The 8 Man Rotation

2014

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The 8 Man Rotation:

A Look At Sports and HR

The 2014 Season

By

Steve Boese Kris Dunn

Lance Haun Tim Sackett

Matthew Stollak

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Paul Hebert HR Planning, Strategy, Data and Leadership

Big Data – On the Basketball Court Today..In Your Office Tomorrow? – Steve Boese The Analytics Takeover Won’t Always Be Pretty – Steve Boese The Silver Hammer: Three Reasons to Come Down Hard On Your First Big

Leadership Test – Steve Boese The Juergen Bomb: Three Reasons Why A New Leader Makes A Strategic Firing –

Steve Boese Germany, Spurs: Welcome to the Machine – Steve Boese “I’m Gay:” Notes On How One Leader Got Potentially Disruptive News Right… -

Kris Dunn DATA & MONEY: Run a Vasectomy/March Madness Promo at Your Company Next

January… - Kris Dunn Want to Be A Great People Manager? Don’t Watch the Ball… - Kris Dunn Leadership Isn’t What You Read in Books… - Kris Dunn UAB Football is Dead: Great Leaders Make Great Enemies – Kris Dunn HR’s September Call Ups – Tim Sackett On the Billion Dollar Bracket – Matthew Stollak

Staffing and Career Considerations

Choosing Your Benchmarks Wisely and the Legacy of David Stern – Steve Boese Is “In What Month Were You Born?” A Valid Interview Question? – Steve Boese It’s Tough to Succeed a Legend – Steve Boese You Have to Get Lighter As You Get Older – Steve Boese To Fail This Often, You Have to be Pretty Good – Steve Boese Prepare to be Disappointed – Steve Boese Do’s and Don’ts of Accepting Offers of Employment: NBA DRAFT VERSION… -

Kris Dunn Googling Candidates: Ray Rice Version… – Kris Dunn Hiring Back an Employee Who Left You – Tim Sackett The Organization with the Most Expensive Selection Mistake Is? – Tim Sackett Prospective Employee Camps – Tim Sackett Success is Relative – Tim Sackett Should Your “A” Players Recruit For Your Organization? – Matthew Stollak Yield Ratios, NASCAR, and the National Guard – Matthew Stollak

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Training and Development

How Far Are You Willing to Go to Get Better? – Steve Boese Why There Won’t Be Youth Football in 20 Years… - Kris Dunn Success vs. Development – Tim Sackett

Performance and Talent Management

HOT SPORTS TAKE: What is More Important Than Culture? – Steve Boese What Richard Sherman Reminds Us About High Performers – Steve Boese Why Do Old Coaches Get Fired? – Steve Boese When Things Don’t Work Out – Lessons from the New York Knicks – Steve Boese Diverse Teams Can (Literally) Better Take the Heat – Steve Boese The Obligatory World Cup Post – Steve Boese The Value of Keeping the Team Intact (NBA Edition) – Steve Boese Talent Attraction: The Real Reason to Keep Top Talent – Steve Boese How the NBA can Teach You (Almost) Everything You Need to Know About Talent

Management – Steve Boese Great Players Win Early – Steve Boese The Performance Curve – Steve Boese If Richard Sherman Took A Pre-Employment Assessment, Here’s What It Would

Show… - Kris Dunn MONEYBALL: Is the Talent World’s Most Undervalued Asset Old People? – Kris

Dunn Managers as Coaches: The Key is Confrontation… - Kris Dunn The Ghost of Athlete Past – Tim Sackett 3 Ways To Make Your Office More Productive During March Madness – Tim Sackett The Managers as Coaches Myth – Tim Sackett

Total Compensation

The Best Sports Related Job Ever – Tim Sackett Tiger Woods Returning To Work – Tim Sackett

Employee and Labor Relations

BULLY IN THE WORKPLACE: IS HR Getting It Wrong Most of the Time? – Kris Dunn

2 Sure Things When the Owner of Your Company is Outed as a Racist… - Kris Dunn

Auburn Football and HR: Why We Write New Handbook Policies to Police Morons… - Kris Dunn

When to Allow Someone to Resign Instead of Firing Them… - Kris Dunn

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This Industry Sees 1/3 of its Alumni Develop Cognitive Disorders…. – Kris Dunn Right to Play – Tim Sackett I Don’t Want To Work With A Gay Person – Tim Sackett Are You “Entitled” to One Mistake? – Tim Sackett Baltimore Ravens Failed HR 101 – Tim Sackett I’m Not White Enough – Tim Sackett

Special NBA Summer League Section

NBA Summer League Part 1 – The Relative Value of Talent – Steve Boese Stuff the HR Capitalist (aka KD) Likes – The NBA Summer League… - Kris Dunn My Weekend with the 8 Man Rotation (Featuring How Pro Hoops Misses On Talent

– Just Like You…) – Kris Dunn YEAR-END PERFORMANCE REVIEW: The Outcast, The German, and the Guy with

a Heart Condition… - Kris Dunn Finding “A” Talent is Overrated – Lance Haun Quick Lessons Learned From the 2014 NBA Summer League – Matthew Stollak

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Foreword Do not read this book! It’s not accurate. For years the authors of this book have been putting together what they consider their best written posts from their blogs trying to intelligently tie sports analogies and HR commentary together. I can tell you they only hit that goal on the nose about 98% of the time. Can you live with reading a book with a 2% error rate? I don’t think I can. And why should you take any advice from these guys related to sports. I know for a fact not one of these authors has ever coached a professional sports team. Not one! Sure, one guy spent some time with a college team – but he didn’t play – just helped coach. And yes, they are rabid fans that take a trip to Vegas each year to watch players who won’t even make the professional ranks play. I mean – who does that? Crazy people, that’s who. Sure they have a huge amount of experience in HR and the combined readership for their HR blogs is somewhere north of the population of China but that shouldn’t sway your opinion of them and make you think you should read this book. This book is full of sports metaphors and lingo that the average HR person won’t understand. It’s filled with smart-ass discussions on how sports and HR intersect and overlap. It will make your head spin and your stomach nauseous. Do you really want that? Not to mention it will ruin your relationship with other HR folks. After you read this book you will know more than your peers. You will be different. You will think better, smarter, faster. You don’t want that do you? You just want to keep your head below the log when the shooting starts right? I know you – and you don’t want to be challenged. I’m telling you… reading this book will seriously affect how you practice HR. You will not be the ever again if you read this book. Here’s the bottom line. And this is mostly fact… the HR people who read the previous versions of 8-Man Rotation are no longer in their jobs. Yep…they read this book. Learned from the entertaining and well-written articles on sports and HR and they left their jobs. Yeah, sure, they did get promoted and moved on to more challenging assignments with greater visibility, pay and benefits. Now, some might see that as a positive but I think it just goes to show that reading this book puts ideas in people’s heads. Ideas that make a difference. Ideas that change things. And that is scary stuff. Do yourself a favor. Don’t read this book. Just go on your merry way. Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t challenge the status quo.

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Remember – your boss probably read last year’s edition and see what it did for her? Do you want that? I didn’t think so. --Paul Hebert

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CHAPTER 1 HR Planning, Strategy, Data and Leadership

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Big Data – On the Basketball Court Today, Tomorrow in Your Office? Steve Boese Originally Published on February 14, 2014 Super piece over at Grantland the other day titled The Data Flow Continues: NBA D-League Will Monitor Player Heart Rate, Speed, Distance Traveled, and More, about some of the steps that the NBA, (and its affiliated minor league the D-League), are taking that leverage wearable tracking devices to monitor player movements, player vital signs, and evaluate things like player fatigue levels and stress during the course of play. These new devices, ones that go beyond the already in-place sophisticated video technology that records player actions like direction of movement, speed, acceleration and deceleration, and move into more precise measurements of a player's biological and physical status and condition, seem to offer NBA teams a rich and copious set of information that can inform in-game strategy, (Is LeBron really tired, or does he just look tired?), and off season training and conditioning plans. But of course the potential backlash for the NBA and its teams is that no one, not even highly compensated NBA players, will be terribly excited about not only having their actions tracked, but also their physical reactions tracked as well. But if we move off of thinking about this kind of physical tracking as something that is limited to jobs or activities like playing basketball we could easily see how this kind of technology and data collection and mining approach could have applications in other domains. Wouldn't you like to know, Mr. or Ms. HR/Talent pro, how a given manager's team members physically react when they are in a performance coaching session, or getting any kind of feedback on their work? Do the team member's hearts start racing when their boss enters the room or begins one of his soliloquies? Do certain team members react and respond differently to the same managerial techniques? And wouldn't that information be valuable to feed back to the manager so that he or she could better tailor their style and approach to fit the individuals on their team? I know what you are saying, no way are employees going to agree to be wired up like subjects in some kind of weird biology experiment. Too intrusive. Too much potential for the data to be lost. Too many chances for the data to be held against them. The NBA players are probably going to make similar arguments, but eventually they will succumb. I will leave with a direct pull quote from the Grantland piece*, and as you read it, think about how naturally you could substitute 'organizations' for 'NBA teams'.

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Bottom line: None of this stuff is going away. Data of all kinds are already piling up at a rate that is overwhelming NBA teams, and the pace and variety of data available will only increase. Teams are going to have to change hiring patterns, and likely hire additional staff, to mine anything useful out of all this information. And the holy grail, to me, remains what these tracking devices can tell us about health — about preventing injuries, predicting them, monitoring players’ training loads, and keeping them healthy.

*  http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-data-flow-continues-nba-d-league-will-monitor-player-heart-rate-speed-distance-and-more/

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The Analytics Takeover Won’t Always Be Pretty Steve Boese Originally Published on March 31, 2014 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. This excerpt from ESPN* gives you 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.

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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. *http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/10673335/some-executives-fear-reliance-stats-keeping-ex-nba-players-front-offices

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The Silver Hammer: Three Reasons To Come Down Hard On Your First Big Leadership Test Steve Boese Originally Published on April 30, 2014

I probably don't need to re-hash the Donald Sterling v. the NBA (and the World) narrative once again for you, by now you have heard the important details of the story. But just to re-set, and set up this piece, you need to know two things. 1. Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers was just suspended from the NBA for life for making racist statements, fined $2.5M, and is going to be forced by the other 29 NBA team owners to sell the Clippers. 2. This disciplinary judgement was handed down by NBA commissioner Adam Silver, whose name may not be terribly familiar to you, and is not that familiar to even many NBA fans. Silver just became the Commissioner about three months ago when he succeeded former commissioner and NBA legend David Stern, who had a 30-year reign leading the NBA. Stern in many ways became synonymous with the modern NBA, and while not perfect, will probably be remembered by history as one of the two or three greatest sports executives of his time. Adam Silver, the new person in charge, had to not only deal with the Donald Sterling situation, he also had the added challenge of this very public and high-profile problem being the first true test of his leadership. And in this test, Silver elected to mete out the harshest and most significant punishment that was possible according to the NBA constitution. Silver could have suspended Sterling for a fixed time period, like one year, could have fined him less than the max of $2.5M, and did not have to elect to push for Sterling's removal as an owner. But instead Silver went heavy, and in his first leadership test, (at least one that involved a disciplinary decision), he made a pretty bold statement. That statement was essentially, "There's a new sheriff in town." Here are three reasons I can think of why it makes sense for a new leader to come down super heavy in their first big leadership spot:

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1. Old-school territory marking - A new leader, especially one succeeding a highly successful and influential predecessor, has to make sure the rest of the team knows who is running the ship now. One of the best ways to send that message is with really bold, decisive actions that help to instill confidence in the team. I have read lots of accounts of the NBA/Silver decision, and not once have I read "What would David Stern have done?" 2. If the decision is a "Should he/she stay or go?" one, you should almost always pick 'Go' - One of the biggest challenges for the new leader is evaluating the team around them. And it is usually obvious who needs to go, and most of the time the leader will know it in their gut but don’t do anything because they don't want to shake things up too soon. It’s hard to face that there is some house cleaning that needs to be done before the new leader and team can move forward. Or they might think that with a new approach or style that the person can be coached. This almost never works out. A new leader is better off cutting bait nine times out of ten. These kinds of tough decisions can also open up opportunities for other members of the team who may have been languishing under the former regime, feeling stuck or blocked by folks that needed to be (gently) moved along. 3. It's easier to lighten up later, than it is to get tougher - Did you ever have a teacher or coach or manager or even one of your parents that was kind of easy-going and took a laissez-faire kind of approach? The type of leader that generally liked to keep their hands clean, avoided most unpleasant confrontations, and tried to guide you more so than lead you? But later when there arose some kind of situation or screw-up where the leader really had to get tough, crack the whip, bang the hammer, (you get the idea), no one really took them seriously since they were always more of a friend rather than an authority figure? The point being it is almost impossible to pivot from 'nice-guy' to 'tough guy' once your reputation as a nice guy is established. It is much, much easier to ease off a little bit over time, once the team sees you as someone that is not afraid to make tough, sometimes unpopular decisions. Good luck trying to go the other way. What do you think, about Silver's decision here and about how new leaders stake out their position in general?

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The Juergen Bomb: Three Reasons Why A New Leader Makes A Strategic Firing Steve Boese Originally Published on May 28, 2014

A couple of weeks back (see previous piece) I riffed on NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's decision to crack down amazingly tough on (disgraced, probably racist), soon-to-be former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling following the release of audio tapes that revealed once and for all time how horrible a person is Mr. Sterling. Commissioner Silver went full nuclear on Sterling - fining him the maximum allowable amount according to league policy, banning him for life from the Clippers and all NBA matters, and moving (along with the 29 other league owners), to force a sale of the Clippers by Sterling. You can check out my piece linked above for the full take, but essentially I think Silver's response to this first real leadership test was spot-on, and in particular, because it set a decisive tone for his leadership style and approach moving forward. Fast forward to last week, and we have another pretty high profile leadership (this one mixed in with some tasty talent management) situation from the world of sports - specifically from the United States Men's National Soccer team. In case you missed it, US coach Juergen Klinsmann made news when he dropped US soccer star (and the National team's all time leading scorer), Landon Donovan from the squad of 23 players that will compete in the upcoming World Cup. While Silver's handling of the Sterling mess has been universally lauded and wildly popular, Klinsmann's decision to essentially fire Donovan from the National team has been met with plenty of second-guessing, and is certainly not popular with several of the remaining (and influential) team members. This was a tough managerial decision around talent, and since my job as part of the 8 Man Rotation crew is to help you break down the connections between sports and your job as an HR/talent pro, here are three reasons I can think of why it makes sense for a new leader to make a strategic fire a la Klinsmann:

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1. The obvious one - dropping a veteran, established talent that seemed 'safe' by just about every stretch of the imagination signals out to the rest of the team (sports or otherwise), that the new leader is really in charge, and more importantly, has the security and management support to make tough decisions. Much speculation about Klinsmann's decision to drop Donovan from the World Cup squad was that the coach wanted to use that spot to give a younger, less experienced player a great developmental opportunity for what seems to be Klinsmann's true goal - mounting a serious challenge in the next World Cup in 2018, a competition which the then 36 year old Donovan would certainly not factor. 2. A strategic fire can often shake up a content workplace. The US team has been sort of running in place for the last few World Cup cycles. Sure, they have the occasional moments of success and games that make you think they are finally going to be serious contenders at elite competitions. But then they inexplicably fall to some lesser opponents, fail to seriously compete when facing the world's top teams, and generally seem comfortable just qualifying for the World Cup. Klinsmann does not want to reward that kind of status quo, that decade of mediocrity. The remaining players simply need to play better, or Klinsmann will find replacements. Dropping a former star, who still may be able to contribute, signals that performance standards across the entire organization are going up. The other players might think, "Crap, if he was willing to cut Landon, he definitely will drop me if I don't start scoring goals." 3. The leader takes ownership of overall team results - especially if the results are poor. The primary reason in sports that coaches like to 'play it safe' and 'go by the book' is that they don't want to accept blame for failure, since they 'went by the book', whether it is in player selection or game strategy and tactics. In American football, the vast majority of coaches will punt the ball away on 4th down when the data clearly show that running an offensive play to try and keep possession of the ball is almost always the better statistical move. But if the coach plays it safe, and the team loses, he/she can usually shift blame to the players or some other external circumstance. Make 'risky' decisions like unexpectedly cutting a star player like Donovan and have them not pan out? All the blame, or at least a large part of the blame, will land on Klinsmann's shoulders. And I think that is a good thing, more coaches/leaders need to be willing to claim responsibility for failure (and accept the consequences too). Ok, that's it - I'm out. Go USA. Try not to lose to any country with less than 1% of our population this time.

