In developing its V10 V-NAND with more than 400 layers, hundreds of Samsung Electronics engineers stepped beyond the boundaries of their own responsibilities. They learned about adjacent processes, connected with specialists from different fields, and worked together to solve problems.

Why did they go that far?

Rather than simply concluding that “Samsung has highly capable engineers,” a different picture emerges when we compare these employee behaviors with Evidence from global leadership research.

Zenger Folkman’s research shows that the difference between extraordinary and average leaders is reflected in business outcomes including employee engagement, customer satisfaction, turnover, and profitability.

In this Insight, we connect Samsung employees’ behaviors with large-scale leadership research and explore what they may tell HR leaders about initiative, autonomy, strengths, and behavioral change.

Peemo and Dash
Peemo searches publicly available information for concrete employee behaviors and the Evidence behind them.
Dash analyzes that Evidence through the lenses of The Extraordinary Leader™, DialogueWORKS, PQA, and Talent Development.

Beyond 400 layers, “my responsibility” was no longer enough

Peemo:
“Dash, in Samsung’s V10 BV-NAND development, hundreds of engineers gathered almost every day to discuss technical challenges.

With V-NAND exceeding 400 layers, multiple technologies became closely interconnected. Understanding only one’s own process was no longer enough to solve the problems.

So engineers stepped beyond their assigned responsibilities, learned about adjacent areas, and worked with engineers from other processes to solve problems together.”

Dash:
“I think this offers an important clue to how we think about initiative and autonomy.

When HR talks about self-directed talent, we often imagine someone who:
thinks independently,
makes decisions independently,
and acts without waiting for instructions.

All of those are important.

But Samsung’s behavior suggests something slightly different.
Recognize, ‘I cannot solve this alone.’
Find the people you need.
Cross the boundary of your expertise.
Listen to different opinions.
Examine the Evidence.
Change your judgment when necessary.
Then act again.

Perhaps autonomy should not be defined as ‘being able to do everything alone.’

A better definition may be:
‘Being able to choose and take the actions necessary to achieve the desired result.’”

Does leadership really affect business performance?

Peemo:
“Dash, when I looked into The Extraordinary Leader research, I found some striking numbers.

One study classified branch managers in a financial services company by leadership effectiveness and compared their ratings with actual branch profitability.

Branches led by the bottom 10% of leaders recorded a loss of $1.2 million.
The middle 80% generated an average profit of $2.4 million per branch.
The top 10% generated a profit of $4.5 million.”

Dash:
“What is interesting here is not only the difference between poor leaders and average leaders.

There is also a substantial difference between ‘reasonably good leaders’ and extraordinary leaders.

Talent Development often starts with ideas such as:
Eliminate weaknesses.
Bring people up to the average.
Make sure they can do everything reasonably well.

But The Extraordinary Leader research raises a different question.
Making someone ‘above average’ and developing extraordinary strengths are not the same thing.”

Peemo:
“A similar pattern appeared in a Mexican retail company.

The leadership effectiveness of 95 store managers was assessed through 360-degree feedback and compared with year-over-year sales growth.

Average sales growth across the organization was 5%.
Stores managed by leaders in the bottom 10% grew by only 0.7%.
Stores managed by leaders in the top 10% grew by 7.4%.”

Dash:
“That tells us something important.

Leadership is not simply a ‘soft HR topic.’
Leadership changes employee behavior.
Those behavioral changes accumulate.
And eventually they can influence customers, sales, and profitability.

That is why leadership development deserves to be treated as a business issue, not simply an HR program.”

50% lower turnover and 40% higher customer satisfaction — what happens in between?

Peemo:
“Zenger Folkman currently reports client outcomes including:
50% lower turnover.
40% higher customer satisfaction.
Up to 70% higher employee engagement.
Three times more discretionary effort — employees willingly going beyond what is formally required.
And up to 4.8 times greater profitability.”

Dash:
“For HR, I do not think the numbers alone are the most important part.

Turnover declined.
Engagement increased.
Customer satisfaction improved.

But what changed in employee behavior between the leadership intervention and those business outcomes?
That is the question we need to examine.

And that is exactly what we are looking at in Samsung’s 400+ layer development.

Employees did not stop at:
‘That’s not my responsibility.’
They connected with the people they needed.
They did not remain trapped inside their own expertise.
They did not avoid difficult problems.
They kept experimenting until they could produce results.

Perhaps it is the accumulation of these seemingly small behaviors that ultimately creates the larger business outcomes.”

From “fixing weaknesses” to “building strengths”

Peemo:
“The Extraordinary Leader research also contains data that challenges some conventional assumptions about Talent Development.

Only about 20% of leaders have a serious weakness — what the research describes as a fatal flaw.

For the remaining roughly 80%, developing strengths rather than correcting weaknesses is a more effective path toward becoming an extraordinary leader.”

Dash:
“This is particularly important for Japanese companies.

When people receive 360-degree feedback, their eyes naturally go to the lowest scores.

‘This is a 3, so I need to make it a 4.’
‘I need to bring this weakness up to average.’

That is an understandable reaction.

But unless there is a fatal flaw, bringing every competency above average may not be the best development strategy.

Samsung’s engineers also possess different areas of expertise.

The goal is not to turn everyone into the same all-purpose professional.

Have a distinctive strength.
Connect it with someone else’s different strength.
Use that combination to solve a problem that neither person could solve alone.

That seems much closer to how real work gets done.”

Being results-driven alone is not enough

Peemo:
“There is also interesting research on combinations of strengths.

