“Why are team leaders at Korean companies so helpless?”

This is a question I often hear because of my experience with Silicon Valley and Korean companies. Even though they are the same team leader and manager, why are they so different? Because Korean team leaders are incompetent? no. The structure is different.

What is a team leader?

A team leader at a Silicon Valley startup can do this.

“Last quarter, we laid off two team members and directly scouted two seniors from LinkedIn. We secured a project budget of $200,000 and launched the initial service this time.”

What about team leaders at Korean companies during the same period? Even if you have a team member who is underperforming, you can just “request a meeting” with HR. New personnel? “There is no T/O.” Try something new? “There is no budget for this year.”

Although they are the same team leader, one of them creates results with his or her team and budget, and the other is an expensive messenger who deciphers the management's intentions and conveys them to the team members.

Two axes of authority: personnel rights and budget rights

Growth as a leader is possible when two types of authority are properly given.

First, personnel rights.

Silicon Valley managers create their own teams. Clarify the team's purpose, hire, conduct PIP and fire if necessary. The team is the manager’s work.

The Korean team leader must do the best he can with the number of people he is given. Recruitment is led by HR, and the team leader is an interviewer. The reality is that even if there are people with poor performance, we have to “bear with them and bring them along.”

Second, budget rights.

Silicon Valley managers plan projects that will have an impact on the market and customers, secure and execute budgets according to the roadmap. Each team/organization is assigned an executive as a sponsor, and they do not spare any support if it suits the company's business and direction. If you can't make an impact, the manager and the team he created will get together, and it doesn't happen often that you can't try due to lack of budget.

The Korean team leader distributes tasks sent down from above to team members. Try something new? It was rejected, saying it was “unprecedented.” Budget execution? Rigid processes must be followed. This is also why the representative organizations with power in Korean companies are human resources and finance.

But is AI changing it?

We are moving from an era where we had to ask people to do work, to an era where we have to ask AI to do the work or work with AI. Because work had to be done through people, the role of a manager to manage people was necessary, and since people are labor costs and labor costs are a fixed cost per hour, the budget had to be proportional to that.

However, this role itself may disappear or remain a task for management only, not team leaders. Team leaders may no longer need the team members and budget approvals they used to need to make an impact. The permissions required to run are dramatically reduced.

If the leadership of a team leader in the AI ​​era were to be redefined, for example, it might look like this.

Before: People Manager

• Assign work to team members
• Check progress
• Performance evaluation and feedback

After: AI Orchestrator

• Designing tasks for AI agents
• Context engineering and workflow configuration
• Run it yourself and prove it with the results

To leaders without authority

For young, disenfranchised leaders, this is a paradoxical opportunity. This is because it has become possible to indirectly obtain authority through AI that is not given by the existing system.

If you have not yet tried automating the workflow of existing tasks and delegating them to an agent through AI, start small. I believe that the leadership gap between Silicon Valley and Korea is still large, but in the AI ​​era, a detour has emerged to overcome that gap.

People management can gradually become a fake task. It is time to review whether it is possible to move the lagging indicator of impact faster with AI than the routine of improving leading indicators, which is a given for each team.

Thank you.