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Germany, Spurs: Welcome to the Machine Steve Boese Originally Published on July 14, 2014

The German men's national team won the World Cup with a 1-0 victory over Argentina yesterday, completing a march to the title that at times seemed almost incredible and surreal, (their 7-1 demolition of host nation Brazil in the semifinal), and absolutely workmanlike (the title match, their group stage tussles with Ghana and the USA). But no matter how any individual game for the Germans developed, in the end they were always able to find the right combination of talent, strategy and tactics, and individual moments of inspiration and excellence needed to raise the most prized trophy in all of world sports. For US fans, continuing to warm up to the highest levels of a sport that almost (it seems) every American child has played at least some in the last 20 years, watching the German team in this World Cup had to be at least somewhat reminiscent of the recent San Antonio Spurs NBA Championship. While there were certainly some differences between the two team's achievements, the similarities, at least to me were pretty clear, and might (apologies in advance to anyone already sickened by 'What can we learn about career management/leadership/workplaces from LeBron James returning to Cleveland' posts), I as a member of the 8 Man Rotation feel obliged to call out a few keys to both of these victories, and to take a stab at what broader application might be found therein. Talent and system are not the same as culture, (and are more important) - Tim Sackett had a great take at Fistful of Talent last week about 'system' hiring and it is well worth a read. Both the Spurs and Germany 'play the right way', i.e., organize their players and approach the game in a particular way in that each player understands their role, and how it contributes to the overall goals of the team. While each team has recognizable and extremely successful individual players, (Duncan and Parker on the Spurs, Muller and Klose for Germany), none of the games and the strategy ever seemed to be about these individuals. From beginning to end each team approached and played the games as a team. Not once in the NBA Finals or in the World Cup late stages did I recall hearing any commentator say something like 'The Spurs (or Germany), will only go

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as far as player XYZ takes them.' It was always a team effort, not one that relied on one or two talents. In fact, many of the players on the Spurs for sure, probably only succeed because they are in the Spurs system, and they have found the right fit for their talent. In the long run, discipline and belief trumps emotion - In the pre-game of the World Cup semifinal the home team Brazil had cranked up the emotional meter to 11 - they had 70,000 fans behind them, they 'felt' like it was their destiny to win on their home soil, and even held up the jersey of their injured and unable to play star Neymar in the pre-game line-up. It would have been easy for Germany to succumb to that emotional and psychological pressure, and give up and early goal or two. Instead, the German side stuck to their plan, withstood the first 10 minutes or so of Brazil's efforts, and then set on a goal scoring flurry not seem ever before in a World Cup semifinal. Similarly, in the final game of the NBA Finals, the two-time defending champion Miami Heat jumped out to an early lead against the Spurs, only to find the Spurs back to just about even by halftime, as the Spurs system and discipline proved more that Miami could match. When you have a system, and the right talent that has bough in to the system, then the lesson is to stick with it, don't panic when your opponent seems to have the upper hand, and double down on what you know will be successful in the long game. Most of us are really bad at evaluating talent - The Spurs had the NBA's best regular season record. The German side are full of top-level players from the world's most famous clubs. Yet neither was favored to win their respective championships prior to the final series or game. The Heat, with best player in the world LeBron James, and Brazil with their history of success (and home nation status), were expected to lift the trophies that ended up being held by the Spurs and Germany. We kept looking for excuses why the Spurs or Germany could not win (the Spurs were too old, Germany had not won the World Cup in 20+ years, and never outside of Europe), that we let ourselves be fooled. Even the leaders of these great teams might not understand talent completely. The World Cup winning goal was set up and scored by two players that were not even in the starting team of 11. I think this is is often the same thing that occurs in day-to-day talent assessment and evalution. We are trained to look for the reasons why someone won't or can't succeed, instead of focusing on the things that they are talented and strong at, and thinking about ways to leverage the skills they have. Bottom line - Spurs = Germany = a great way to think about how systems and strategy lead you to find the right talent you need to succeed.

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“I’m Gay:” Notes on How One Leader Got Potentially Disruptive News Right…. Kris Dunn Originally Published on February 13, 2014

By now, most of you heard the breaking news earlier this week - University of Missouri Linebacker Michael Sam declared to the world he was gay, setting up the chance that the NFL will have it's first openly gay player in history. Sam's projected to be a 3rd to 5th round draft choice and was defensive player of the year in the powerhouse SEC, so it's hard to see where he won't be on an NFL roster when the NFL regular season rolls around in September. I'm not qualified to talk about many of the issues surrounding this, but I wanted to put a light on someone who got it right related to Sam over the last year - Mizzou head coach Gary Pinkel. Let's take a look at some notes from ESPN related to Pinkel's reaction to Sam coming out before Mizzou's regular season*, and how the team reacted with that leadership: As it turns out, Pinkel had set up small groups designed to help the players get to know each other, which was one important mechanism in Sam feeling comfortable enough to share who he was.

"Periodically throughout the year, Pinkel said, each Missouri coach will invite about 15 players from different position units to his home for "cross-over dinners." "They'll all come over, having dinner at my house, and I'll stand up and say, 'I'm Gary Pinkel, I'm from Akron, Ohio,' and I start talking about my family, everything about my family. And everybody unloads everything about themselves. It's remarkable." Sam was at an assistant coach's house when he told his teammates he is gay. "In August he was in another group, and I got a call from the coach right

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afterward that Michael told the whole group that he's gay," Pinkel said. "That's when I first heard of it."

Nice. Small groups, a leader OK with others leading each other. But Pinkel was on the brink of losing his job:

"Michael Sam's sexual orientation probably wasn't the most pressing thing weighing on coach Gary Pinkel's mind at the start of the 2013 season. He was close to losing his job after going 5-7 in an injury-plagued 2012, a year in which his team looked as if it had no business playing in the SEC. That Pinkel, who is 61, from Akron, Ohio, and widely known as being an old-school coach, had no experience on how to handle an openly gay player when Sam came out in August.

Duly noted. As a kid who grew up in Missouri, there's no question his job was on the line, which makes his reaction to the news an even better story for leaders everywhere. Pinkel didn't overreact.

"Pinkel knows players. He knew that Sam was widely respected, popular and one of the best players on the team. He knew he had a strong senior class full of leaders. He told the Tigers that if they wanted to be successful, they had to come together and protect their family members, everybody from the freshmen to the coaches to the video staff." He leaned on his captains, and in the days after Sam came out to the team, he met with them daily, asking, "How's the team doing? What's going on?"

Again, allowing and expecting others to lead. Showing them he expected it. Nice. But the coach changed in the midst of possibly losing his job and having a national story on his hands. He loosened up, rather than trying to rule the situation with an iron fist.

"Pinkel changed, too. Faced with so much pressure, he let it go and loosened up. The most noticeable difference was at practice. At the urging of the seniors, Pinkel allowed the team to play music during warm-ups. In all of the years that any of them had known Pinkel, he'd never had music during warm-ups. The change allowed the players to be more relaxed and comfortable. Pinkel trusted his team. He never asked them to keep Sam's announcement a secret, even though he knew if the news had leaked, it would've been a big distraction. He just told them to respect each other and protect each other. "Coach Pinkel didn't have separate meetings pointing out how we should handle it," senior offensive lineman Justin Britt said. "I think he kind of let us learn as we went along."

Ponder this. Pinkel was about to lose his job and has a potential huge distraction dumped on him before the season. But rather than try to control it, he went the other way, trusting everyone around him. Mizzou responded with a magical season, going to

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the SEC title game, finishing in the top 5 nationally and cementing Pinkel's security as the Mizzou coach for years to come. Did that happen by chance? I think not. The team responded to Pinkel's cool and took his lead. In doing that, Mizzou showed the world how to handle diversity and had the best season in the history of the program. That's leadership. Go Mizzou. *http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/10443289/missouri-blueprint-nfl

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DATA & MONEY: Run a Vasectomy/March Madness Promo at Your Company Next January…. Kris Dunn Originally Published on March 18, 2014

Heads Up - This is not your normal March Madness post about lost productivity. Your employees don't need tourney brackets to screw you out of an honest day's pay - they're waaaaaay more creative than that. Nope - this post is about how you combine March Madness, economic, medical coverage and bedroom issues that interest your employees into one big "marketing meets HR" extravaganza.

You need to mark your Calendars for January 5th, 2015, at which point you'll launch a "Vasectomy/March Madness" special.

I'd like to think I'm a leader in this area. Once we had the second kid, it was time to decide if we were done or not. We were done. I went to a urologist to explore the male side of family planning. My urologist was a immigrant from South America. As part of his vasectomy package, he actually told us he had to talk with us as a couple. Then he unleashes this (imagine Columbian accent):

South American Urologist - "Now Mr. Dunn, are you sure you want to do this? I have to ask, because I see more and more men in their early 50's coming back with a young

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second or third wife who expects children. At that point, they're looking to reverse the vasectomy. I don't want you to be caught in those circumstances." Me - "I'm sure, doc. Have you met Mrs. Dunn? She's sitting right here."

What an ass. But the deal got done. It also coincided with the purchase of our first big screen TV and conference tournament weekend in college basketball, when there's like 100 high-end games on in a single weekend. I was a leader in this area. It's now a trend - from CNN*:

"A major clinic in Ohio reports it performs 40 or 50 more vasectomies a month before and during the 68-team basketball tourney. We do have (in March) typically about 50% more vasectomies than in other months," said Dr. Ed Sabanegh, chairman of the Department of Urology at the Cleveland Clinic. A lot of patients come in and say, 'I have to have this during March Madness, you have to talk to my wife about it. Tell her what my limitations are and that I need to be on the couch."

Here's your opportunity HR - you launch a special next January and focus on your long term employees that look to be about done having kids and remind them of the possibilities. The women probably wish the husband would take care of it. The husbands are worried their macho level - or maybe the third wife in 13 years. You bring them together by reminding them of the possibilities of the vasectomy/March Madness combo. Maybe you throw in additional PTO and a platter from Chick-fil-A. The wife wins because it's handled. The guy wins because he gets to watch hoops. You win because you're creative, and let's face it, your medical plan doesn't need more covered dependents or pregnancies. That's win/win/win where I come from. *http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/16/us/march-madness-vasectomies/index.html

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Want to Be a Great People Manager? Don’t Watch the Ball… Kris Dunn Originally Published on August 7, 2014

I've got a simple post today. It starts with sports and rapidly moves off that. Hang in there. You know what separates good and great coaches in team sports from average ones? They don't watch the ball. Regardless of the sport, the best coaches are the ones who spend 80% of their time watching the activity off the ball. They figure the guy with the ball is going to react to what's going on and do what's necessary. But the people without the ball? That's where the action is. Off the ball is where you have people reacting to what's going on in front of them, behind them, to what they hear - all in an effort to be prepared and be in position to make a play when the opportunity presents itself. There's a world of activity going on off the ball, but almost all fans and many average coaches focus almost exclusively on the ball. You want to be a great manager of people? A great coach in your organization? Find the equivalent of "off the ball" for the people you manage and coach. Examples: • A direct report's prep (or lack thereof) to talk to an influential person in another

department at your company.

• Abruptness in email communication that doesn't fit the culture of your company. • Giving "gifts" of time and effort in an organization that your direct report doesn't have

to - because it's good for them, you and the company - and almost always gets repaid.

• A direct report's ability to give feedback to people up and down the organization in a

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way that makes everyone feel like she's looking out for them rather than telling them they suck.

There's a million examples, so let your mind flow. Real coaches don't watch the ball. They coach off the ball. In sports and in companies. Be a baller as a manager. Don't watch the ball.

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Leadership Isn’t What You Read in Books… Kris Dunn Originally Published on August 7, 2014

Is Leadership something that can be learned? Or are people born leaders? Your answer probably depends on your definition of leadership. If you believe that you can gain knowledge related to leadership by listening to the various leadership gurus, reading books on leadership and watching/emulating Patton Jack Welch, then you probably believe that leadership can be learned. Or at the very least, those resources can take the leadership abilities you have and improve them within a certain range based on your genetic limitations. I tend to agree that everyone can learn how to be a better leader, although I'm not sure if what we're talking about in most situations is really leadership. It feels more like upper-end how to "manage" to me, which is valuable, but seems to fall short of the mark. Why do I feel like that? Probably because when you see someone operating as a true leader, we often sit back and say, "WOW". I'm not talking about Bob's charisma in the all-employee meeting. I'm talking about a lifestyle that shouts out "Leader!", and it's something you can't fake or learn from a book. Check out the following description of how Magic Johnson led way back when he was in

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high school (via Jackie MacMullan writes in "When the Game Was Ours", hat tip to True Hoop)*:

"Magic's congeniality was a gift and a blessing to a school that was struggling to maintain order in the wake of the redistricting. There were incidents throughout Johnson's tenure at Everett between white and black students, yet the gifted young ballplayer defused much of the tension by coaxing his friends into becoming like him -- colorblind. He showed up at parties held by his white teammates, even though he and his friends were often the only blacks in attendance. He convinced his white friends to listen to his soul music and coaxed the principal into setting aside a room to dance during free study periods. He organized a protest when no African American cheerleaders were picked for the school's squad, even though their talents were undeniable. "For all his basketball skills, the biggest contribution Earvin made to Everett was race relations," said Fox. "He helped us bridge two very different cultures. He ran with the white kids, but never turned his back on the black kids. He broke down so many barriers. He was so popular the students figured 'Hey, if Earvin is hanging out with these guys, it must be okay.'" It was an Everett tradition that after the first practice of the season, the players ran around the basketball court until the last teammate was standing. Two years in a row, that person was Earvin Johnson. The summer before his senior season, Johnson's teammates Randy Shumway informed Fox that he was out to beat Magic. The two ran around the court for more than a half-hour as their teammates dropped by the wayside. After 45 minutes, both players were panting, clearly exhausted, yet neither was willing to quit. Fox was contemplating how he should break the stalemate when he noticed Johnson whispering in Shumway's ear. The two did one more lap together before Magic announced, "That's it, Coach. We're calling it a draw." "Earvin could have outlasted him," said Fox, "but he knew it would be better for team morale if he didn't."

Can what Magic displayed way back in the day be learned? I think not. It's in his DNA. No book can teach you that... *http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/18735/the-magic-johnson-school-of-leadership

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UAB Football is Dead: Great Leaders Make Great Enemies Kris Dunn Originally Published on December 4, 2014

In case you missed it, UAB Football is dead. Technically, the UAB President and the university made the decision to shut down the Division 1 FBS program, which went 6-6 this year and is bowl eligible. Reasons provided by the leadership of UAB state that the program lost too much money and wasn't sustainable, but most people think it is a power play by the Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama System. For those of you outside the state, the University of Alabama System, which includes campuses in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham and Huntsville, is controlled by the same board. The University of Alabama you know is the one in Tuscaloosa (Roll Tide - hard for me to write that, but it's the best identifier for those outside the state I can provide). But the campus in Birmingham is thriving and is the 2nd biggest employer in the state of Alabama. The people who believe the Board of Trustees made the call say they're doing it to keep UAB down - to ensure UAB always plays second fiddle to the flagship campus in Tuscaloosa. Me? I think that's true, but the bigger lesson is that the Board of Trustees made the call because they were influenced by a time tested truth - Great Leaders make Big Enemies. Allow me to explain. The UAB athletic program was founded in 1977 when Gene Bartow was hired as UAB's first athletics director and men's basketball coach. They started from scratch. For those of you that don't know, Gene Bartow is now in the basketball Hall of Fame - a big deal. Bartow was well regarded enough that he was the guy that replaced John Wooden at UCLA when Wooden retired - that's also kind of a big deal. Lucky for UAB, Bartow was shocked by the booster scene in SoCal, the expectations created by Wooden's historical success at UCLA and more. He knew that he wasn't long for that

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job and was in play, available to be recruited away for the right opportunity. The fact that Bartow left UCLA to found an athletic program and basketball program from scratch says a lot about who he was. He had some rebel in him. That became an important part of the UAB story, and contributed to the death of the UAB Football program this week, which I'll explain as we roll along. Leaders aren't scared of creating something from scratch. Bartow obviously was a leader in that sense. UAB athletics, and specifically UAB Men's Basketball, shot up the chart. They drew 15,000 to their first men's basketball game and advanced to the Final 8 of the NCAA Tournament 6 years after the start of the program. They were on fire. Leaders get great organizational results in a short period of time. Bartow did this better at UAB than anyone else in the history of Division 1 athletics.

My first job out of undergraduate was being a part of the UAB coaching staff from 1991 to 1994. It was a great time and introduced me to the city I now consider home - Birmingham. Check out the pic above and you'll see the gang from that time at UAB. Young KD is suited up, first guy on the second row. Working with Coach Bartow was more complex than I expected. That's OK - I was just getting exposed to the world of work and thought things should be a lot simpler than I now know they can be. From the start, Bartow was ready to fight to grow his program if he had to. Enter the natural enemy - the University of Alabama (Flagship Tuscaloosa Location). Leaders pick fights as necessary to grow their program. Bartow did this - it was

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in his DNA. Bartow's view of the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa) was negatively influenced by his view of the aforementioned Board of Trustees structure. Like today, the board was dominated by Tuscaloosa supporters, and he had paranoia about that. How's the paranoid saying go? "You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you." In addition to the board structure and everything that means, Bartow was routinely fired up by recruiting wars with Wimp Sanderson at Alabama. Bartow had multiple recruits that were flipped and ended up playing for Sanderson in Tuscaloosa, and of course, Bartow felt there was foul play including money changing hands, etc. I've since met Coach Sanderson and he seems like a great guy. And if there's anything I'll say about recruiting, it's complex and complicated everywhere - including UAB. Through the years, Bartow became increasingly vocal about his views of Tuscaloosa. If he would have lived and participated in today's social media world, I'm not sure he would have survived the fallout from his views and enjoyed the same long career that he did at UAB. Leaders make big enemies because their vision is big and they have incredible drive. When I think about the death of UAB Football, I have to think about Gene Bartow. First up, he was obviously the type of leader that could build something great from scratch. He wasn't perfect, but what he built in a short period of time was incredible. A basketball school in Birmingham? Are you kidding me? As a hoops-first guy, he was way ahead of this time in understanding that he needed football to get to/stay in the big time world of college athletics. So he gave birth to a football program, and nurtured it from club, to D3, to D1 status. Tuscaloosa seethed as that was built. He didn't care. Leaders that matter rarely care who gets their feelings hurt if the greater good is served. Leaders eventually fade away and enemies kill their families if they don't have the right successor. As I look back at the history of Gene Bartow, he built something that's hard to find anywhere else. It came from the ground up, and was unapologetic in it's ambition and purpose. Unfortunately, the vision of leaders burns hot and enemies are created. UAB never had a successor in multiple leadership positions who had the same passion for what was built - a fact that's evidenced in a new president's willingness to kill the football program and neuter the vision of UAB Athletics. As a result, UAB will downgrade their conference affiliation (involuntarily - it takes football to play with the big boys, or even the medium-sized boys) and all sports will be negatively impacted. UAB's going back to a conference like the Sun Belt. Which is perfect for Tuscaloosa -

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UAB will never be a major threat in any sport due to the conference downgrade. This wasn't always the case - just look at the history of UAB Basketball (beating the Tide in 1993 in the only head to head match up, arranged by the NIT) and the fact that the football program has had some great moments (beating Nick Saban when he was at LSU, etc.). At the end of the day, killing UAB Football goes back to Gene Bartow. Great leaders make great enemies. Would I change anything that Bartow did? Hell no. I would change the succession plan that followed him. The void allowed the enemies created by the growth process to come in and kill a family member (football) and disable the rest (all other sports due to the conference downgrade that's coming). You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. RIP UAB as a player in big time Division 1 athletics. Your founder willed you to prominence. The successors weren't strong enough to keep the wolves at bay.

