Good stats, bad team

I am still basking in the limelight from yesterday's launch of The 8 Man Rotation: The 2014 Season E-book, (if you missed the launch announcement, you can check it here), so I knew I had to drop in some kind of a sport-related take as a follow-up.

There is a phenomenon in sports, most notably in NBA basketball, knows as 'Good Stats, Bad Team', which referred to the sometimes over-inflated to the positive personal statistics, (points, rebounds, etc.), that some players accrue largely by virtue of playing for a bad, losing team.World B. Free

The explanation for this situation is pretty sound and understandable. Even the worst NBA teams are likely to generate near 100 total points and 45 - 50 total rebounds, even while losing. And someone on the team has to take shots, score points, grab rebounds, etc. So often a good player, playing on one of these bad teams, can look statistically to be almost a great player just by looking at their stats. He might get 5 or 6 more points per game and 3 or 4 more rebounds than if he were on a more competitive team, and surrounded by more talented teammates. This might not seem like that big a deal, but even small increases in points and rebounds are a big deal in the NBA - they translate to more valuable contracts, possible All Star game appearances, and recognition as an 'elite' player amongst fans and peers.

So NBA team management has to be careful when dealing with these kinds of 'Good Stats, Bad Team' players, and attempt to quantify the impact on their performance when considering adding such a player to an already good team. You can take a look at Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers for a current example - since moving from the perennial bad Minnesota Timberwolves to the LeBron James-led Cavs this season, Love's numbers are down across the board, and has struggled at times fitting in to a team where he is no longer the best player.

The 'Good Stas, Bad Team' concept was on my mind not just from watching another 4 hours of basketball last night, but from this piece, highlights of a recent interview of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, where Costolo warned leaders of sort of the opposite of 'Good Stas, Bad Team', i.e. poaching managerial talent from already successful companies. 

Here is Costolo's take:

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo just finished speaking at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco, and he said that he's spending a lot of time instilling proper management practices into his leadership team.

It's particularly important because a lot of these employees are young, and have only had one other job. They sometimes think that just because something worked well at their previous company, it will work well at Twitter.

Not so.

As Costolo put it, "It might have just been that company X was making an extraordinary amount of money and you could've done anything."

Did you catch that? 

It is the reverse take on 'Good Stats, Bad Team'. In this context it could be called 'Average Manager, Great Team', maybe.

Costolo warns us that when hiring talent out of great, successful companies that we need to be a little careful that maybe some portion, maybe a large portion, of the individual's success was due to the great company/team of which they were a part. Maybe in that context, anyone could have been successful in the role. And finally, it reminds us to at least consider what might happen when taking an individual out of that successful context and placing them into a new, (and possibly less successful, less talented context), might mean for their performance.

It is a pretty interesting concept, and probably worth keeping in mind if you have convinced yourself that you only want to recruit from Apple, Google, (insert the name of the best company in your industry).

Happy Thursday.

The 8 Man Rotation: The 2014 Season - #8ManRotation

As an HR/Talent pro I am on record as stating that you can learn just about everything you need to know about leadership, management, performance, assessment, teamwork, engagement, culture, succession planning, and ultimately winning from watching sports.

In fact, not only do I believe that to be true, my 8 Man Rotation pals Kris Dunn, Tim Sackett, Lance Haun, Matt Stollak and I spend lots of time, energy, and pixels all year long trying to make that point through the numerous posts we craft that hit upon the themes of Sports and HR.

And each year our pal Matt Stollak compiles these pieces into The 8 Man Rotation E-book, which the boys and I are proud to release today.

The 8 Man Rotation: The 2014 Season is 161 pages of our best takes in 2014 on the themes of HR strategy, analytics, talent management, performance, recruiting, compensation and more - all with a connection to the wide, wide world of sports. With a forward from our pal Paul Hebert, The 2014 Season I have to confess, was probably our finest season yet.

