leads the team. When those two mesh, a person can take the next step — like that newcomer sitting beside the unit leader.

07A stance that supports, and an eye that sees each flavor

On the last Friday of the month, the unit leader was calling us to his desk one by one. My turn came, and I braced a little. So many spots I had failed to fix this past month came to mind. But the leader did not start there. "You always chase the source of a number in a document down to the very last digit." That is what he said first. He put into words, before I did, a habit I had not noticed in myself.

In material review, you check one by one whether a medicine's ads and explanatory documents stay within the approved content. It is a run of fine checks, and what I could not do is plain enough to my own eyes. That is exactly why I had expected my weak points to be pointed out first. The leader's way was the reverse. He scooped up the flavor that was mine alone, before I did. Not an order, but a hand that supports from behind.

Someone gave this stance a name. Robert Greenleaf (= a man who watched organization-building for a long time at an American company) called it servant leadership (= a way of guiding that places supporting and serving first). Usually, a leader is thought to be the one who stands at the front and commands. Greenleaf flipped that order. If you want to lead people, first work for them. Help what they themselves want to grow toward. Guidance follows after that.

Put into words, it sounds obvious. But on the floor it is hard. When a deadline looms, you want to start from what is missing — "fix this here." What the leader did was to place one breath before that. Before counting the missing ten percent, he first saw the ninety percent that only this person has. Just by reversing the order, the strength in the back of the person he called changes. I could honestly feel like chasing the source of numbers for another month. It is a feeling that never comes out when you are blamed.

Alongside Greenleaf, there is another idea working quietly. In how people relate, there are two directions: going to fill in what is missing, and growing the flavor that was there to begin with. The leader stood on the latter. Not going around erasing weak points, but searching for the place where what makes a person themselves rings out. Line up only cleanup hitters, and the same strengths merely collide. The one strong on defense, the one who raises their voice, the one who chases the fine numbers. When different flavors mesh, a lineup becomes a line for the first time.

The charm of a person comes down, in the end, to what makes them themselves. That was the plain intuition I placed at the start of this piece, before it became any argument. Greenleaf's name, and the way of relating that sees each flavor, were not arguments to erase that intuition. They were, rather, a quiet backing that supports it from behind. The ideal team is not a lineup of cleanup hitters of the same strength. It is a place where different flavors play off one another, and where there is someone who scoops each one up, carefully, one at a time. That short handful of minutes on the last Friday of the month taught me this.