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HR’s September Call Ups! Tim Sackett Originally Published on September 5, 2014

For those who aren’t big Major League Baseball (MLB) fans you probably don’t know what the “September Call-Up” or “Expanded Rosters” mean. Each year on September 1st, as the MLB season goes into its final month, the league allows teams to invite players from their minor league teams and the roster number expands from 25 to 40. For teams who are out of the playoff race, this allows them to give some younger guys an opportunity to perform on a larger stage. For those in playoff races, or teams that have already solidified a playoff berth, the extra players allow them to rest some regulars. For playoff teams these extra 15 players can’t play in actual playoff games, only in the final regular season games. Ok, Tim – why the hell should we care about Major League Baseball’s September Call-ups? In any HR shop I’ve ever worked in, or with any HR Pro I’ve ever had a conversation with, Succession Planning is always an issue HR Pros struggle with in their organizations. Many times sports shows us there is a way that it can be done. You just need to find a way to tailor it to your environment, and I think the MLB gives us a window to how a competitive organization attempts to get this done. Succession is difficult and costly, there is no way around it. If your organization is truly trying to do succession and not spend money, it won’t be pretty and it probably won’t be effective. To really know a person has the ability to step into someones shoes when they leave, you have to see them actually do the job. In most organizations this just isn’t an option. How many of us have the ability to pull out a high performer from their current position, and put them into a new position, while the other person is still in that position? Not many of us! It’s just not a reality most of live in. Baseball’s September call-ups is one strategy that you might be able to use within your organization. While pulling someone full-time into a new position, might not be

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something you could do, could you do it for 30 days? Before telling me you can’t what would you do it that same person had a medical issue and had to be hospitalized or home-bound for a month? You’d make it, you’d get by, that’s what we do in organizations. The team would rally and make it work. So, giving someone a 1 month succession stint into a new potential role – full immersion – would actually give you some decent insight to whether or not the person could actually handle that role in the future, or at least show you some great development needs that have to ensure success. Is it perfect? No – but that’s why it works. We don’t get perfect in HR – we get good enough and move onto the next fire. We don’t get million dollar budgets to formalize succession and have a bench full of high performing talent to just step in when someone leaves our organization. It’s our job to figure out succession, while we figure out how to keep the lights on at the same time. I love the September Call-Up – gives me insight to the future of my team, shows me how someone performs in an environment that doesn’t pigeonhole them forever, and let’s me know if they show some potential for The Show!

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On the Billion Dollar Bracket Matthew Stollak Originally Published on March 17, 2014

Its my favorite week of the year....spring break combined with what should be national days off - the opening rounds of the NCAA Tournament on Thursday and Friday. I'm sure many of you are researching heavily trying to put together your winning bracket for your office pool. Others are going to adopt a "Go By The Gut" approach. Every year many sites sponsor a prize for the top bracket. This year is different. Quicken Loans, in conjunction with Warren Buffet, are offering a $1 billion prize (If you win, you can take $25 million a year for 40 years or a $500 million check right away) if you are able to put together a perfect bracket. That means one has to pick all 32 opening round games correct, all Sweet 16 games, the Elite 8, the Final Four, and the championship game - 63 games in all. Is Buffett taking a risk? The odds of putting together a perfect bracket are 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (9 quintillion to 1). To win the $400 MegaMillions jackpot is just a mere 1 in about 258.9 million. Most (if not all) brackets will be finished by 6 p.m. on Friday. But, let's say the truly unlikely happens and one gets to the National Championship game with his/her perfect bracket intact? Buffett says he isn't worried about individuals fixing the games. However, if $500 million was on the line: • How do you not hedge (i.e. if you pick MSU to win it all against Michigan) by placing a

bet on Michigan just in case? Would your mortgage your house? What kind of loan could you possibly get to bet against your pick (just to be safe)? 1 million? 5

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million? 10 million? More?

• Would you offer every player on Michigan several million dollars to throw the game? I'd like to see someone get to that point just to see what kind of scrutiny and pressure would be put on that result.

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CHAPTER 2 Staffing and Career Considerations

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Choosing Your Benchmarks Wisely and the Legacy of David Stern Steve Boese Originally Published on February 4, 2014

Over the weekend I had a brief Tweet exchange with the HR Capitalist, Kris Dunn, and another Fistful of Talent colleague the very underrated R.J. Morris about the legacy of the very recently retired after a 30 year run Commissioner of the NBA David Stern. The gist of the conversation regarding Stern was this: By most measures of internal comparison, i.e. taking where the NBA was in terms of hard metrics like revenue, franchise values, player salaries, international growth, etc., Stern presided over a long and sustained period if incredible growth for the league. By every internal standard, the NBA is in a far, far better and more financially successful place today than it was when Stern became commissioner. But Stern has his critics too, and rather than dig into all the specific and sometimes subtle elements of his stewardship of the NBA, let's focus on just one. Namely, that while Stern did, by most accounts, a superb job of growing the NBA, it is still far, far less popular and financially and culturally massive (at least in the USA) as the National Football League. The NFL is the proverbial 300lb gorilla of modern American sports. It has widespread appeal, its game telecasts rank among the most popular TV programs week in and week out, the the culmination of the season, the Super Bowl game, has become such an important and ubiquitous event that there are fairly serious proposals that the Monday following the game be designated as a national holiday. The NFL is #1, by every measure that matters, and when holding up the NBA to that mirror, well then the Association falls short, a distant second really, (and possibly even third behind Major League Baseball), and consequently then Commissioner Stern must be judged as not having really been such a transcendent sports business leader. But I think that comparison is a little unfair, and perhaps even a little premature, (even as Stern retires). I think if we let the evolution of both American professional sports, and societal and global trends play out a little longer, I think this kind of comparison, or benchmark of basketball to American football will end up looking quite a bit different, and Stern, long gone from the scene, will have to be credited for at least some of these developments. To me, the NBA is like Apple Computers, in the latter part of the 90s. The NFL, the behemoth, is Microsoft of that same time. Back then, Microsoft was the undisputed leader in personal and corporate computing technology, was led by a legendary and visionary Bill Gates, and simply dwarfed everyone else in its space with its vise-like grip over almost every interaction you had with a computer. Apple was still interesting, quirky, made a different kind of computer that had its adherents, but never was seen as a serious threat to the MSFT ecosystem. And then something called the iPod came out and things started to change. You know

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the story and I don't need to go into all the Apple innovations and the subsequent (or concurrent) missteps from Redmond, but suffice to say the technology world in 2014 does not look anything like it did in 1998 or so. So back to my NBA and NFL take, and the need to give Stern some room before we all start deciding about his legacy. I submit that about 15 years from now the NBA will be almost, if not more popular (in America and globally), than the NFL for the following reasons: 1. Basketball, and by extenstion the NBA, is largely an urban or city game. The game is mostly played and celebrated, in America's big cities - New York, Chicago, Boston, L.A.. And America (and the rest of the world) is becoming a more urban place as well. As more people migrate to the larger cities, the city game, basketball, will continue to thrive, often at the expense of football, a game that requires expansive grounds on which to play, lots of expensive equipment, and the type of space not easily found in a big city. 2. Basketball is a global game, played all over the world, while American football is played (seriously) pretty much only in America. As the world shrinks, cultural and sporting phenomena like the NFL, that have only single-country relevance, will eventually become somewhat marginalized over time. While the NFL dominates the American sporting landscape, it hardly registers anywhere else in the world. The NBA, with its global reach, and high number of non-American players is far ahead of the NFL in this regard. Just witness the growing popularity of English Soccer here in the US as a small example of this trend. 3. The talent supply chain is constricting for the NFL. Due to its violent nature, more and more parents are electing to keep their kids out of full-contact football. Every football player gets injured at some point in a season, and as the NFL has learned, many of these injuries can have incredibly serious and devastating repercussions. The recent concussion-related lawsuits, settlements, and high-profile former players revealing their stories of traumatic brain injury are beginning to cast a longer and longer shadow over not just the NFL, but the beginnings or feeder systems for their talent. This will play out over time, surely, but even today if you were the parent of a very talented and gifted athlete, would you steer him toward a violent sport like football where he is likely to have at least a few concussions over time, or a sport like basketball where the injury risks are much less? 4. At the top, I said this was going to be a 'quick take', turns out I was wrong. Sorry about that. 5. The NBA understands social media and new media in general. This is certainly subjective, but if you look at how the league and its teams have embraced digital and social over the last few years, you see an organization that is more forward-thinking than most others. This is a by-product of the NBA's long time strategy that elevates and promotes its star players and personalities. Think about it, only the most ardent NFL fans

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can name more than a handful of players on their favorite team, and even less would be recognizable. If the new world of media and commerce is about engagement and connection, then the NBA is in a much stronger place than the NFL, where the vast majority of players are faceless and anonymous. I probably could keep going on this, but I think I have made enough points for now, and besides, I have to get on a plane. But the bottom line to me, taking us back to the question of David Stern and his legacy I think we have to let some of these cultural and global trends play out a little longer before we dismiss Stern (and the NBA) as being somehow inferior to the NFL. Compare the NBA of 1984 to the NBA of today and then no question, Stern was a great leader and executive. Compare the NBA of 2014 to the NFL of 2014 and sure you could say he fell short, but I say we need to let these shifts develop. Apple wasn't Apple back in 1998. But the world changes, sometimes faster, sometimes slower than we like or anticipate. And being on top of the food chain, even if you have been there awhile doesn't guarantee you that spot forever. Just ask Microsoft.

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Is “In What Month Were You Born?” A Valid Interview Question? Steve Boese Originally Published on April 15, 2014 Check out the chart below, a birth month distribution of about 240,000 professional soccer players taken from a database that tracks player signing and transfers and was compiled by David Bauer:

Notice anything strange in the pattern distribution? How about the unusually high (relative) percentages of professional soccer players born in the first quarter of the year, particularly in January (11.3%), and the relatively lower percentages of players that were born at the end of the year (down to a low of 6.5% in December). It might not seem like that much of a disparity, but consider a similar chart that shows the birth month distribution of the entire population of the European Union, (below), and you can see some striking differences.

As you can see from the total EU chart, people are born more or less consistently across

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the months of the year, with only small differences in percentages born in the highest percentage months. But professional soccer players? They show a striking and increased likelihood to be born in the first three months of the year. This phenomenon is attributed to the traditional soccer (and other sports as well) youth development process that groups players of the same age (Under 10, Under 16, etc.), for training and competitions. The theory then is that at those younger ages the physical size and skill differentials between an Under 10 year old player born in January and one born in December are really large, and noticeable. The player born in January then receives more attention, better coaching, more opportunities, etc., as he/she is simply deemed a better prospect than the player born in December. This then plays out again and again over time resulting in more of the 'early year' born players making it to the professional levels. No one knows if this is really true and explains the birth month disparity of professional soccer players compared to the overall population, but it does seem at least plausible. So circle this back to your HR/Talent shop. Does this kind of analysis make sense for you to consider? Is there a similar performance effect that can be seen in other types of occupations besides professional soccer based on birth month distribution? Are comparatively "older for their grade level" people likely to turn out to be better at more than just playing sports? Do you care about the birth month of a candidate or an employee? I don't know. I guess it seems unlikely. But even so there is still a takeaway from this data which is this: If you want little Junior to grow up to be a pro soccer player, you may want to plan around a January birth date, (if it isn't too late).

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It’s Tough to Succeed a Legend Steve Boese Originally Published on April 23, 2014

From the sports world yet another enduring and timeless lesson in talent and career management. Here is the headline - Manchester United sacks manager David Moyes. Some backstory. Manchester United is one of the most well-known and successful soccer clubs in the world. They are the defending champions of the English Premier League, (arguably the best league in the world), and regularly compete at the highest levels of European club soccer in the Champions League. At the end of last season, Manchester United's longtime and legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down, capping a stellar managerial career with his 13th Premier League title in 26 seasons at the helm. Ferguson was (and will probably will always be, given the nature of English soccer), by far the most successful club manager of the Premier league era. For USA readers who might not be familiar, think of Ferguson as some kind of combination of John Wooden, Vince Lombardi, Phil Jackson, and Red Auerbach. Except even more successful and globally famous. The kind of legend with the track record of exemplary performance that is tough, if not impossible to replace. No matter who stepped in for Ferguson, even Ferguson's hand-picked successor Moyes, it was going to be an almost impossibly difficult pair of shoes to fill. When someone has been so astronomically successful, over such a long period of time, and achieved legendary status in the organization and industry, then no matter how prepared and talented the successor is, it is going to be almost impossible for them to match (or even approach) the standards that have been established before them. Succeeding a legend, in sports or in any business really, is such a risky, dicey proposition that it makes sense for super talented people to avoid it at almost any cost, tempting and enticing as it may seem.

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Again, taking it back to the sports angle: Can you name the coaches that succeeded John Wooden, Vince Lombardi, Phil Jackson, or Red Auerbach? The answer is, 'Of course not.' No one remembers them because the combination of almost impossibly hard to match performance standards and the huge shadow that their legendary predecessors cast proved to be a combination even previously successful and competent performers, (like David Moyes), could not overcome. Trust me, you DO NOT want to try and succeed a legend. You want to be the person that succeeds the person who succeeds the legend, just after they fail. Postscript: This isn't just a sports phenomenon. Ask Tim Cook how things are going at Apple these days.

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You Have to Get Lighter As You Get Older Steve Boese Originally Published on August 8, 2014

Recent buzz around NBA circles, (no, this post is not ANOTHER one just about basketball, I promise - just hang with it for a second), has been the off-season weight loss of superstar player LeBron James, (see the new, slimmer LBJ from a crop of one of LBJ's Instagram pics for some visual evidence). The general line of thinking around LeBron's trim down this off season is that as NBA players get older (and LeBron is not 'old' in the normal sense, but he does have 10+ years in the NBA at this point), carrying less weight helps to keep knees, ankles, backs, etc. less likely to break down over the course of a long season. It is a pretty simple and obvious realization for basketball players and anyone else really - the less bulk you are dragging around makes it easier on the other parts of the body that are tasked with hauling that bulk. And for us non-NBA players, being lighter makes it infinitely easier to just navigate daily life - hustling through airports, getting in and out of your car, tossing the ball around with little Timmy or the frisbee to your adorable little dog. Being lighter just helps sometimes. But I think that advice, You have to get lighter as you get older, doesn't just apply in that literal, physical sense, it also has some value in a mental/emotional way as well. We are not just carrying around with us the physical accumulation of all the bad decisions we might have made at the buffet line or the donut shop, most of us our lugging around a pretty sizable collection of guilt or resentment or disappointment or even clinging for too long to some kind of romanticized version of the past that was probably never that romantic back then, and is certainly not ever coming back even if it did exist once. At work, we might be carrying around the excess weight of outdated processes, legacy technologies, and a history of 'that is the way we do things around here' that may no longer have value or relevance to what you and the organization really needs today.

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Letting go of things, both physical as in a weight loss or with cutting loose material possessions like cars or houses or old clothes, or simply dropping bad habits as a way to move forward is not some kind of new idea or concept, and certainly not one I claim any specific insight towards. It's been talked about and done for ages. But I do think in some ways modern technology and social networks and our tendency to want/need/have to be always connected, makes letting go a little bit harder than it used to be. It seems like sometimes the digital connections (combined with the ease of which most of us can be contacted via these networks), make getting lighter harder than in used to be, and harder than it should be. Someone is always out there on the the end of their iPhone and is either trying to actively hold us back or is just making it more difficult to move forward because we know they're watching. And that kind of stinks. But putting that aside, I also wanted to mention that LeBron looks really happy in most of these latest 'Slimmer LBJ' pictures. And while it is easy to say that LeBron should be happy all the time, after all he is a mega-rich superstar athlete, he is underneath it all a person like anyone else. He probably isn't happy all the time, even if most of the rest of us can't relate to that. He also, like most of the rest of us in our careers, need to make changes and adjustments to prepare for the next phase of his career that he is moving towards, one where he will soon be an aging player that needs to adapt to remain on top. If getting lighter as you get older and to move forward works for the most famous athlete in the world it will probably work for you too.

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To Fail This Often, You Have to be Pretty Good Steve Boese Originally Published on November 12, 2014

Quick post from the Western NY satellite office of The 8 Man Rotation - wanted to point out an important NBA milestone that happened last night: Lakers star Kobe Bryant set the record for most missed shots for an NBA career. From the ESPN piece* on the 'achievement':

Kobe Bryant made history Tuesday, setting the NBA record for missed field goals. The Los Angeles Lakers star set the mark with 6:22 left in the fourth quarter of a 107-102 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. He missed a 14-foot fadeaway jumper from the left side, giving him 13,418 career missed field goals, one more than Boston Celtics legend John Havlicek Asked about the record, Bryant, who scored a game-high 28 points on 10-of-26 shooting and finished with 13,421 misses for his career, smiled and said he wasn't aware of it. "Nah, I don't follow that stuff, man," he said. How does he explain setting the mark? "Well, I'm a shooting guard that's played 19 years," he said, shrugging and smiling. He later added, "Like I said, 'shooting' guard, 19th year."