For example, even when a leader is highly rated for driving results, the probability of being perceived as an outstanding leader remains low if interpersonal skills are weak.

But when both results orientation and interpersonal effectiveness are strong, that probability rises dramatically.

In other words, competencies do not simply add together.

They can create a multiplier effect.”

Dash:
“That connects directly with the Samsung example.

Deep semiconductor expertise alone was not enough to move beyond 400 layers.

Engineers needed technical expertise, but they also needed the ability to:
talk with others,
understand different specialties,
think through problems together,
and share Evidence.

In The Extraordinary Leader, this idea appears in the use of ‘companion behaviors.’

To make an existing strength even stronger, you develop another behavior that reinforces it.

This changes Talent Development from ‘repairing weaknesses’ to ‘multiplying strengths.’”

Three strengths can dramatically change leadership effectiveness

Peemo:
“Another interesting finding is that leaders do not have to be strong in all 19 competencies.

According to Zenger Folkman’s research, leaders with no outstanding strengths had an overall leadership effectiveness score at the 34th percentile.
With one outstanding strength, this rose to the 64th percentile.
With three outstanding strengths, it reached the 81st percentile.”

Dash:
“This has significant implications for HR.

We could list all 19 competencies and try to improve every one of them a little.

Or we could ask:
‘Which strengths should this person develop to become extraordinary?’

That changes the development plan itself.

Do we want more people who can do everything reasonably well?
Or do we want more people who are extraordinary at something?

Those are very different Talent Development strategies.”

Is 360-degree feedback just a popularity contest?

Peemo:
“The 360-degree assessment itself has also been validated using a very large dataset.

More than 100 companies.
26,314 leaders.
237,123 survey responses.
1,956 survey items.

These data were used to statistically examine the relationship between assessment items and overall leadership effectiveness.”

Dash:
“If we dismiss 360-degree feedback as merely ‘what other people think of me,’ we miss its real value.

Of course, a 360-degree assessment cannot tell us everything about a person.

But it can reveal something important.

How does my manager see me?
How do my peers see me?
How do my direct reports see me?
And how do I see myself?

The gaps between those perspectives matter.

This connects directly with DialogueWORKS.

People do not see Evidence in a purely objective way.

We interpret reality through our experience, knowledge, values, assumptions, and previous successes.

That is why we need to ask:
‘What Evidence did I actually observe?’
‘What meaning did I add to it?’
‘How do other people see the same situation?’

Those questions can change how we understand ourselves and the situation around us.”

Question the question: “How do I fix my lowest score?”

Peemo:
“How would PQA look at this?”

Dash:
“When people receive 360-degree feedback, many immediately ask:
‘How can I improve my lowest score?’

PQA encourages us to question the question itself.

‘Is raising my lowest score really my most important development priority?’
‘What will have a greater impact on performance: correcting a weakness or developing a strength?’
‘What additional behavior could I combine with this strength to take it to an extraordinary level?’

When the question changes, development behavior changes.

That is Critical Thinking in practice.”

From an HLS perspective: Is “combining strengths” another tool?

Peemo:
“How would you organize all of this from the perspective of HLS Global Case Research?”

Dash:
“In Samsung’s employee behaviors, we can see patterns that have appeared repeatedly in other high-productivity companies we have studied:

Observe.
Question.
Connect with people.
Decide.
Act.
Learn from the results.

But when we combine Samsung’s Evidence with The Extraordinary Leader research, another interesting behavior appears:

‘Combine your own strength with a different strength.’
Should this simply be included within ‘connecting’?
Or should it be considered an independent behavior that helps increase human productivity?

I do not think we need to rush to a conclusion.

At HLS, we want to continue testing this idea as we accumulate more Evidence from different companies.”

The productivity gap between top and average performers is larger than we may think

Peemo:
“There is one more study that caught my attention.
Research on highly complex work found that top performers were 127% more productive than average performers.”

Dash:
“This leads to a question I would like to put to HR leaders in Japan:
‘Have we made increasing the number of reasonably good people the goal of Talent Development?’
Reduce weaknesses.
Bring every competency above average.

Develop people who are reliably competent across the board.

That may be useful.

But it may not create more people capable of producing extraordinary results.

Samsung did not exceed 400 layers because everyone possessed exactly the same capabilities.

People with deep expertise stepped outside the boundaries of that expertise and connected with people who had different strengths.”

Perhaps HR needs to change its assumptions about development before changing its training

Initiative.
Autonomy.
Psychological safety.
Questioning.
Leadership.
Communication.
Critical Thinking.

We can treat each of these as a separate training topic.
But in real work, they are interconnected.

Know your strengths.
Connect with the people you need.
Listen to different perspectives.
Question your assumptions.
Experiment.
Look at the Evidence.
Revise your judgment.
Act again.
Then continue developing your strengths.

When we combine Samsung’s employee behaviors with The Extraordinary Leader research, the idea of “self-directed talent” begins to look different.

Self-directed talent may not mean:
“Someone who can do everything alone.”

It may mean:
“Someone who understands their strengths, connects them with the strengths of others, and continually changes their own behavior to produce results.”

So I would like to leave HR leaders with one final question:
“Are we spending too much of our Talent Development effort bringing employees’ weaknesses up to average?”

Increasing the number of people who are above average and increasing the number of extraordinary people are not the same thing.

Akira Chida (Dash)
SmartWorks
HLS Global Case Research

#HumanCapitalManagement #Initiative #Autonomy #PsychologicalSafety #Questioning #Leadership #Communication #CriticalThinking