Please check out The 2014 Season, (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

The 8 Man Rotation: The 2014 Season from Steve Boese

Huge thanks go out once again to the fellas for letting me be a part of the crew and to Matty Ice in particular for doing all the hard work to bring the Ebook together each year. 

Culture Change or the Gig Economy: You probably can choose only one

Warning in advance, this post is (sort of) about basketball, but hopefully will resonate beyond the hardwood and make some sense to HR/Talent pros in this increasingly complicated modern age. First a quick take from the NBA, and how perhaps it might hold some insights that apply in the real world.

Exhibit A : Your 2014 - 2015 New York Knicks, current possessors of the NBA's poorest Won-Loss record at 5 - 35, at the time of this writing riding a franchise-record 15 game losing streak, with their two best players currently injured, and recently having traded another two of their more useful players for essentially nothing in return, (the players they received in the trade were immediately released).

The Knicks are a joke, a running tour of poor performances, uninspiring effort, and predictable results. Even for me, a life-long fan, they are almost impossible to watch. 

But let's get to the HR/Talent/Workplace angle of this. Prior to the season the Knicks hired a new head coach, Derek Fisher who had extensive playing experience (and has played on a few championship teams), but no coaching experience. Basically he is a first-time coach. And more importantly, the Knicks threw a ton of money and power to lure legendary coach Phil Jackson, winner of 11 titles with the Bulls and Lakers, to run the entire basketball operation. In corporate terms, the Knicks basically brought in a new CEO and a new COO with the marching orders to turn the franchise into a winner and to make the changes need that will lead to winning - many of these changes centered around instilling a 'winning' culture.

But in the NBA, and in your company, even C-level mandated change, and in particular with attempts to change something as nebulous and imprecise as workplace culture the task is never going to be easy. And often in both sports teams and 'normal' businesses, culture change is completely about the people that make up the organization, their willingness to make and embrace changes, their commitment to these changes longer term, and finally the ability and flexibility of management to add/move/replace talent as needed to better align the workforce to this new culture-driven change program.

Now since the NBA has some specific and unique rules and constraints (salary caps, rules about trading players, deadlines for trading players, etc.) that to some extent limits the flexibility of team executives to simply 'rip and replace' the roster with new players if the current ones are adjudged not good enough or (beg forgiveness) not a 'cultural fit'. And I bet even if your organization is not subject to many, (or any), of these kinds of constraints, it still isn't easy or even advised for you to begin a widespread house cleaning of employees to try to quickly raise the talent level and try for better cultural alignment. I mean, after you fire everyone, who exactly is going to do the work while you scour LinkedIn for replacements?

So NBA teams and normal businesses too that are driving massive change programs, at least in the short term, are going to have to try and effect change by, on, and with many of the existing workforce. And in the 2014 - 2015 Knicks, one specific attribute of their workforce/roster has made driving this kind of major cultural change, (and the actual on-court tactical changes that accompany it), exceedingly difficult. 

At the start of the 2014 - 2015 season, 11 of the 15 Knicks roster players were on the final year of their playing contracts, the sports world's version of being a lame duck. These 11 were not all at the same stage of their careers, some were young, untested players trying to cement a place in the NBA, some were older veterans trying to hang on to their lucrative playing careers, and some were mid-career players that likely were not going to be a part of the Knicks plans beyond this season. In short, 11 of the 15 workers had no guarantee or assurances their services would be wanted by the Knicks past this season - a season where the team executives were also trying to push major strategic and cultural changes on the team.

Basically, the Knicks started 2014 - 2015 trying to drive a massive change program with the vast majority of their front-line workers, (the players), not at all bought in to this long-term program, as these 11 were (and are) essentially short-term, contract, 'gig economy' type workers. They, naturally, have to worry about their next contracts, and will be incented to do the things they think they need to do to obtain those contracts. 

And many of these kinds of behaviors (scoring more, getting court time, developing more personal skills), have not be aligned or compatible with the Knicks executives ideas about how they team should play. Jackson and Fisher want the team to play in a style that will (and has) precluded most of these players from generating the kinds of outcomes they think they need to further their careers.