Wow, over 13,000 missed shots in a career, more than any other player. You would think that this ignominious mark speaks pretty badly of our man Kobe. But before you come down too hard on the Mamba, take a quick look at the next half-dozen or so names on the 'Most career missed shots' leader board John Havlicek - (Celtics legend from the 60s and 70s, Hall of Fame member) Elvin Hayes - (The Big 'E', great scored and rebounder in the 70s, Hall of Fame member) Karl Malone - (The Mailman, Utah Jazz legend, possibly greatest power forward ever, Hall of Fame member) Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - (the NBA's all-time leading scorer, Hall of Fame member) Michael Jordan - (probably greatest player of all time, Hall of Fame member) I think you get the idea here. In order to be able to miss so many shots, you have to be

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an amazingly good and valuable player. Players who can't actually perform are not kept around long enough to climb very high on this kind of 'failure' list. The bigger picture takeaway from the 'Kobe has missed more shots than anyone' story? That in many fields (sales, content marketing, natural resource exploration, showing price pigs at the county fair....), failure might come just as often, if not more, than success. You have to be out there competing, hustling, working it in order to fail so often. And your best performers, maybe even you, are naturally going to fail, sometimes often. But that might be ok. I will leave this story with a quote from Kobe, asked to comment on over 13,000 misses over 19 years:

"You've got to go out and figure that out and play and do the best you can, and whatever happens, happens. You can't be held captive by the fear of failure or the fear of what people may say."

If you are open, take the shot.

• http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/11862042/kobe-bryant-los-angeles-lakers-sets-nba-record-missed-field-goals

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Prepare to be Disappointed Steve Boese Originally Published on December 10, 2014

8 Man Rotation favorite: Dennis “German Rondo” Schroeder 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

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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.

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Do’s and Don’ts of Accepting Offers of Employment: NBA DRAFT VERSION Kris Dunn Originally Published on June 27, 2014 I like hoops - a lot. So I consumed 5 hours of NBA Draft coverage last night. Wow. What did I learn? I learned a lot about the right way to accept offers of employment. I watched the draft with my sons (ages 14 and 11), and any time I watch things on TV with my boys, they have to listen to the world according to Kris Dunn. They're lucky like that. Three lessons from the NBA Draft related to reacting to offers and marketing yourself as a candidate:

1. First up, you really need to act like you've been there before. DO NOT BREAK INTO A HUGE SOUL SHAKE ROUTINE WITH A PERSON TWICE YOUR AGE. Also, if you're a parent of new grad accepting an offer, resist the urge to helicopter in or do anything to jeopardize your kid's ability to be taken seriously by his future employer. Nik Stauskas, drafted 8th overall by the Sacramento Kings, failed this test. So did his dad. That's Nik performing a planned routine/soulshake with a degree of difficulty of 8.2 More importantly, the dude he's doing it with is his dad. And yes, it ended with both of them throwing up 3-goggles. As a former caucasian guard, I can tell you that the world will give you the latitude of the soul shake and 3-Goggles if you make it in pro hoops. Your dad does not need to be part of the process. Reminds me of this article on Johnny Manziel where his dad is sharing stories of togetherness with Johnny Football and is proud of their exploits that included double punches in the nuts as a father/son activity. Me thinks Dad needs to be the grown up. 2. Next - If you're good enough to be drafted in the NBA, make sure your resume/video montage includes a large degree of self-confidence. A GREAT WAY TO SHOW SWAGGER IS TO HAVE THE DEEP HEAD NOD AS YOU TURN TOWARD THE CAMERA LIKE YOU ARE BOUNCING TO AN ASAP ROCKY CUT. PJ Hariston has it down. That's confidence people. No doubts exist in PJ. 3. If the only employment that's available exists at a place you don't want to work, resist the urge to curse right after the offer has been

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delivered verbally. Not a lot of basketball players want to work in Minnesota these days, including Zach Lavine from UCLA. Watch his lips for the "f me.” Whoops!

So to sum up the learning for the Dunn brothers from the draft: 1. I'm not soul shaking/3-goggling with you during the most important moments

of your life.

2. Understated Swagger isn't all bad.

3. Don't drop F-bombs on the phone when someone makes you a verbal offer. My kids love having me drop the HR knowledge on them while we watch sports. DVR and rewind has made it our own personal classroom.

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Googling Candidates: Ray Rice Version… Kris Dunn Originally Published on December 2, 2014

Ah yes, Googling candidates. Read enough HR Magazine or talk to employment lawyers, and they'll tell you Googling candidates is questionable at best, as is looking at candidates on social media. You could get sued. You could factor things into a selection process that really shouldn't be evaluated. You know what's riskier than Googling candidates? Not Googling candidates. Just ask your CEO. He wants you to go deep on candidates, to make sure a limited number of freaks make it through. Social media – and life in general as now indexed via the Googleplex – is evolutionary. People make mistakes in judgment (what they share on social media) and in life (what gets indexed by Google and more specific, database driven services like Lexus/Nexus). You should be using every resource available to get all the info you can on candidates. Ask your CEO over drinks, and he'll tell you he wants you using those resources 10 out of 10 times. Because the people who tell you doing so is a bad idea aren't responsible for meeting your bottom line. They're vendors.

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Case in point, Ray Rice. Rice is the guy who infamously punched his wife out cold in an Atlantic City casino elevator. He's just been cleared to play for any NFL team. At this writing, no one has picked him up, mainly because all the teams have PERFECT INFORMATION ON THIS CANDIDATE. Your candidates? Perfect information doesn't exist. But you're a sucker if you don't use what's available to get a vibe on people. Can that lead to discrimination suits, etc? Yeah. But if your HR department is the one taking a look – not the hiring manager – I like your odds of keeping that to a minimum. Our country is founded on second chances, and most people get those. Ray Rice will play somewhere, but he may have to sit out a year. You probably hired at least 5 people last year out of every 100 hired at your company you would have thought long and hard about had you deep googled them and did a social media scan. I trust your judgment – so does your CEO. And he wants you to Google the hell out of every candidate you hire.

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Hiring Back an Employee Who Left You Tim Sackett Originally Published on January 10, 2014

Did you see what happened last week on the college football carousel? The University of Louisville hired their ex-coach, and current Western Kentucky Coach, Bobby Petrino. For those who don’t know the Bobby Petrino story check out his detailed coaching timeline on SB Nation* (it’s awesome!) – I’ll give you a five second tour:

I. Hired Head Football Coach at University of Louisville – doing great (2004)

II. Hired Head Coach NFL Atlanta Falcons (Jan. 2007) – didn’t do great

III. Leaves mid-season and takes University of Arkansas Head Coach job – did good (December 2007)

IV. Head Coach Arkansas, has a motorcycle crash with a 25 year old female

assistant on the back that wasn’t his wife and that he was having an affair with, and that he hired – Power drunk. (April 2012)

V. Fired as Head Coach at Arkansas – not good (April 2012)

VI. Hired Head Football Coach Western Kentucky University- did good

(December 2012)

VII. Hired Head Football Coach University of Louisville. (January 2013) There’s a bunch of other luggage along the way that SB Nation points out which leads me to only one question – Was it a good hire by Louisville to take Bobby Petrino back? I asked a couple of my friends and fellow #8ManRotation authors this same question – here are their responses: Matt (akaBruno) Stollak:

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How much time off does a mercurial talent deserve before being brought back? Is Jim Tressel looking at the Petrino hiring and thinking he is up next? Similarly, how do Louisville Football Core Values** continue to exist when Petrino has blatantly violated #1 and #2. Is it all about winning? What message does it send to staff and players? Steve (Mr. HR Tech) Boese: Even a cynic like me is surprised by this move. I guess the argument was he hit rock bottom and now has done the football equivalent of finding Jesus or something, But it is also about positioning, Louisville does not want to be a stepping stone job between the MAC and the Big 10 or SEC, (they are delusional about this, but I think it is true). So at some level they see this hire as a the best they could do with that in mind. No successful power conference coach would leave for Louisville so with Petrino they find the closest they could to that ideal. Petrino going to Western Kentucky after his biggest screw up at Arkansas and before coming back to Louisville also serves to give Louisville some cover on this. It is kind of like Western Kentucky took at least some of the flak for letting the guy back in to the world of coaching and at least in theory that will diminish the heat that Louisville is going to take. Kind of like Petrino went to jail (getting canned at Arkansas), then got released to probation, (Western Kentucky), and now the ankle bracelet has been finally cut off (back to Louisville). Here’s my take: The best hires that most companies will never make are the ones like this. He was great for us. Went someplace else and had a meltdown. Now we won’t hire him back either. For some reason, he was great with you. Don’t discount what certain environments, certain cultures, etc. will do for someone’s performance. Bobby Petrino is a broken man, coming home to where he had his most success. This might turn out to a great hire for Louisville. What do you think? *http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2014/1/9/5288648/bobby-petrino-louisville-scandal-timeline **http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/06/louisville-footballs-core-team-values-include-no-guns-no-drugs/

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The Organization with the Most Expensive Selection Mistakes Is? Tim Sackett Originally Published on May 8, 2014 The NFL. This Thursday that NFL will perform their annual selection process on ESPN, with their annual draft. Just like you, they have no idea what they’re doing, but act like they figured out the secret sauce to great selection. The big difference between you and the NFL, their mistakes costs them a lot more money! Check out this chart from BI* on the NFL Draft Guaranteed Contracts:

This chart basically shows you that the best, or highest, first round pick will get about $22 million guaranteed, while the lower third round picks will get $600k in guaranteed money over the life of their contract. How would you like that level of possible expense in your selection process!? All that money, all that time, all that research, and the NFL draft is still basically a crap shoot. The pick people, like you pick people. “Well, we really like Johnny’s football IQ and he just seems so personable! What the hell, let’s pay him $15M!” What!?!

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“Well, we know his ‘past performance’ in college. We know all his ‘performance metrics’. We gave him a personality profile. We ‘feel’ like he’s a safe bet and potential high performer.” It’s really not that different from you picking a $50,000 per year sales professional. Many organizations put as much into their hiring selections, as the NFL puts into picking their draft selections. Obviously, the NFL has more resources to throw at their process, so they probably have a few more bells and whistles. But, they have no more success than you. The ones who do the best, like you, are not only concerned about the ‘big’ hires/selections – your executive hires, their high first and second round draft picks, but put as much research and resources into each hire. Making a great selection in the 7th round might be as valuable, long term, as making a great first round selection. Just as you making a great entry level sales hire, might be as valuable, or more, to making a really solid Director level hire. The learning on all of this? You can’t take hires off. There are no ‘throw away’ hires, just as there are no throw away draft picks for great NFL teams.

• http://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-draft-contracts-2014-5

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Prospective Employee Camp Tim Sackett Originally Published on September 2, 2014

In athletic recruitment there are these things called ‘Prospect’ camps. Depending on who you talk to these are either just coaching staff supplemental income, or serious recruitment functions needed to get prospective student athletes on campus.

Whatever they are, they’re a little genius!

Here’s how the entire system works. Usually an assistant coach emails your kid, who has a dream to play college athletics, that they are having a prospect camp and you’re invited to attend, for $150. Two things just happened: 1. Your kid just got an email from a college coach; 2. That coach insinuated that your kid is a ‘prospect’! Either way, there’s a good chance you’ll bite and pay the $150.

A couple of things happen at these camps. Coaches actually invite players they really do have interest in, and they invite anyone else who is willing to pay $150! So, a hundred kids show up, two or three which have actual ability to play college athletics, and they go through drills and modified games. You instantly know who has ability because the coaches spend time with those kids. If your kid doesn’t have a coach talking to him or her, they don’t have ability. It’s a real quick and easy way to set your own expectations.

These camps are a necessary evil of the function of recruitment. While most parents don’t like them, they all pay the money and have their kids attend.

These prospect camps got me to thinking if we in HR could do this in our organizations. Could we charge $150 to have potential employees come in and check us out, while we check them out? We run them through some tests, show them our

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facilities, make them compete against others in their same job function, spend time with our employees. At the end of the day, we offer a couple of them jobs.

Could it work? Maybe not for the average organization, but what about Google or Apple or some other big organization that has thousands wanting jobs with their company? I think it could work. The one issue we face is the expectation. “Well, I paid $150 what do I get for this?!”

We would have to deliver $150 worth of ‘value’ in these Prospective Employee Camps. I think that is probably the easy part. Think interview skills, resume skills, leadership skills, some hardcore job function skills based on what they actually do. It’s part self-development, and part dating game. People pay millions of dollars per to sites to find their perfect romantic match, with most failing to do so.

Prospective Employee Camps might just be a way for your organization to set itself a part from all the noise, and get candidates to come in that truly interested in (I’m willing to pay to be here, truly) and want to be a part of your organization. I know, crazy idea, but when you see it work in one area it just begs to be tried in another!

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Success is Relative Tim Sackett Originally Published on December 4, 2014

It’s that time of year when college football coaches get fired because they weren’t ‘successful’.

This year’s unsuccessful coach of the year has to be Nebraska’s Bo Pelini. Here are some of his stats:

- Won 9 games every year he has coached at Nebraska. Not averaged 9 wins. He’s won 9 games each year!

- 67-27 overall record – a +.700 winning percentage

That seems pretty freaking good! How many of you would take 9 wins each year from your favorite college football team (Alabama fans you can’t participate!)? I’m a huge Michigan State fan and we’ve been fortunate to have double digit win totals four out of the last five years and we’re on cloud nine! If you asked me five years ago if I would take 9 wins per year for the next five, I would have bought it for sure!

Here’s what Bo didn’t do:

- No conference titles

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- No BCS bowl appearances

- At least 3 losses each season

99% of fans in the country would take 7 years in a row of 9 wins each year. Because most of us will never come close that success on our best year.

That’s why success is relative.

Think of this with your own hires and employees. You judge success of your new sales person on the results of the sales person that just left. If your new sales person sells $1 million worth of products, and the old guy sold only $750K, the new person is a rock star. That same new sales person is judge against your all time sales person at $2 million, and suddenly, they’re a piece of crap.

Nebraska holds their coaching hires against legendary Nebraska coach Tom Osborne who won 13 conference championships and 3 national titles.

This is why comparing individuals in terms of performance never really works out well. A better way is to determine what does ‘good’ performance look like in your environment, no matter the individual. Also, what does great performance look like. Then measure your employees against those metrics, not an individual who might have been good or bad.

Most organizations struggle with this concept, because defining good and great performance is hard. It’s easy to compare.

Don’t allow yourself and your organization to take the easy road. It doesn’t lead you to where you want to go.

Do I believe Bo should have been fired? Yes, but not because of his won/loss record. Bo wasn’t a fit, culturally, with Nebraska football. Bo had a short fuse and lost it publicly and on the field way too often for cameras to see. This isn’t what Nebraska people want from their coach. They’re extremely loyal fans, and don’t like to be embarrassed. Yes, they want to win, but it’s not a win-at-any-cost fandom that we’ve been accustom to seeing recently in major college athletics. Win, but win with pride and respect for the history of the program. That’s tough. Nine wins per year, apparently doesn’t do that!

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Should Your “A” Players Recruit For Your Organization? Matthew Stollak Originally Published on June 30, 2014

     Its long been mantra that great employees want to work with other great employees. The organization can only be better when great employees see others putting out quality effort. In "First, Break All The Rules," Marcus Buckingham wrote that one of the critical 12 questions that measures the strength of an organization is "Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?" Interesting news, then, from the NBA, as the star of the Chicago Bulls is shying away from selling the organization to prospective players - in particular, talented free agent Carmelo Anthony. According to Yahoo Sports*,

The Chicago Bulls are expected to pursue Carmelo Anthony in free agency. They just shouldn't expect Derrick Rose to participate in the recruiting. Rose told Yahoo Sports on Sunday that he doesn't plan to recruit Anthony – or any free agent, for that matter – even though he likes Anthony's game and thinks they can play alongside each other. Rose's reason is simple: He said it's "not his job." "My thing is if they want to come, they can come," Rose said.

The goal of every player and team is to win that world championship (though some would rather make that max contract). Each player should be looking at how they could make their team better. Joakim Noah, Derrick Rose's teammate, has been doing everything possible to get Carmelo to come to Chicago**:

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According to several sources, including a teammate, Noah's All-Star Weekend “conversation'' with New York Knicks standout Carmelo Anthony didn't end in New Orleans. They had discussions via text the rest of the season, including the day after the Bulls were eliminated in the playoffs by the Washington Wizards. “I was kidding Jo that they were boys now,'' a source said in a phone interview Friday. “  ‘Well, get your boy to come to Chicago.'  '' Sources said Noah has been in Anthony's ear as often as possible, and he has told other Bulls to push hard for Anthony this summer. But there is one condition: Backup big man Taj Gibson can't be sacrificed.

So, what is the obligation of your superstar to sell your organization to prospective candidates? Does he or she have any responsibility, particularly when fellow employees are making a strong push as well? *http://sports.yahoo.com/news/derrick-rose-doesn-t-plan-to-recruit-carmelo-anthony-to-bulls-021144469.html **  http://www.cbssports.com/nba/eye-on-basketball/24549864/report-joakim-noah-has-been-in-carmelo-anthonys-ear-since-all-star-weekend

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Yield Ratios, NASCAR, and the National Guard Matthew Stollak Originally Published on August 8, 2014

  If you are responsible for recruiting at your organization, I hope you are paying attention to your yield ratios. At its core, yield ratios tell you how the various sources you target for recruiting (i.e., newspaper ads, job postings, college job fairs) are delivering candidates that you hire at what cost. The National Guard has been under fire of late for its excessive spending. One area what the National Guard has been particularly profligate has been its sponsorship of NASCAR. According to Justin Boyer in the Washington Post:

USA Today reported the Guard spent $26.5 million to sponsor NASCAR in 2012, “but failed to sign up a single new soldier to its ranks,” according to Senate documents. Between 2011 and 2013, the Guard spent $88 million, but “it is unclear how many new recruits, if any, signed up because of it.” “How can you justify the fact that nobody is getting recruited?” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) in hearings. “The facts speak for themselves. The data is very clear. You’re not getting recruits off of NASCAR.”

Tom Vanden Brook at USA Today noted:

The Guard received 24,800 recruiting prospects from the program in 2012, documents show. In those cases, potential recruits indicated the NASCAR affiliation prompted them to seek more information about joining. Of that group, only 20 met the Guard's qualifications for entry into the service, and not one of them joined. In 2013, the number of prospects associated with NASCAR dropped to 7,500, according to briefing materials for the Senate subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight led by McCaskill. The National Guard needs 1 million leads to meet its annual recruiting goal of 50,000 soldiers.

