Sports analogies aren't typically my deal. I leave that to my friend Kris, the undisputed master of the genre - at least within the talent blogosphere. But this story is just too compelling for me to leave alone.
We had a great discussion at the dinner table last night about the Sunday New York Times Magazine article The No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis (who you may know as the author of Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
and Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
).
The article features N.B.A. player Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets. Battier, as the article points out, is an intriguing statistical anomaly. "His greatness is not marked in box scores or at slam-dunk contests, but on the court Shane Battier makes his team better, often much better, and his opponents worse, often much worse."
Battier's story has huge implications for talent management, for leadership planning and development, and - particularly, I think - for how we measure and reward performance. Allow me to let a few outtakes from the article speak for themselves about the Battier phenomenon.
It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. ...
He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. ...
...the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey <hired to remake the Rockets> says, “and he should be shot.”) ...
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. ...It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them. ...
“We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs. “It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re getting paid.” ...
Back to dinner conversation. My husband Keith worked with Michael Lewis during his Liar's Poker days at Salomon Brothers and has also coached youth hockey for nearly two decades. The Battier story has its parallel in hockey, where my husband realized early in his coaching career that the key statistics for his players were not "goals" or "assists" but rather their "plus-minus". Individual players' plus-minus stats get increased by one every time their team scores an even strength or shorthanded goal while they are on the ice and decreased by one every time their team allows an even strength or shorthanded goal while they are on the ice. As Keith will point out, it is the best metric for how an individual player really contributes to the success of the overall team.
The implications for us? Many, my friend. How are we defining and measuring top performance? What are we driving and reinforcing with our reward programs? What competencies do we focus on in recruiting leaders ... and in our succession planning efforts? Are we focusing too much on the box score, on goals and assists, and overlooking the critical plus-minus contribution?
Do we understand deeply enough the characteristics of the player whose presence in the game makes the whole team perform better, and do our programs reflect this deep understanding?
I don't believe so. Which means we have our work cut out for us.
, make the case for smaller goals as a way to kick start performance during times of adversity.