And therein lies the problem.

The Knicks, (and this could be any business), are trying to drive a massive cultural and strategic change program with a majority workforce working as short-term contingent employees that have to think about their personal agendas and futures. 

The Knicks leaders have expected (and have been surprised by the fact that it has not really worked), that these short-term, 'gig' workers would fully and happily embrace change when the workers had no assurances at all even if they did embrace the changes that one, they would not be shown the door at the end of the season anyway; and two, that embracing these changes would not hinder their opportunities to find new contracts with other teams when/if the Knicks let them go.

You can't change the culture by relying on a bunch of short-timers to execute that change. It doesn't work in basketball and it probably won't work anywhere. 

There are lots of benefits to organizations to increase their reliance on short-term contractors, contingent workers, outsourced services, etc. Less cost, more flexibility, easier admin, etc.  But running the organization as a loose confederacy of 'gig' economy workers has some negatives too.

Chief among them, you can't expect these gig workers to care too much about your culture, and your desire to change that culture. Culture change requires commitment, from both employees and employers.

Happy Thursday.

REPRISE: The Analytics Takeover Won't Always Be Pretty

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next few days (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2014. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2014!

The below post first ran back in March and is a good example of a combination of themes that I love writing about on the blog: NBA basketball and talent management. In this piece I took a look at the trend developing in the modern NBA, where business and tech savvy (and new) team owners are valuing data and analytics skills and experience more than decades of actual basketball experience when making executive hires. As you would expect this change in hiring philosophy will have pretty significant implications for talent, and might just be indicative of bigger talent management challenges. 

Happy Sunday!

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The Analytics Takeover Won't Always Be Pretty

Seems like it has been some time since I dropped a solid 8 Man Rotation contribution here on the blog, so to remedy that, please first take a look at this recent piece on ESPN.com, 'Fears that stats trump hoops acumen', a look at the tensions that are building inside NBA front offices and among team executives.

In case you didn't click over and read the piece, the gist is this: With the increased importance and weight that a new generation of NBA team owners are placing on data-driven decision making and analytical skills, that the traditional people that have been the talent pool for NBA team management and executive roles, (former NBA players), are under threat from a new kind of candidate - ones that have deep math, statistics, and data backgrounds and, importantly, not careers as actual basketball players.

Check this excerpt from the ESPN piece to get a feel for how this change in talent management and sourcing strategies is being interpreted by long time (and anonymously quoted) NBA executives:

Basketball guys who participated in the game through years of rigorous training and practice, decades of observation work through film and field participation work feel under-utilized and under-appreciated and are quite insulted because their PhDs in basketball have been downgraded," the former executive, who chose to remain anonymous, told ESPN NBA Insider Chris Broussard.

One longtime executive, who also chose to remain anonymous, postulated that one reason why so many jobs are going to people with greater analytical backgrounds is because newer and younger owners may better identify with them.

"Generally speaking, neither the [newer generation of] owners nor the analytic guys have basketball in their background," the longtime executive told Broussard. "This fact makes it easy for both parties to dismiss the importance of having experience in and knowledge of the game.

The piece goes on to say that since many newer NBA owners have business and financial industry backgrounds, (and didn't inherit their teams as part of the 'family business'), that they would naturally look for their team executives to share the kinds of educational and work experience profiles of the business executives with which they are accustomed to working with, and have been successful with.

The former players, typically, do not have these kinds of skills, they have spent just about all their adult lives (and most of their childhoods), actually playing basketball. A set of experiences, it is turning out, no longer seems to provide the best training or preparation for running or managing a basketball team. 

But the more interesting point from all this, and the one that might have resonance beyond basketball, is the idea that the change in hiring philosophy is coming right from the top - from a new generation of team owners that have a different set of criteria upon which they are assessing and evaluating talent.