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Landing only 20 potential candidates out of nearly 25k, and actually hiring none of them is a yield ratio no one should be happy about. So, what might be responsible for generating such poor return on that recruiting investment? Age of the audience:

"The Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard all canceled their sponsorships with NASCAR due to cost, ineffectiveness and difficulty in measuring results," according to the briefing document. "The Army specifically stated that NASCAR was declining against the Army's core target audience and that NASCAR sponsorship had the highest cost per engagement in the Army's portfolio of sponsorships — three times the next highest program."

About one-third of NASCAR's audience is aged 18-35, the Guard's target audience for recruiting, according to the document.

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CHAPTER 3 Training and Development

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How Far Are You Willing To Go To Get Better? Steve Boese Originally Published on July 31, 2014

At the (continuing) risk of alienating blog readers who are not the least interested in the connections between sports and HR and the workplace (come on, get with it people), I felt compelled to go back to the NBA well one more time to share a sliver of a fantastic piece in Grantland about the Atlanta Hawks' Kyle Korver. For the uninitiated, Korver is a 33 year old veteran player about to enter his 12th season in the NBA, after completing 4 years as a college player at Creighton. He has played for 4 different teams in his career, and was notably traded before ever playing a game in the NBA by the Nets, the team that originally drafted him to the 76ers in exchange for $125,000 - enough cash to fund the Nets' summer league team and buy some office equipment. He then bounced around the league somewhat, making stops in Philly, Utah, and Chicago before joining the Hawks in 2012. Since becoming a Hawk, and in particular since the Hawks have adopted a more open, fast-paced, spread the court and shoot 3-pointers type of offensive style, Korver has enjoyed something almost unheard of with professional basketball players on the wrong side of 30 - he is getting better. Korver's scoring average, shooting percentages, and most notably his 3-point shooting percentages have all gone up each of the last 3 seasons, just when most players his age are declining to a point where few even remain in the league. To what can you attribute this remarkable late-career renaissance for Korver? Probably to three things, two that are basketball specific but have relevance to pretty much any kind of workplace, and one other that is strictly a personal development play, and too has relevance to anyone looking to improve their performance in their job. One - The league in general has adopted a style of play that suits Korver's natural talents more so than it did even just 5 or 7 years ago. Teams are favoring a more open game,

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are spacing the floor to free up 3 point shooting, and relying less on dominant center oriented offense. Through a combination of rule changes and a focus on analytics that values a high percentage 3 point shot over almost any other kind of shot, Korver has found himself a valuable niche in the current NBA. For the rest of us, the lesson is about finding that correct industry or type of work that fits with what we are naturally good at or inclined to enjoy. It sounds really simple, and it should be, but we all have probably spent longer than we care to admit in jobs or at companies that were not 'right.' Two - The Hawks, Korver's current team, and their head coach John Budenholzer are installing specific patterns and plays to take advantage of Korver's skills, and that more often than not place him in a position where he or his teammates have the best chance for success. Often non-star players do not get much opportunity to showcae their talents, as most NBA teams orient their game plans around the strengths and preferences of their star players. It is not that role players like Korver are not capable, it is just that they often get limited opportunities. Here is a quote from the Grantland piece*:

No coach has unleashed the full breadth of Korver’s game like Budenholzer. Korver isn’t a traditional pick-and-roll player; he can’t dribble the ball 25 feet to the rim, juking dudes along the way. But Budenholzer has tailored a sort of hybrid species of pick-and-roll to his secret star — a high-speed curling action in which Korver takes a pitch or a handoff, probes the defense with a dribble or two, and makes the next pass from there.

This is the classic, 'never get a chance to show what I can do' problem that happens in many workplaces. You can either get stuck as too much of a specialist, thus becoming too valuable for the one thing that you do well, but might not be too excited about, or you can fight and push and volunteer for projects that will simultaneously energize you and raise your overall value. Even if you work for the man, sometimes you have to make the man work for you. Three - Korver probably works harder at getting better at his job than most of us work at getting better at ours. Work ethic is sometimes a tough thing to assess and then to value. Often it isn't about the level of effort that goes into doing the actual work, in Korver's case actually playing the games, but rather what someone is willing to do when they are 'off the clock' so to speak. What are they working on? What are they reading and researching? How far are they willing to push and explore in order to improve? One more bit from the Grantland piece shows what this means to a guy like Korver:

Korver is also willing to test himself in unconventional ways. Elliott introduced him to misogi, the Japanese annual purification ritual some athletes have adapted into a once-a-year endurance challenge. Korver and Elliott stand-up paddled 25 miles from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara last year. Korver may have one-upped himself with the misogi he did this summer. Big-wave surfers build lung capacity by holding a large rock, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and running short distances on the ocean floor. Korver and four friends decided

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to go back to the Channel Islands, find an 85-pound rock, and run a collective 5K holding the thing underwater. Each participant would dive down, find the rock, run with it as long as he could, and drop it for the next guy to find. Those waiting their turn wore weight belts and tread in water between five and 10 feet deep. It took five hours. “We were honestly worried about blacking out,” Korver says. They were also worried about sharks. “He wants to turn over every stone, and try every possible thing that might make him better — as a player and a person,” Elliott says.

Get that? A group 5K, underwater, while carrying a 85 pound rock and hoping you don't black out and/or get eaten by a shark. That is work ethic. That is wanting to get better. That is the kind of approach, in combination with the right system and organization, that allows a 33 year old shooter to keep getting better when decades of NBA history says he should be getting worse. How far are you willing to go to get better?

• http://grantland.com/features/kyle-korver-nba-atlanta-hawks/

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Why There Won’t Be Youth Football in 20 Years… Kris Dunn Originally Published on May 23, 2014 You think you have legal problems at your company? You have issues. The NFL has problems. The NFL, fresh off of agreeing to $765 Million dollar settlement for issues surrounding the treatment of concussions (a Federal judge hasn't accepted that settlement, thinking it might not be enough) now is facing a group of players that claims the league pushed them to take pain killers and other meds without warning them of the danger in an attempt to keep them on the field. More from USA Today:

"A group of retired players sued the NFL on Tuesday, claiming the league gave them powerful pain killers and anti-inflammatories to keep them on the field, never warning them about the long-term dangers to their health. This as the NFL is still trying to persuade a federal judge to accept a $765 million settlement with another group of former players, who claimed the league hid or ignored the devastating effects of concussions and other head trauma. The eight players–attorneys have asked for class-action status, saying more than 500 former players are involved – paint a picture of a league that "recklessly and negligently created and maintained a culture of drug misuse, substituting players' health for profit." Team doctors and trainers "were handing out drugs like it was Halloween candy," attorney Steve Silverman said, "to mask these injuries to get these guys out on the field, to their detriment." The list of narcotics, anti-inflammatories and local anesthetics reads like a pharmacy -- Toradol, Percocet, Vicodin, Ambien, Prednisone, Lidocaine – and the eight players estimate they were given "hundreds, if not thousands" of injections and pills over the years."

Workplace culture 101. Get results, do it all costs. In the NFL's case, as more lawsuits get filled, it's increasingly looking like an entire generation of players is pulling up lame and broken. Once portable MRI machines are at athletic fields that show damage to brain in a just-in-time report to parents, youth football probably won't exist. *  http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2014/05/20/nfl-haunted-by-past-sins-with-another-safety-related-lawsuit/9351299/

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Success vs. Development Tim Sackett Originally Published on June 18, 2014

I something really cool happen recently. My oldest son plays high school baseball and his team went on a long run to the Michigan High School baseball championships and made it to the final four. It was really fun. The local community came out in droves. Big crowds. High pressure situations. Cheers and tears. Quintessential local small town high school team does good story, ends one game short.

My son was the last out of the final game, with the game tying run on third base. He hit the ball for an out. Literally, one step from glory. So many people came to us offering condolences for his ‘failure’. He must be crushed. He must be so down. One at bat meaning so much. Ironically, in the game prior he hit in the game tying run and the game winning run in extra innings.

The funny thing was he wasn’t upset at all. He looked at it not in terms of success or failure, but in terms of development. You don’t get many opportunities to be in that situation. He didn’t get it done this time, but the ‘next’ time he still wants the bat in his hands when it happens. He compartmentalized this ‘one’ at bat as development. Not success or failure.

He had 150 at bats during the year and failed 60% of the time. While this at bat was obviously at a crucial time for team success, he treated it as every other at bat he’s had. Try to get yourself into a positive hitters count, and swing at the best pitch you can. You’ll fail 60-70% of the time in baseball, if you’re a really good player! Failure is guaranteed over the long run – if you view it, in only that one way.

He started his club baseball season the next day. More at bats, more games, more development. More chances to fail. Or more chances to develop and get better.

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I wonder how much better our organizations would be if we could take on this mentality? It’s about getting better each time, not closing the sale, successful projects, better profit and margins, but incrementally getting better little by little.

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CHAPTER 4 Performance and Talent Management

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HOT SPORTS TAKE: What is More Important Than Culture? Steve Boese Originally Published on January 8, 2014

It's been a huge few days in the sports world - with the NFL playoffs over the past weekend, the NBA finally getting interesting, and the wind up of the College football bowl season and final BCS Championship game. there has been plenty of fodder for sports talk shows, articles and columns that feature that essential element of sports coverage these days known as the HOT SPORTS TAKE. This is where some blowhard, (in the case of the blog you are currently reading, that blowhard is me), goes on some silly, shouty rant about a coach, or a player, or a team, or sometimes an official about how they variously choked and lost the big game, is actually a terrible, mean, no-good person, and by losing the game and/or being a mean person they have therefore insulted America or tradition or the scared honor of the lunkhead sports stars of a bygone era. The rise of the myriad number of online sports sites has certainly contributed to the genre, but by no means is this a recent phenomenon. Actually come to think of it, my take probably doesn't completely merit the HOT SPORTS TAKE definition, as I really am not in a snit about any specific player or coach or team, but rather wanted to use a sports analogy (again) to back up one of my workplace/talent management takes from the past. Namely, that in contrast to the tiresome (and incorrect) cult of 'Culture Eats Strategy' I contend, still, that talent trumps everything. Talent is more important than strategy. Talent is definitely more important than culture. What completely non-scientific and impossible to prove or disprove evidence am I going to cite? Just a random call to the 'I can't remember which show but they are all the same so it doesn't really matter sports talk show' following the recent NFL playoff games. (Transcript lightly edited due to my failing memory and to better make the point I am trying to make)

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Host: Next up Jim from Hoboken. Go head Jim. Caller: Hi Mel - I just want to say I hated the body language of the Chiefs/Eagles/Bengals (doesn't matter and I can't remember) at the end of the game. They just don't have a winning mentality. They just don't have any team chemistry. It's like they don't like each other. Host: Winning mentality? Chemistry? They fumbled three times and had 12 penalties. What's the 'winning mentality' have to do with that? Caller: But Mel, the play calling was terrible. They gave up on the run in the second half! Host: They had a receiver drop the ball in the end zone for what should have been an easy touchdown. That play would have put them ahead in the game with less than 4 minutes left! Caller: And all the penalties Mel. They couldn't seem to stay onside all game! Host: Their top three lineman were all out hurt and they had to play rookies and reserves. The reason they lost the game was simple. The other team is better. They have better players. They have more TALENT! You fans want to go on and on about whether the Quarterback likes the Running Back or the coach's play calling is shaky or there were bad calls by the officials but all that stuff doesn't matter. What matters, in this order, is Talent first, execution second, coaching and play calling third, and last by a mile is whether or not the guys like each other or chemistry (Note: this is the rough equivalent of 'culture' for the HR types). But make no mistake about it, the team with the most Talent wins these games 9 out of 10 times. And don't forget that. <scene>

I continue to believe Talent trumps all - whether it's on the football field or in the executive boardroom. Great players make great plays.

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What Richard Sherman Reminds Us About High Performers Steve Boese Originally Published on January 21, 2014 If you are a sports fan, or perhaps even if you are not, you probably heard or saw coverage of Sunday's NFC Championship game, (that is American football for the non-USA readers), and particularly of the epic post-game rant/interview from the Seattle Seahawks' Richard Sherman, a member of the winning team. To set a little context, in the final stages of the game, the opposition San Francisco 49ers attempted a pass into the end zone that had it been completed would have won their side the game. The Seahawk's Sherman was able to deflect the pass attempt from the 49ers Michael Crabtree and the ball was then intercepted Sherman's teammate, sealing the victory for Seattle. I love this guy. Let's break it down for what is reminds us about people and performance. 1. Some people just want to be a little better than the worst performer in their peer group You know this guy, he is pretty easy to spot. Never stands out at all, is definitely not anywhere close to being a great performer, but usually does just enough to nose in front of the office's weakest link. He is the antelope that realizes that he doesn't need to outrun the cheetah, he only needs to outrun the slowest other antelope in order to survive. Eventually, he becomes the slowest antelope himself, but that can take some time. They are usually pretty fun to be around though. 2. Some people want to perform at their highest/most productive/most efficient level This is actually most people I think. They want to learn, want to get better, want to challenge themselves (most of the time). They usually are good to very good performers. They are your 'B' students, slightly above the curve. They are also generally pretty fun to have on the team. They do some really good work and most notably, they rarely make waves. Some part of them sees being the best version of themselves as being a good team player. A team full of 'B' students, in a mature or slower moving market might be perfectly fine for long term stability and performance. 3. Some people want to perform at their highest level, actively seek out who they perceive to be the best performers in their peer group, and do what is necessary to outperform them. This is our friend Richard Sherman I think. Really driven, consumed with not only becoming the best they can be but also consumed with the measurements that validate they are the best, (and desirous of the accolades that come with being the best). These types stay up at night working, planning, and scheming on how to beat the other guy and

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are not going to rest until they do. And once they do, they are not shy about telling you about it. We sometimes don't like these kind of guys because, like in the Sherman video, they come off as arrogant, cocky, and kind of unlikable. We chastise them for their hubris and lament that they are not 'team players.' But make no mistake, these are the types that drive progress, at least until they flame out, stop producing the results that led to their arrogance, (while remaining arrogant), and alienate that core group of 'B' students that everyone likes. Richard Sherman is clearly a '3' on my little scale. Note that in his 25 second rant he hits the two main elements necessary for this kind of mindset approach. He talks about being the best there is at what he does, AND, calls out his competition, reminding everyone that he is aware of who he has to be better than, and that he is not just using some kind of internal measuring stick to judge his own progress. Not everyone can be a Richard Sherman, but I think every organization needs at least some of that type in order to win. Because in life and in business we like to forget sometimes that winning is not only a matter of being the best that we can be, but also involves beating the other team.

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Why Do Old Coaches Get Fired? Steve Boese Originally Published on February 13, 2014

I caught an excellent piece on the AJC College Football blog featuring college coaching legend, and the current head football coach at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, Steve Spurrier. Spurrier, also known as the Head Ball Coach, has has a legendary collegiate playing and coaching career. He won the Heisman Trophy as the nation's best college player in 1966, had a 10-year NFL playing career, and then has had a stellar college coaching run starting at Duke, then Florida, (winning a national title in 1996), and finally at South Carolina. At Carolina, Spurrier has led the Fighting Gamecocks to three consecutive 11 win seasons and become the most successful coach in school history. But now, at 68 years of age, some observers are wondering just how much longer Spurrier can continue to put in the work and successfully compete at the highest level of college football, and in a position that is notorious for insanely long hours, tremendous pressure to win, and significant demands on ones time. Or, said differently, some are asking, 'Is Spurrier, or any coach of more advanced years, still able to get the job done?' To that, in a recent AJC piece, Spurrier offered what I think was one of the sharpest observations about age and on the job performance, and one that resonates and applies just about in every field. Check out the take below:

“I will tell you what is neat. You look around at college basketball now, and there’s Jimmy Boeheim, who is almost 70 years old. He has got the only undefeated team in the country. Larry Brown is at SMU. He’s 73, and I think they’re a top 10 team. Mike Krzyzewski is in his upper 60s and so forth. Coaches don’t get fired for being older coaches. They get fired for not winning.

Love that take from the Head Ball Coach.

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Coaches, (or usually pretty much anyone working in a company/industry that cares about winning), don't get fired solely because they seem too old or that somehow the game or business has passed them by. Coaches (young and old) get fired because they don't win. Winning makes everyone look better, younger, smarter. More from the HBC:

"It all comes down if you are winning and losing, if you’re recruiting well, and if your program is on the upbeat and it’s positive. That’s what we all shoot for and obviously it’s not that easy to do. “But the age of a coach really has nothing to do with it.”

This may seem like a kind of throwaway concept, or just something really obvious, i.e. keep performing at a high level and usually anyone's job is safe. But as I know I have posted about on the blog here, and has become an increasingly prevalent dynamic in many US businesses, employees are getting older and older, and the percentage of people age 55 and up still in the workforce keeps climbing. We could all do for reminding ourselves from time to time that unless there are some really specific and challenging physical elements to the job, that often age, by itself, simply does not matter when evaluating performance. And we have to get used to working with, learning from, and leveraging these older employees. Old coaches get fired not for being old. They get fired for not winning. Which is the same reason young coaches get fired.

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When Things Don’t Work Out: Lessons from the New York Knicks Steve Boese Originally Published on April 17, 2014

Knicks coach Mike Woodson, in his standard 2014 repose My beloved New York Knicks wrapped up a disappointing 2013-2014 season last night with a win, but despite the win and some solid play in the season's late stages the season ended with a playoff-missing 37-45 won-loss record. Since I spent a ridiculous amount of time this season watching the Knicks I better have gotten something out of it (or I will be really even more depressed), so I figured I would share five quick lessons from disappointment from the 2013-2014 Knicks debacle of a season. 1. Be careful with celebrations and self-congratulation Last year the Knicks had a surprisingly strong season, winning 54 games and also winning their first playoff series in about 20 years. They were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs, but still went out with a feeling of "We've had a great season!" But the good feelings and accomplishments from a prior success don't really mean anything when it comes to tackling the next challenge. This year's Knicks team had a lingering hangover from the celebrations of prior accomplishments that themselves were not all that great. Lesson? Don't celebrate too long and especially for 'wins' that are not all that remarkable.

