Measuring & Rewarding No-Stats All-Star Performance

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.

 

Comments

[KD]

Ann - your husband worked with Michael Lewis - that dude is an absolute rock star and one of the reasons I started blogging. Very cool. Good post, you should do sports more often!

Thanks - KD

[Ann Bares]

KD:

That is cool. Glad you liked.

[E James (Jim) Brennan]

Despite periodic and fitfully-implemented efforts in the past, few orgs have attempted to create metrics to capture and measure the catalytic effect of individuals. Sounds kind of contradictory, too, to consider the way certain individuals affect groups and how people "grow" others, whether it be how they "rub off" as a force multiplier on team members or "nuture and develop" subordinates.

Every big enterprise knows there are king-makers who inculcate such habits and values in their subordinates that an inordinate number of their graduates rise to prominence. In the military, they are typically senior NCOs, but there is rarely a formal rank or reward program for such mentors in the private sector where that comparable legacy link for upward development coaching is seldom positively reinforced effectively over time. Those who develop others (unless they are full-time T&D specialists) are often depreciated as less competent than their proteges, when in fact their value comes from different services. Those driven by personal ambition are often blind to the important role played by humble team-builders.

I'd love to hear from some outfits that have successfully implemented programs to identify, measure, reward and reinforce successful mentor/coaches.

[Ann Bares]

Jim:

I'd love to hear from those outfits too. I like your term "force multiplier" - at essence that is a big piece of what these individuals do. And I agree that we - collectively - tend to overlook and underappreciate their role and contribution.

The metric part is tough. And we have to care that we approach and measure it in a way that we don't contaminate the very thing we are trying to encourage. A challenge, but a worthwhile one I think.

Thanks for the thoughts.

[Wally Bock]

I see two components to the Shane Battier situation. One is metrics. Without a bit of number crunching and conceptualizing that moves beyond the classic box score, there wouldn't be enough understanding of the game for Battier to do what he does as well has he does.

The other component is Battier himself. He's a particularly selfless player, but that's not enough. He's also smart enough to make sense of the metrics. And he has the physical skills to put them to use against some of the top players in professional basketball.

In other words, Battier is a special case. The question for us is what general lessons there are for us to apply elsewhere, with different people.