Left to tradition, hiring and promotion decisions would have probably only slowly begun to modernize. But a new generation of owners/leaders in the NBA are changing the talent profile for the next generation of leaders.

The same thing is likely to play out in your organization. Eventually, if it has not happened yet, you are going to go to a meeting with your new CHRO who didn't rise through the HR ranks and maybe is coming into the role from finance, operations, or manufacturing. In that meeting your 19 years of experience in employee relations might be a great asset to brag on. Or it might not be.

And you might find out only when you are introduced to your new boss, who has spent her last 5 years crunching numbers and developing stats models.

Prepare to be disappointed

The full title of this post really should be 'Prepare to be disappointed: The 2014-2015 New York Knicks', but I wanted to at least try not to scare away any potential readers, particularly ones that get tired of the 8 Man Rotation 'Sports and HR' posts.

I promise this post isn't really about the Knicks or sports, not completely anyway.

The backstory:

I arrived back home at HR Happy Hour HQ at about 7:55PM ET last night and realized that it was about 5 minutes before the tip off time for the Knicks, (my favorite NBA team since forever, my favorite holiday picture from my childhood features a 5 or 6 year old me sporting New York Knicks pajamas that Santa had bestowed), who were matched up against the New Orleans Pelicans, (not a very good team, but better than the Knicks, much like just about every other team so far this year is better than the Knicks). 

As I quickly gathered up some snacks and a needed beverage, scurrying to be in my favored easy chair for the start of the game the thought that popped into my mind was that all I was really doing was preparing to be disappointed - the Knicks are one of the worst teams in the league and have lost a number of close games recently, the kinds of losses that really sting for longtime fans (and I suppose the players too). Heading into last night's game, there was no logical reason to expect the Knicks would be able to defeat the Pelicans, I didn't think they had much of a chance anyway, so all I was doing by planning my evening, (partially), around watching the game was really just preparing to be disappointed by the eventual Knicks loss.

OK, that was a lot of nonsense about basketball to get me to the point, so here goes.

I have ceased letting Knicks loss after loss bother me. Sure, I would rather they were better, I would enjoy more frequent wins. But I get that this is not going to be a very good year for them. And so as a hedge against the Knicks stumbling and bumbling, I have adopted the much better (and much more fun to watch), Atlanta Hawks as my proxy team for the season. 

The Hawks have a solid winning record so far this season, play an upbeat and entertaining style of basketball, and, importantly, have never been a significant or hated rival to my Knicks. They have always just been another team in the league, so supporting them is not really traitorous to my team, but rather serves as a way for me to keep invested in something I enjoy, (NBA basketball), while not allowing the terrible Knicks team to ruin the overall experience of the sport.

So now the point (no one has kept reading until this point I am thinking).

The Knicks, and there relentless way of disappointing me and their other fans probably represent a lot of our real lives too. Jobs that we really can't stand. Managers that are always on our cases. Co-workers that let us down, (at best), or stab us in the back (more likely). Significant others that just seem to do the same annoying things over and over again. And if you have kids, well, I don't need to delineate all the ways they manage to exasperate, frustrate, and yes, even disappoint us. 

How do we deal with all that, with all that disappointment?

I think we have to find the version of the Atlanta Hawks in all these varying situations.

The part, even if it small or insignificant, that is pretty reliably positive. The element that we can latch on to in a bad situation and take something positive from. 

There is something about your crappy job that has value. Your slacker boyfriend probably takes good care of your cat. There is likely at least one person amongst the clowns you work with from which you can learn something.

This isn't about seeing the bright side in a given, bad situation, it is about seeing a different side.

I am stuck supporting the terrible Knicks because they are my team. But I can still take enjoyment from the Hawks, (up until they play the Knicks), without being a traitor.

And you can find something to love about your job while not betraying your very real hatred for it.

Ok, that is it, I am out.

Note: It is halftime of the Knicks-Pelicans game. The Knicks are only down by 2. Maybe I won't be disappointed after all.