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2. Sometimes you are the worst evaluator of your own capability and potential Prior to the season, a computer analysis of their prospects predicted the Knicks would finish with a 37-45 record, and miss the playoffs. And that prediction was predictably mocked and derided by the team's players and coaches. But as we see, this is exactly the terrible record the Knicks ended up with. The lesson here? When a neutral, no-skin-in-the-game third party (like this computer), gives you an assessment of your performance and capability, you should at least consider its point of view and findings. Like the Knicks, most of us are pretty bad at self reflection and examination. 3. You can't fix other people's problems One of the major off-season moves the Knicks made was to acquire via trade former Toronto Raptors forward (and former 1st overall draft choice from 2006), Andrea Bargnani. In Toronto, Bargnani was essentially hated, and the Raptor fans even made celebratory videos when his trade to the Knicks was announced. While Bargnani might be a nice guy, he is not a very good NBA basketball player, despite 'seeming' like he should be (he's tall). Bargnani's performance with the Knicks, (before getting injured and missing the last half of the season), was almost exactly in line with his career average performance level from seven years in Toronto. Bargnani was a mediocre-at-best player that the Knicks somehow felt in their system could perform at a higher level. The lesson is that they were wrong. 4. Past performance is not indicative, except when it is Last season's 54 win Knicks team was powered, in part, due to career-best performances by two players, Point Guard Raymond Felton, and shooting guard and NBA 6th Man of the Year, J.R. Smith. For various reasons, both of these player's performances were substantially better than their career averages, and consequently helped lead the Knicks to what was really an over performing 2013 finish. In 2014 instead of repeating that level of relative over achievement, both players regressed back to their typical or expected performance levels, (and at times, even below that). They both returned to who they are. Your takeaway? Veteran employees don't usually and suddenly start performing much better or much worse than their career history suggests. And when or if they do, you can expect a return to the mean level of performance (good or average) eventually. 5. When things are really bad, you have to send a message Towards the end of what would be a lost season, the Knicks signed NBA coaching legend (and former Knicks player) Phil 'Zen Master' Jackson to be the team's new President. While this was too late in the campaign to make much of a difference in 2014, at least it sends a message to the team, the fans, and the other execs that the Knicks are at least finally realizing they are a dysfunctional mess. Will Jackson be able to actually turn the Knicks around next year? Hard to say but the lesson from ownership to the team and for you as well is clear: When there is a performance problem, you can't expect it to just

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work out on its own, you have to take some steps to shake up the organization, the culture, the staff, etc. in order to get at and improve the problems. Ugh, I am just as drained from this (silly) post as I have been watching this disaster of a Knicks team this season. But talking/writing about it is a little cathartic, I think. I guess that is the last lesson from this terrible team - no matter how bad things get it helps to vent a little bit about it.

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Diverse Teams Can (Literally) Better Take the Heat Steve Boese Originally Published on June 9, 2014 Did you happen to catch Game 1 of the NBA Finals last week between the San Antonio Spurs and two-time defending NBA champions the Miami Heat? In the game, won by the Spurs 110-95, probably the most notable element was the Spurs arena air conditioning system failing in the second half. This led to soaring arena and on-court temperatures which (likely) contributed to Heat star LeBron James' serious leg cramps, a condition which forced him to leave the game in the 4th quarter, and factored significantly in the Spurs win. While each athlete's ability to tolerate or withstand the increased temperatures is probably difficult to predict, the Spurs team seemingly had a slight advantage adapting to the tough conditions. Why? Possibly because of the team's diversity. The Spurs are the NBA's most diverse team in terms of the player's nationalities, featuring guys from places like France, Argentina, the US Virgin Islands, Australia, and Italy. Many of these players have considerable playing experience in leagues and competitions in Europe, where in-arena air conditioning is much less common than it is in the USA. As such, these players were able to draw on that experience that the diversity of their backgrounds helped to provide, to successfully adapt to the unusual conditions in Game 1. Here's a quote form Spurs guard and native of France, Tony Parker: "I felt like I was playing in the European Championship. We never have AC in Europe so it didn't bother me at all." The Spurs Manu Ginobili, an Argentine, had this to say about the heat (and the Heat): "I don't think we (the Spurs) suffered as much. And for sure I played for more years in situations like this than with AC on the court. Not a big deal in that case." As the Heat, and in particular James, were unable to adapt to the tough conditions, the Spurs were able to go on a late 31-9 scoring run and win the game by a comfortable 15 point margin. And in no small part, their diverse set of contributors were a key factor in the game's outcome. It seems obvious that people from different backgrounds will have a different set of life experiences, sensibilities, and likely have ways to adapt and react to situations in a beneficial manner - all traits in evidence during Game 1 last week from the diverse players on the Spurs roster. We all know, or have been trained to accept, that increased diversity is generally a good thing for workplaces and teams, but rarely do we get to see such a public and clear set of

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circumstances where having that diversity directly leads to increased organizational performance and better outcomes. In this case, Game 1 of the NBA Finals, we saw loud and clear how having a more diverse team allowed the Spurs to succeed in conditions that really were not all that foreign (pardon the pun) to many of their players. A good lesson and a fun game to watch as well. Unless you are a Heat fan.

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My Obligatory World Cup Post Steve Boese Originally Published on July 8, 2014

My annual contract with the 8 Man Rotation Group, LLC (not a real thing, but we do have an annual FREE Ebook on Sports and HR), obliges me to post at least once about the World Cup and what similarities, parallels, or HR and workplace takeaways you might be able to glean from the tournament (which I really do enjoy), so here goes... Talent almost always trumps all - Despite some interesting and surprising 'upsets' in the early round matches, (the USA getting out of the 'Group of Death', the legendary Spanish side failing to play to expectations), by the later stages of the event, the best/most talented teams had risen to the occasion. In the first knockout round the 8 teams that had been on top of their opening round groups, all defeated the second place in their group teams that they were matched against. And then in the quarter-final round, the four teams that advanced (Brazil, Germany, Argentina, and the Netherlands), were among the pre-tournament top four favored sides. Winning at the World Cup, and in most every business as well, remains mostly about having a group of talented people working together towards the same goal. And since every team wants to win the World Cup, the tie-breaker is talent. Not fighting spirit, not fan support, not a 'unique' culture - it's talent. The more people needed to create the finished product, the less individual stars matter - Soccer is played by 11 people per side, thus making any single individual's ability to impact and influence the outcome of the match relatively less than say basketball, where a single star player is often the difference between winning teams and losing ones. Sure, each of the top 4 teams have their share of 'star' players, but in a 90 minute match these players can often go for very long stretches of play without even touching the ball, much less making game-altering plays. Soccer is often about discipline, strategy, organization as much as about singular talent. So while talent (usually) trumps all, it is really kind of a collective talent level that I'm talking about. Many of the top sides have seen their star players go down to injury, yet their overall talent level and team

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organization has allowed them to continue to thrive. The HR lesson here? Once about 10-15 people are involved in any project or initiative, you might be better off passing on the 'star' talent in favor of raising the overall talent level of the group. Performance is relative (and a function of expectations) - Just like how for most publicly traded companies their quarterly performance in terms of absolute revenue or earnings means much less than how those figures compared to Wall Street's 'expectations' of what those results would be, a team's performance in the World Cup usually is assessed against some kind of nebulous collective expectation of what that performance would be. Case in point -the USA team played four matches in the World Cup. They won one, drew one, and lost two. The win was against probably the worst opponent of the four. The draw happened when the USA allowed a shocking goal in the 95th minute of play (essentially the last kick of the game). But yet after the USA was eliminated from the tournament, the general consensus was that the USA had a successful tournament and is on the right track for the future. But objectively, a record of 1-2-1 in four games is pretty terrible. But against expectations, it was a success. We see this effect at work all the time - someone's just sort of average performance is viewed as wonderful if they have a track record of being incompetent. Someone else's good performance is not appreciated if they had somehow done a little better in the past. We'd probably be better off trying to forget the recent past, let go of 'expectations' and try to evaluate people and performance for what they are.

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The Value of Keeping the Team Intact: NBA Edition Steve Boese Originally Published on July 29, 2014

Drowned out by the overwhelming amount of fan and media attention that accompanied the recent decision by basketball's LeBron James to leave his team of the last four seasons, Miami, and return to his original club in Cleveland, another team in the NBA has quietly completed the execution of a different kind of talent strategy in advance of the 2014-2015 NBA season. The talent strategy? The retention of key players and team leadership. The team? The NBA Champion San Antonio Spurs who recently defeated James and Miami 4 games to 1 in the NBA Finals, thus setting off a chain of events of player movement (starting with the league's best player, James), that is still not completely settled almost two months from the end of the season. The Spurs' retention strategy concluded with the re-signing to a multi-year contract extension of the team's longtime coach Gregg Popovich. From the ESPN.com piece* announcing Coach Pop's contract extension:

Gregg Popovich has agreed to a multiyear contract extension to continue coaching the reigning NBA champion San Antonio Spurs. Popovich, 65, has coached San Antonio to five NBA titles since becoming the team's coach in 1996-97. The Spurs won their first championship since 2007 last month when they defeated the Miami Heat in five games in the NBA Finals. With Tim Duncan, Boris Diaw and the rest of San Antonio's key players all set to return next season, it was no surprise that Popovich has signed on for a few more years.

The long time coach, Popovich. The 'Big Three' star players, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili. All of the important reserve/role players that helped the team vanquish the Heat in a five game series that was for the most part, incredibly one-sided. Everyone

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that played a key part and made needed contributions to the Spurs' great season and eventual NBA title are returning to the team next season. In modern professional sports, the ability to retain so much of the key talent from a championship team is almost unheard of. Individual players, emboldened by their status as 'championship winners', often seek (rightly), to leverage that status into more lucrative contracts with competing teams. Some reserve players get uncomfortable returning to a team where they are likely to remain reserves for another season, thus potentially detracting from their longer term market value. And in sports, just like in any other business, sometimes people get tired of working with each other after a few years, and seek to use the success as a launch pad to something and somewhere else. Retention as a strategy is sometimes, perhaps even regularly overlooked in sports and in many other types of organizations as well. Some people like to say retention is an outcome, and not really a strategy in of itself. It could be, but either way that does not diminish its importance and role in long-term organizational success. ALL the NBA chatter this off-season has been about where LeBron was going to play next season, what his decision meant for the other stars on Miami, and how these moves impacted the eventual recruiting strategies of the other teams in the league. And while all this talk about player movement, potential trades, and how certain players might fit in with their new teams is fun and interesting for fans, it completely obscures what the most successful organization of the past 15 years has been doing. The Spurs led the NBA in victories, won their 5th NBA title in the Popovich/Duncan era by defeating James and Miami in convincing fashion, and then re-signed Popovich and all the important players from that team and NO ONE is talking about them. It is because retention is boring. Recruiting is fun and exciting though, so we like to talk about that instead. But retention, stability, and sticking to a winning formula probably gives the Spurs, (and your organization too), a better shot at long term success than chasing elusive talent and not doing enough to convince your home grown talent to stick around. * http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/11196065/gregg-popovich-agrees-multiyear-extension-san-antonio-spurs

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Talent Attraction: The Real Reason to Keep Top Talent Steve Boese Originally Published on October 28, 2014

A few months ago I posted* a recap of 'Why Stars Matter', a recent study out of the National Bureau of Economic Research that concluded the most important contribution that so-called 'Top Talent' makes to an organization is that they increase the organization's ability to recruit even more Top Talent. Here is an excerpt from my piece from April, then I will hit you with the reason why I wanted to revisit this topic today: ------------------------------------------------ A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study titled Why Stars Matter, has attempted to identify just what are these 'top talent' effects. It turns out that just being better at their jobs only accounts for a part of the advantage these high performers provide and that possibly the more important benefit is how the presence of top talent impacts the other folks around them, (and the ones you are trying to recruit). Here is a summary of the findings of the 'top talent' effects from HBR:

The researchers found that the superstar’s impact on recruiting was far and away the more significant driver of improved organizational productivity. Starting just one year after the superstar joins the department, the average quality of those who join the department at all levels increases significantly. As for the impact of a superstar on existing colleagues, the findings are more mixed. Incumbents who work on topics related to those the superstar focused on saw their output increase, but incumbents whose work was unrelated became slightly less productive.

So 'top talent' (mostly) gets to be called 'top talent' because they are simply better, more productive employees. But a significant benefit of these talented individuals is that they

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help you recruit more people like them, who in turn also are more productive than average, continuing to raise the overall performance level of the organization. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to October when we have from the world of sports, specifically the NBA, this effect of 'Top Talent as a recruiting magnet' playing out with one of the league's most well-known and successful teams, the Los Angeles Lakers, and superstars, 5-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant. Except in this case, if Henry Abbott's reporting on ESPN** is accurate, the 'Top Talent', i.e. Kobe, is no longer attracting talent, he is in fact, serving to repel other top players (LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, etc.), from even considering joining the Lakers when all three players had that option this off season. In Abbott's short video he essentially concludes that at this stage of his career, Kobe's personality, need to take most of the shots, (and claim all of the spotlight), and his past history of not being able to co-exist with other top players has made the Lakers, once the destination of choice for NBA legends like Wilt Chamberlain, Shaq, and Magic Johnson, into a place where no top player will consider playing for. It is worth watching the quick (1:20) report from Abbott, even if you are not an NBA fan, just because it serves as a reminder of what the NBER talked about in their research. Once 'Top Talent' stops serving as a magnet for other top talent, then it is probably time to take a long, dispassionate look at what they are contributing to the organization overall. Not just in what they are producing themselves, but how they might be holding the organization hostage so to speak, if they are keeping away the next wave of star talent you need.

• *http://steveboese.squarespace.com/journal/2014/4/28/whats-so-great-about-top-talent.html

• **  http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/70878/lakers-arent-attracting-stars-with-kobe

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How the NBA Can Teach You (Almost) Everything You Need to Know About Talent Management Steve Boese Originally Published on October 28, 2014

Tonight is the opening of the 2014-2015 NBA season, (also known as the greatest day of the year in my house). I am a firm believer that sports, and particularly NBA basketball, offer some of the best real-world and public manifestations and examples of what HR and Talent pros would refer to as modern organizational Talent Management. I am also a firm believer that you too can learn just about everything you need to know about modern Talent Management from close observation of the NBA - the teams, the stars, the coaching, the executive decisions, even the marketing. Sure, I know what you are saying, sports isn't like real life and real business, and you can't constantly keep comparing the two very different worlds. To that I say, you're wrong. Or at least that is the argument I am going to make. Here are five (easy, and just the most obvious ones I could think of in the 26 minutes I allotted myself to write this post), of how following the NBA can raise your HR game in the major Talent Management process areas. Recruiting/Selection - The most obvious parallel between the NBA and 'real' business is probably in recruiting and selection. In both examples you have to make the critical determination of just who is likely to succeed and perhaps more importantly, succeed in your specific business/team/set of circumstances. Even really talented NBA players sometimes find themselves on the 'wrong' team or in a system that does not suit their talents, (see Paul, Chris). You know you have been there too, dealing with a smart, talented employee who for some reason or another doesn't 'fit' or simply needs a change

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of scenery, (maybe a transfer, a new boss, maybe leaving altogether), in order for them to realize their potential. Learning/Development - Most players get to the NBA (mostly) fully formed, i.e., their skills and abilities are reasonably developed, and only need some refinement and experience in order to succeed. But there are some players, especially players later in their career, that end up adding new elements or skills to their games in order to extend their usefulness and their time in the league, (see Carter, Vince). I would argue that for successful people, just like for NBA players, learning and development needs have two peaks, right at the start of one's career, and again towards the end. What is the HR/Talent lesson? Probably not to neglect the learning and development needs of longer-tenured employees, who still have plenty to offer, but might just need a little more time in the gym learning a new skill or two. Performance Management - Coaching doesn't make a ton of difference in the NBA, as success or failure is primarily a function of the talent level of the players. But there are a couple of exceptions to this. Namely, the coaches at the very top, the ones that consistently have the most success, find a way to coax superior performance out of their players, (see Popovich, Gregg). Much like with players, the difference between the very best coaches and average coaches is incredibly significant, (and apparent). The HR pro takeaway from this? The best talent does not always win. The best talent, guided by the best managers usually does win. Don't skimp on trying to build the best team of managers that you can. Succession Planning - Lots to learn about succession planning from sports, but the best recent example might be what has been happening to the proud Los Angeles Lakers franchise since the passing of owner Dr. Jerry Buss in 2013. Under Buss' stewardship, the Lakers enjoyed a lengthy run of high performance and numerous championships. After his death, his ownership interests passed to his six children, with each one having an equal vote in team matters. Two of the children, Jeannie and Jim have the most direct involvement with the team, and their performance has been to put it kindly, less than stellar. The franchise seems kind of adrift, they have made several questionable decisions, (see Bryant Kobe), and are facing down what is likely to be their worst season in years. The takeaway here? Even the best performing, best-run companies have to have a plan for when their owner/leader moves on. Nothing lasts forever, but organizations with a deep bench of solid leaders will last longer than most. Compensation - All NBA teams operate under a salary budget (cap), just like your organization does too. Allocating that budget intelligently across the roster is paramount to a team's success in the league. Spend too much on one or two superstar players, (see Bryant, Kobe), and then you're left with filling out the team with a collection of less talented players. But, fail to spend (or offer) top-level talent the top-level money they demand, and watch them walk to a competitor, (see Parsons, Chandler). Hey, that is exactly what happens to some of your best people too!

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Simple, right? Lessons abound everywhere in the NBA where you can see the actual outcomes of Talent Management strategies and decisions play out in real-time, every night, in arenas around the country. I am down with the NBA, and not just because basketball is by far the greatest of all team sports, but also for how studying the game can help us be better at what we are charged with doing - helping our organizations manage and utilize talent for successful results. Welcome back NBA and Go Knicks!

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Great Players Win Early Steve Boese Originally Published on November 25, 2014

I remain convinced that everything, everything (pretty much) you need to know about HR/Talent Management/The Workplace you can learn from watching the NBA. I even said as much a few weeks back. The dynamics of NBA basketball exhibit remarkable similarities to many of the most common workplace situations: Relatively small working teams, (even in large organizations, most work gets done in much smaller groups), a need for the team to function cohesively, and, importantly, plenty of opportunity (and need for), individual expressions of creativity and high performance. With that setup, I want to call out yet another example of how understanding the NBA can help you with HR and Talent management, this time a look at how early-career NBA player performance can help you in evaluating tricky things like how long should it take a new hire to be 'fully productive' and an even more challenging question - 'What is the performance ceiling, or potential of this new hire?' At Deadspin*, they took a look at the early career results, (defined by team regular season win totals), for high draft choices (in HR-speak 'Top talent'), over the last 15 or so years. What they found after examining the data is for the most part is that really truly great players begin to show positive results for their (almost always 'bad') teams, by their third season in the NBA. Here is an excerpt from the analysis, then a couple of comments from me about how you might be able to consider this data in a 'normal' workplace context.

This is a look at regular season wins. Taking just the regular season gets us out of the ringsssssss mentality. The NBA playoffs are the most meaningful of any sport's, but getting 66 wins out of Mo Williams, Boobie Gibson and Delonte West is a version of greatness that hasn't been explored as deeply as it probably should. (Steve here - this

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is a reference to the stiffs that LeBron James carried on his back in his first stint with the Cavaliers). So let's draw a totally arbitrary line in the sand at 50 wins, and plot out not just who gets there, but when they get there, the idea being that in those first few years, we can isolate talented players on inferior teams. As it happens, the hunch mostly bears out: In today's NBA, good players win, great players win early.

The Deadspin piece goes on to list the players that meet this (admittedly subjective) criteria - 50 wins by year three, the player was a high draft pick, and the 'new hire' played significant minutes from the beginning of their career. And the list reads like a 'Who's Who?' of current NBA stars - Chris Paul, LeBron James, Kevin Durant etc. The point is not really that LeBron and Durant and Paul are great players, it is pretty easy to tell that by just watching them, but rather how that greatness actually manifests in organizational success, i.e., wins. The point is (quoting from the piece), 'Good players win. Great players win early.' What takeaways about new hire productivity and longer-term potential might you be able to glean from the data about NBA stars? I have three quick ideas: 1. The 'learning curve' for really talented, special performers is likely much, much shorter than for average performers. They will 'get' the basic elements of the industry/organization/role really quickly, and might be bored if your typical onboarding/training program feels too slow and too restrictive. 2. Great, transformative talent will likely demonstrate that talent in some manner pretty early in the process. It might be a great new idea for a product/service, an improvement in an existing process that saves time or money, or simply how they begin to elevate the performance of those around them. But the point is, you likely can tell pretty quickly if you have a potentially great performer on your hands. 3. But in order to one; not be bored with a slow training cycle, and two; even have the chance to demonstrate great ability and potential, the new player on the team has to be given some opportunity to do just that. In the NBA study, the new players had to have averaged 28 (out of 48) minutes of game action, i.e. they had to essentially be starting, featured players even though they were new. The same is true in any workplace really. In order to contribute meaningfully, you have to have a chance or platform to do just that. The overwhelming tendency is to shield new hires from the most complex and important projects until they are 'ready', but by doing that you might be preventing both their chance to demonstrate their true capability and potential. It's all about the NBA. It is. I will convince you eventually. Ok, I am out.

• http://regressing.deadspin.com/the-best-nba-players-win-50-or-more-games-by-their-thir-1652667908

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The Performance Curve Steve Boese Originally Published on December 3, 2014

If you are a fan of baseball you might be familiar with the maxim or rule of thumb that states for Major League players that an individual player's performance (hits, home runs, wins as a pitcher, etc.), tends to 'peak' at around age 29 or so (give to take a year or two), then most often declines until the end of their careers. This phenomenon, most often raised when a team elects to offer hundreds of millions of dollars and 5+ year contracts to players on the wrong side of 30, has been pretty well observed, studied, and documented over the 100+ years of data about Major League player performance. Since charts make everything better, take a look at the generalized performance by age chart from a 2010 study published on Baseball Prospectus*:

The specifics of the Y-axis values don't really matter for the point I am after, (they represent standard deviations from 'peak' performance', but simply looking at the data we see for both the original study sample (veteran players with 10+ years of data), and 'less restricted' players, (more or less everyone else), that performance peaks in the late 20s and declines, predicatbly, from there. Keep this data in mind the next time your favorite team drops a 7-year, $125M contract on your best 31 year old slugger. Those kinds of contracts, for hitters or pitchers, almost never work out well for the team. And

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again, the reasons are completely obvious and predictable. Almost all players skills begin to decline by age 30. All players are in decline by 32. What does this predictable and observable performance curve for baseball players mean for you as an HR/Talent pro? I think at least three things can be taken from the baseball performance curve that apply more generally. 1. While baseball, and sports in general, allow more precise and discrete measures of performance that allow us to pinpoint when performance 'peaks', this phenomenon applies in many other scenarios as well. You, or your managers, know after how long in a given role that an employee's performance has likely hit its apex, and continued tenure in that role is likely to results in lessened performance. Put more simply, you can't keep people, especially good ones, in the same roles for too long. They get bored, they figure it all out. And after too long, they start to tune out. The time to move people to the next role isn't when they are on the decline, it is when they are just peaking. 2. In baseball gigantic contracts are often bestowed on players in their late 20s or early 30s, mostly on the basis of several years of prior high performance. While this on first glance seems to make sense, it almost always results in a bad deal for the team And again, the reason is not usually the fault of the player. It is just that 100 years of data show that almost all players are simply not as productive from ages 30-35 as they are from ages 25-30. The lesson here: We need to remember that most compensation should be about ongoing and future performance, and not predominantly as a reward for what has already happened. Past performance is not always, maybe not even all that often, a great predictor of future performance. 3. Baseball player performance is very predictable, as we see in the above data, and there really is no excuse for baseball team management to pretend that is not the case. Decades of data make it plain. I think soon, maybe even fairly soon, the kinds of data and predictive data that organizations will have about employee performance will be similarly robust and powerful. Just as baseball team execs find it very difficult to heed this data, it will be tough for HR and business leaders to 'listen' to their data as well. But the best-run organizations, the ones that make the best use of their resources will be the ones that do not fail to heed what the hard data about performance and people are telling them. Ok that is it, I am out Trust your data. And don't give 32 year old first basemen $100M contracts. * http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=9933

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If Richard Sherman Took a Pre-Employment Test, Here’s What it Would Show… Kris Dunn Originally Published on January 27, 2014

By now you've heard or read about Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman. As the football Seahawks move to the Super Bowl this week in NYC, he's the talk of the town. Brash. Confident. High-Performing.

Plenty has been written about Sherman, so I'm going to zig while others zag. I'm not doing an analysis on the definition of thug, or talking about the contrast between being raised in Compton by a 2-parent family, then graduating from Stanford. Instead, let's dig into Sherman's probable behavioral assessment if you gave him one as part of your interview process.

Here's what I think that would show - as told through the lens of Talent DNA, the assessment we use at Kinetix:

-High Cognitive - Sherman can take a lot of data in and make quick accurate decisions, as evidenced by his performance on the field, and his performance in the cited interview, which was conducted literally two minutes after he made a play that saved the game for the Seahawks. Quick study, that Richard Sherman.

-High Assertive - Not much else needs to be said here. Don't you ever talk about him. He's going to shut your mouth for you.

-Low Rules - Sherman likes to create his own solutions, as evidenced by his ability to adjust on the field and have little tolerance for being told what he should do. The Seahawks can't control RS, they're just along for the ride. If they don't like it, they'll have to trade him, because low rules people don't change.

-High People - He's obvious not introverted.

-Low Team - It's about him, not about the team. He measures himself against others and if you want to motivate him, you talk about him vs. others, not team results. PS - he needs that but may appear angry if... you talk about him.

-Faking Good - Doesn't appear to be hiding much, does he?

Superbowl prediction - Broncos 24, Seahawks 20. Peyton Manning throws 60 straight 4 yard routes away from Sherman, and on the 40th and 53 of those passes, Sherman is flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. Because, you know, he figured out he was being ignored. (Ed. Note…Seahawks 43, Broncos 8)

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MONEYBALL: Is the Talent World’s Most Undervalued Asset Old People? Kris Dunn Originally Published on March 26, 2014

Moneyball - A term describing baseball operations in which a team endeavors to analyze the market for baseball players and buy what is undervalued and sell what is overvalued. Unlike a common misconception, it is not about OBP, but whatever is undervalued at that time. It is most commonly used to refer to the strategy used by the front office of the Oakland Athletics. It derives its name from a Michael Lewis book of the same name. That's the sports definition of Moneyball. The more important application of the Moneyball concept is that in any talent economy - the one your company competes in for example - there's always undervalued assets to be recruited and acquired on the cheap. The point of Moneyball is this - if you can recruit the undervalued asset at 60% of the cost but get 80% of the production the higher priced asset gives you, you're going to win at a company Which brings me to the point of the post. What's the undervalued asset in today's talent economy? Is it any of the following?

Ivy League grads? No, too competitive and the price gets driven up quickly. Young college grads? Probably not - not enough experience and they're probably valued correctly, even at their low salaries - for their skills and experience. Generation X? I think not. Now in late 30's and 40's, they're in their peak earning years. You may love the experience and energy combo, but this segment is not undervalued.

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Here's another thought. If you're going to follow the Moneyball approach and invest in the undervalued asset that no one wants, let's face it - it's old people in the workforce. That's right - I said old people. Shock and awe. Some people consider me to be old in my 40's. Bastards - I'm Gen X, which doesn't qualify as old. Unless you're a punk kid, but you really don't have the experience to judge me - OK youngsters? Here's why older workers are on my mind as the undervalued asset a moneyball talent approach would follow. New Republic recently published an article on the Brutal Ageism of Tech in Silicon Valley*, and the part that interested me the most was a counter-intuitive, Moneyball approach to older entrepreneurs by a outcast VC/angel investor:

"Midway through my first encounter with Dan Scheinman, he warned me that he was weird. He wasn’t wrong. Once, while he was fielding a pitch from two entrepreneurs, I watched him tear apart a bagel with his teeth like a flesh-eating predator. Later, I noticed him absently fingering poppy seeds from a napkin into his mouth. Though he had ascended to head of acquisitions at Cisco during his 18-year run there, he always felt as if his quirkiness kept him from rising higher. His ideas were unconventional. His rhetorical skills were far from slick. “I’m a crappy presenter,” he told me. “There are people in a room whose talent is to win the first minute. Mine is to win the thirtieth or the sixtieth.” Back in the early 2000s, he proposed that Cisco buy a software company called VMware. It did not go over well. “Cisco is a hardware company,” the suits informed him. Why mess around with software? Not that this shook his confidence. Scheinman simply concluded that he would have better luck if he made investments without clearing them through a bureaucracy. VMware, after all, became a $50-billion success. And yet, when Scheinman left Cisco in 2011 to become a venture capitalist (V.C.), he attracted not the slightest bit of interest from the established firms on Sand Hill Road."

That made Scheinman a lot like the Oakland A's when it came to talent he could attract on his own. So he naturally zigged while others zagged:

"The only question was what to invest in. “I could see the reality was I had two choices,” Scheinman told me. “One, I could do what everyone else was doing, which is a losing strategy unless you have the most capital.” The alternative was to try to identify a niche that was somehow perceived as less desirable and was therefore less competitive. Finally, during a meeting with two bratty Zuckerberg wannabes, it hit him: Older entrepreneurs were “the mother of all undervalued opportunities. "Indeed, of all the ways that V.C.s could be misled, the allure of youth ranked highest. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32,” Graham told The New York Times in 2013. “After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.”

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Naturally, Scheinman decided to lurch in the opposite direction. He became an angel investor, meaning he typically provides the cash the founders tap once they’ve exhausted their family members and credit cards. If the angel’s bet is sound and the company continues to grow, it will frequently need an “A round” of funding from a V.C. later on, usually between $2 and $10 million. Scheinman’s hypothesis was that, with enough money to pay their bills for a year or two, the older entrepreneurs could rig up a product that was sufficiently impressive to overcome the V.C.s’ prejudice. He could force them to wonder if maybe, just maybe, they were staring at a billion-dollar business."

Our natural instinct is to do what others do. Reach for the energy of the young person. Be skeptical whether the professional in his 50s has what it takes to climb the mountain again. You might have reasons to really believe that. But, if you also believe in the Moneyball approach - that assets ultimately get undervalued as the pack chases what's hot - it's clear what the undervalued asset is. The undervalued asset is old people. Or should i say <throat clearing sound> - deeply experienced workers. Zig when others Zag. The only thing you have to figure out is which 20% of deeply experienced workers are super talented and simply got caught in pack mentality that older workers don't have what it takes to compete in today's economy. *http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism

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Managers As Coaches: The Key is Confrontation…. Kris Dunn Originally Published on August 25, 2014

Spent a good part of last week talking coaching skills to a group of managers in Texas. How do you coach? Why should you coach? Why do so many managers not actively coach their people? Then I see this from Tim Sackett (Ed Note..the Sackett post follows after the next two articles), which I think is pretty good:

"When you tell me I should ‘act’ more like a coach, and less like a manager, I get very confused. Let me give you a little insight to how most coaches behave:

- Our intent is to get our players to be a more aggressive version of themselves for a short period of time to help us win a game. - I’ll publicly extol the virtues of team, while behind the scenes push internal competition beyond a healthy level. - I love it when my players want to kill each other, and having a fight at a practice isn’t really a bad thing."

Tim's point, which I think is pretty good, is that a BS generality that managers should coach like we see in sports is simple at best, and probably dangerous. You have to pick your role models carefully, and for the most part, you don't want your managers acting like sports coaches. Those guys (and gals) are absolute cavemen. I know, because I used to be one at the college level many moons ago and now find myself attempting to find balance coaching youth sports at a pretty competitive level. So let's assume that Tim's right (go check out the rest of his post at the link above). Is there anything we can learn from the best sports coaches as we think about the right way to engage our teams on performance?

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Yes we can. The best coaches, both in corporate America and sports, are willing to confront situations that need to be confronted. The hardest thing about being a manager in corporate America is that most of the people who are promoted into roles managing others weren't promoted for their ability to coach. They were promoted because they were the best individual contributor doing what they did. So we assume they will be the best at managing others doing the same work. That's true to a certain extent. If you were kick ass at the job, then get promoted to managing others doing the job, no one understands it better than you. You've got creditability as well. But the thing you aren't prepared for? Confrontation. Most people don't do it anywhere as good as you did it. So you see them do things that are counterproductive, and you really need to get in there and try to make them better. But to do that, you've got to tell them how they are doing things isn't great. In fact, sometimes it sucks.

That's why any coaching tool or methodology designed to help your managers needs to have a simple, low impact way for the managers in question to start any coaching conversation.

They've got to be able to confront - and they have to do it in a way were it doesn't feel like blatant confrontation. To Tim's point, most of us aren't wired like Tom Izzo. That means we're less likely to confront bad performance when we see it. That's why they need your help understanding how to do something as basic as start a coaching conversation. They're not screamers. At least we hope not.

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The Ghost of Athlete Past Tim Sackett Originally Published on March 4, 2014

I have three sons. Two of whom are current high school athletes having successful high school careers. Both have potential to move onto college and play the sport they want, if they choose that is the path they want to take. Both are considered very hard working kids in their sports by their coaches and teammates. They get that from their Mom, I was more of a gamer type. Their Mom was the type of player other teammates hated playing against in practice because she never took a play off. It made her very successful as a college athlete. She has passed this down to our sons. I’m grateful. You see, anyone who has been around high school athletics will recognize this, not all kids give their all. Many times you have kids on these teams with super high potential and athletic ability who seem to just piss it away for no real reason. They don’t work hard. Coaches play them anyway. They screw around in school because they think their future is playing professional sports, or that colleges won’t care they’re a crappy student. People treat them differently because their the local star of the moment. They float through life believing this will never end. Flash-forward 10 years and they are usually sitting in the stands of the same local school’s games carrying around their regret like a backpack. Working at the local factory or some crappy sales job, talking about how they were so close to ‘making it’. But they didn’t. I wish I could send these kids a Ghost like in the movie The Christmas Carol. A Ghost of Athlete Past to show them where they are and where they are going. Where they are truly going is not where they think. It’s not dropping out of college because they didn’t prepare themselves. It’s not sleeping in their parents basement at 28 because they can’t find a job to pay them enough money to have their own place. It’s certainly not sitting a some random game at their local high school talking to anyone who will listen how they were better than the current version of themselves on the field right now. I know people like to blame coaches. The coach should have been able to get ‘that’ kid to see how they were throwing it all away. Some blame the parents for not disciplining

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them enough and showing them how their path was broken. I tend to blame the collective. All of us who each, at one time or another, gave the kid a pass. Well, he’s the best player, you need to put up with his attitude. We won’t win with out him so, you’ve got to put up with him not practicing hard. Well, we need him for this Friday’s game, so let’s just give him a passing grade ‘this’ time. We’ve all failed him. We all had the chance to make this kid a great kid. Great athlete, great student, great person. Instead we filled him with regret that he’ll have to carry around for a lifetime. I lifetime of regret at 18. It’s heavy at 18, and it only gets heavier each year after. I love athletics. Athletics have given me a ton in my life, as they have for so many people in our society. It breaks my heart to see a young kid getting ready to sling that backpack on, though. To know you’re looking at someone who has already seen their best days at such a young age. Just a reminder to give it your all today. Some will only have one shot. Did you do everything you could have done to be ready?

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3 Ways to Make Your Office Productive During March Madness Tim Sackett Originally Published on March 25, 2014

For those that know me, I’m a huge basketball fan. Pro, college, AAU, high school, hell, if you really dig into my past you would probably find me hanging out at some playground breaking down the defense effort of a pickup game between grade school kids. So, when March Madness time comes around each year I’m like many of your employees. I’m trying to find the best ways to work and watch basketball, or at the very least stay up on my brackets and see who is getting upset! With all the hype over the past few years about lost productivity, do to March Madness, in the workplace. I felt it was my duty to provide HR Pros with some helpful tips and tricks to get the your staff to highly productive during this time of year. Here’s my ideas:

1. Put up TVs throughout the office. Let’s face it, you really only have one or two hoops junkies in the office, and those folks usually spend vacation time to ensure they don’t miss a minute. Everyone else just wants to see scores and highlights. They’re a casual fan. They’re willing to work a perfectly normal day, and will probably be just a productive, if not more, with the TVs steaming all the games in the background. Plus, if you get a close game or big upset, you’ll get some team excitement in the air. This also stops most of your staff trying to stream the games on their desktops for the entire afternoon. 2. Call off work those afternoons. Let’s face it, March Madness is pretty close to a national holiday as we will ever get. Doesn’t matter if you’re female or male, young or old, what religion you are, we all love the drama and excitement of March Madness. Just close the office. Make a deal with your staff to reach certain goals and if they’re met, take them to the local watering hole yourself and have some fun with it. Employees like to rally around a fun idea. You don’t have to make everything fun, all the time, but once in a while it helps to lift productivity. 3. Shut off all access. Yep, you read that correctly. Have IT shut down all access to anything related to March Madness. Threaten to fire any employee caught checking scores on their smart phone, or calling a friend to see how it’s going. Fear! Fear is a great short-term lifter of productivity. Whether we like to admit it, or not, it’s true. If you went out right now into your office and told the entire staff at the end of the day

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you’re firing the least productive person, you would see productivity shoot through the roof! You would also see about half your staff, the half you want to keep, put in their notice over the next 4-6 weeks.

The reality is, most people will do business as usual. While the CNNs of the world love to point to the millions of dollars American corporations lose during March Madness, it’s no different than so many things that can consume our thoughts in any given day. I do think HR and leadership, each year, lose out on a great way to have fun and raise engagement during March Madness. It’s something most of your staff has some interest in, and depending on your city and the schools your employees went to, it can get heightened pretty significantly. For the record, I’m not picking Michigan State. I want to with all my might, but I’m nervous that my bracket mojo would work the opposite, so I’ll pick someone else, and feel awesome when Sparty wins and I lose my bracket!

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The Managers as Coaches Myth Tim Sackett Originally Published on August 25, 2014

This isn’t necessarily a new concept, but it’s one that is popping up a ton lately in conversation. The basic concept is we should be our managers and supervisors to be ‘coaches’ to their employees, not managers. The view from Organizational Development and Training folks is that coaches are more of a representative of great leadership than we would normally think of when we think of managers and supervisors. Um, what!?! I’m not sure what people are thinking but I’ve been ‘coached’ and have been a coach most of my life. When you tell me I should ‘act’ more like a coach, and less like a manager I get very confused. Let me give you a little insight to how most coaches behave:

We yell. Usually a lot. Yeah, you don’t see that at your 8 year old’s soccer match, but go to a high school football game, basketball game, soccer match, etc. Don’t even get me started on college! Our vocabulary consists of about 6 words I don’t use on this blog very often. Our intent is to get our players to be a more aggressive version of themselves for a short period of time to help us win a game. I’ll make you cry. It’s actually a goal of mine. To push you beyond your comfort zone so you’ll breakdown and comeback stronger. If you worked really hard and give it your all I’ll give you a hug and maybe pat you on the backside. If you fail, I’ll probably yell more. I’ll publicly extol the virtues of team, while behind the scenes push internal competition beyond a healthy level.

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I love it when my players want to kill each other, and having a fight at a practice isn’t really a bad thing.

This is the reality of coaching once you get beyond very young youth sports where everyone gets a participation medal. This is real life. Not every sport, not every coach. But if you took the top 100 most successful coaches in every sport, you would be shocked at their behind the scenes behaviors. You wouldn’t like most of them. You wouldn’t want them around your kid. But, let’s go ahead and teach our managers to be coaches! Here’s the deal. What training and OD are teaching our managers to be, are not coaches. It’s an altruistic version of what they want coaches to be. They believe coaches are there to just help you along to get better and build great teams. Which conceptually is true. How it’s done is not something your training department or OD would want to sign up for! It’s a difficult concept. Most athletes who have really been coached at a high level get it. Coaches are super hard on you, because that’s the only way to make yourself better and win championships. They’ll push you beyond what you think you’re capable of. In the end you usually end up respecting your coach and are thankful for the pain they put you through. Mostly, it ends up good. But is that a process you really, truly want your managers and supervisors to put your employees through? Doubtful. You want all the outcomes of a great coach, but you’re not willing to allow them to go through the process of how a great coach gets his or her team ready for battle. Give us the result without the process. It just doesn’t work that way.

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CHAPTER 5 Total Compensation

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The Best Sports Related Job Ever Tim Sackett Originally Published on May 23, 2014

  Do you know what the ingredients are to the best sports related job ever?

1. Basketball

2. The 5th Richest person in the world 3. Beautiful weather, water and beaches 4. A Gigantic Yacht with a basketball court on it.

Mix all that together and you get one of the best jobs ever invented! Pulled directly from the critically, award winning, Wall Street Journal*:

The Oracle chief has had basketball courts on at least two of his yachts, said Tom Ehman, who handles America’s Cup matters for Mr. Ellison. He said Mr. Ellison liked to relax by shooting hoops, and has had someone in a powerboat following the yacht to retrieve balls that go overboard.

Mr. Ellison, is Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, and 5th richest person in the world, worth about $48 Billion. Larry likes basketball, a lot. Likes to shoot hoops on his yachts. For those who have ever shot hoops, the ball tends to bounce off the rim and backboard when you miss. For those who yacht. Those tend to be on Oceans, or big bodies of water. So, when you mix those two together, you would suspect you’re going to have some basketballs go ‘into the pond’ every once in a while. Now, with $48 Billion, Larry could probably just forget about any basketballs that went over board and just keep using new balls. The problem is, having a couple dozen basketballs go overboard every time you play, might bring some unwanted attention on your from those who are environmentally conscience. But, don’t fret, there is an easy solution. Pay some dude to follow you’re yacht in a smaller boat and pick up those wayward balls!

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That my friends is the best Sports Related Job ever! On a boat all day, warm sun, cool drinks, picking up a few basketballs every once in a while. I don’t think I could ever create a better summer job, ever! You know the boat you’re picking up basketballs with is top notch. You don’t have a piece of crap follow around a $200M yacht. You’re probably outfitted in some cool uniform. Paid lunches, delivered out on the water. Great tan. Good music. Absolutely no stress. You’re getting paid well. The guy has $48B and is asking you to retrieve basketballs for G*d’s sake! Where do I sign up? I would do that job in a second, and would be the best ever at it! No one would ever be better than me picking up basketballs in the ocean. I really think I could retire from that job. Just mark this down as crap you’ll never understand because you’ll never have $48B.

• http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303948104579535

910492925086?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj

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Tiger Woods Returning to Work Tim Sackett Originally Published on June 27, 2014

Most folks probably didn’t notice, but this week PGA golfer, Tiger Woods returned to the tour after a lengthy absence due to an injury to his back. People either love or hate Tiger Woods. I love him. Yeah, yeah, I know what he did, I don’t like that at all. I love watching the greatest athletes of my generation perform, and he’s one of those. I can separate his personal life from his professional life, and appreciate the skill it takes to perform at the highest level.

In HR we have people go out on leave all the time. Traditional HR thought is when an employee is out on leave (FMLA) you shouldn’t talk to them, communicate with them (unless to just get updates regarding the leave), practically not even acknowledge they’re alive! I’ve seen HR pros tell their hiring managers to have absolutely no contact with an employee who is out on leave, if they contact you, have them contact us in HR. I think this is crazy! We miss great opportunities to build loyalty with our employees, and opportunities for our leadership to be empathetic.

Some of this has to do with why a person went out on leave, and HR’s belief that an employee might be gaming the system to try and get something more than just time off needed for whatever problems we have. We add into it this belief that we have to treat everyone the same, and medical leave’s of absence become a nightmare for employees.

Our reality is, most employees just want to get better and return to work as soon as possible. Another reality is that most HR Pros don’t actually believe this. This is where the conflict comes in, and we begin to make it very difficult for our employees to be off. I never believe in the theory we should treat everyone the same. You will have some employees in your HR career who don’t want to work, and want to find some way for your company to pay them to sit at home. That’s real life. But we can’t start believing that is everyone of our employees, it’s not!

HR should encourage hiring managers to keep frequent contact with employees out on leave. Let them know we care about them, we miss them, we can’t wait to have them back. This type of communication will allow you to plan for their return, keep them

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engaged with your organization and the rest of their coworkers. HR needs to firmly believe our employees are innocent until proven guilty when out on leave. To believe each and everyone of our coworkers can’t wait to get healthy and return to work, because that is actual reality.

It’s tough, I know, I’ve been there as well, and gotten taken advantage of. But our employees deserve better from us. They deserve empathy and compassion. They deserve the same thing you would want if you had to go out on leave.

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CHAPTER 6 Employee and Labor Relations

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BULLY IN THE WORKPLACE: Is HR Getting It Wrong Most of the Time? Kris Dunn Originally Published on February 21, 2014

There's an old saying from the playground playbook: "The bully will never go away until you stand up to him." When it comes to bullying in the workplace, as HR pros, we can never sponsor that approach, right? Maybe we should. Maybe we're missing it. Consider the following text from Jonathan Martin, the Miami Dolphis player who created national news by leaving the team after reportedly being bullied and harrassed for years by Dolphin teammates* The text was one that Martin shared with his mom while the harassment was going on:

"I figured out a major source of my anxiety. I’m a push over, a people pleaser. I avoid confrontation whenever I can, I always want everyone to like me. I let people talk about me, say anything to my face, and I just take it, laugh it off, even when I know they are intentionally trying to disrespect me. I mostly blame the soft schools I went to, which fostered within me a feeling that I’m a huge p***y, as I never got into fights. I used to get verbally bullied every day in middle school and high school, by kids that are half my size. I would never fight back, just get sad & feel like no one wanted to be my friend, when in fact I was just being socially awkward. Most people in that situation are witty & quick with sarcastic replies, I never have been. I’m awkward around people a lot of the time because I simply don’t know how to act around them"

The hardest part about the role of HR in these situations is figuring out if the behavior crosses the line of some type of harassment - and if it doesn't, coaching the person on what to do. Here's Martin's mom's response to that text:

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"My first thought is that I am glad you wrote this down as a way to start figuring it out. There are people in the world with their own insecurities and they tend to be bullies and confront people. Dealing with them can be a challenge. I think when you feel really good about yourself they won’t bother you as much because you won’t let them define you. This fits into wanting to please and be liked. Some people out there are not worth it. W e do live in a bubble. Financial and professional success is sheltering. W hich is both good and bad. I think the NFL has a disproportionate share of people who are obscure but masking it with aggression. Your profession is really difficult with measurement and evaluation every week. So we need to build up you liking you. This is where some professional help would be good. They can help you structure your thoughts. And that whole brain chemistry thing is real. You may need some additional seratonin."

Sounds like a HR response, right? Martin responded to his mom:

"I care about my legacy as a professional athlete. But I’m miserable currently. A therapist & medication won’t help me gain the respect of my teammates. I really don’t know what to do Mom."

I'm thinking about this because any HR generalist with employee relations experience has had employees approach her with situations that didn't cross the line as actual harassment. And when that happens, we're back in school, back on the playground. What do you do? Do you give the employee who's living a situation that doesn't call for an investigation the politically correct coping speech, or do you give them advice on how to back the person in question off? Jonathan Martin's situation clearly crossed the line, and the Dolphins just started firing people to deal with it. Unfortunately, all HR pros deal with lots of situations that aren't that clear cut. When a person comes to you and is struggling with how to deal with aggressive behavior that doesn't quite cross the line, what do you do as an HR pro? Are you PC, or do you try to give them tools to deal with it? Most HR pros are PC. I say, evolve - and let the chips fall where they may. * http://thebiglead.com/2014/02/14/jonathan-martins-texts-to-his-mom-and-dad-will-break-your-heart/

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2 Sure Things When the Owner of Your Company Is Outed as a Racist Kris Dunn Originally Published on April 28, 2014

By now you've heard the back-story making the rounds on Donald Sterling, owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers. Sterling is long known to have issues surrounding race, and TMZ broke audio over the weekend of him waxing poetic to a girlfriend/mistress about his embarrassment when she posted pictures of herself on Instagram with black people, and asking her not to do that moving forward. That's a problem in any workplace, but Sterling's NBA workforce is 90% black, as is the rest of the NBA. Being a racist is always bad for business, but in the NBA, it's especially toxic. Check out coverage of all the angles to the Sterling story here. It's a nasty situation, but watching the coverage left me with two distinct impressions related to recruiting and retention when ownership of any company has a reputation for racism:

1. Don't expect employees to jump ship automatically when it gets thrown in their face that their owner is a racist and they're part of demographic that racism is directed at. There's lots of wondering about the Clippers team walking out in a form of a protest. The problem with that is that they're all under contract, and they can't afford to risk having their contracts voided. The coach of the team (Doc Rivers, also black) has the same problem. Millions of dollars on the line. Walking out and taking a stand is much more difficult than it looks, and you can make an argument that's not the best way to go if real change is what the employee group truly wants.

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2. Recruiting will never be successful once it's public knowledge that the organization is owned by a known and active racist. Let's say your organization needs to recruit diverse candidates and your owner has been personally named in multiple EEOC lawsuits. I'm recruiting the same pool of diversity you are - think I'm going to negatively recruit vs your company with that information? Of course I am! The Clippers are in a destination market that NBA free agents want to live and work in (LA), but they'll never land another free agent of any significance as long as Sterling is the owner.

The Sterling/Clippers situation is unusual, primarily due to the fact that the workforce in question has an average salary of 5 million per year and the majority of the workforce is in the demographic that's the subject of the hate. Most times, racist managers hire people who look like them. But the lessons hold true for a low ticket workforce that's "at-will" as well. They've got economic realties that dicate they can't leave automatically, but once the exodus starts over time, recruiting will tighten if it's public knowledge that ownership - or leadership - has racist tendencies. Most HR pros will look at the Sterling case and thank the man upstairs that no one cares enough to record select managers in their company "riffing" on race issues - or any issue that has legal exposure, for that matter. But the same recorder that was used on Sterling can (and has) been used by employees in the workplace to document racist views that emerged in lawsuits. It's just not as public as Donald Sterling.

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Auburn Football and HR: Why We Write New Handbook Policies to Police Morons… Kris Dunn Originally Published on September 2, 2014

What did I learn over Labor Day? I'm glad you asked. I learned that in every work environment, there's always one guy or gal - the person who pushes the limits of what's acceptable in the workplace in a classic "Look at me - I'm awesome" moment.

Sure it's harmless. But people around that person roll their eyes when the person tries to grab a little spotlight.

College Football opened up this last weekend. I went down to the Plains and took in the Auburn season opener. Then this happened (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=acyksWJCIQY)

So an Auburn player makes somebody miss, then starts jetting down the sidelines. Of course the ball boy had to run with him.

"But KD, it's fun."

"KD - how old are you again?"

"You need to lighten up, KD."

I get it. But let's face it, if you're an HR pro, you've deal with these types of people before. These are the people who send out the informational email designed to congratulate themselves. These are the people in the background at the game who are mucking it up behind the commentators.

They have to get some visibility. They have to say, "look at me!" "I'm awesome"

Somewhere at Auburn today there's a manager who's responsible for the ball boy. He's pissed that one of his people - who are designed to provide services, not be seen - soaked up the spotlight for himself and the focus wasn't on the player. He's citing safety issues. He's citing conduct issues. The coaching staff is likely pissed that the ball boy made the national media before the player.

And he wants another damn policy to hit the handbook to prevent this in the future.

When your equivalent of the Auburn ball boy happens, don't write another policy for the employee handbook or the ops manual. Just have a really good Professional Conduct Policy in place in your handbook, and fire the ballboy. You'll never have another problem with the glory grab. 85% of your involuntary terms could be handled via a great Professional Conduct Policy.

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War Eagle. And the dude had a running start - he's not as fast as the WR.

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When to Allow Someone to Resign Instead of Firing Them…. Kris Dunn Originally Published on September 8, 2014 Allowing resignations is on my mind based on news out of Atlanta this weekend, where the owner of the Atlanta Hawks (pro hoops) has agreed to sale the team based on the results of an investigation that showed he had made a bunch of race-based comments related to increasing attendance at Hawks games. What's interesting to me about this was that Levenson was allowed to proactively announce his decision rather than dig in and face the rath of the NBA in the aftermath of everything that happened to remove Donald Sterling from owning the Los Angeles Clippers. Which to me, begs a question - when do you allow someone in your company to resign rather than firing them? I think there are a couple of situations where it's probably always in your interest from an Employee Relations perspective to allow the resignation rather than firing, including:

1. When you can prevent highly likely 3rd party action that's going to cost you thousands or tens of thousands to defend, no matter how frivolous.

2. When your organization will react negatively to the person in question being fired, and it's a better PR move to allow the resignation.

3. When you think you know the deal and they know you know the deal,

but you don't want to rip up a team with a gut-wrenching, turn everyone-against-everyone investigation led by - of course - you.

4. When in the back of your mind you know the person in question really

never had a chance based on a mix of business conditions, internal politics and personalities.

What did I miss? Without question, you have to fire people. A lot of times that's good for the organization to see, but at times, you really need to think through whether it might be better to allow certain individuals to resign. Asking for a resignation is part complete honesty, part negotiation and part bully activity. It's an art. Allowing people to resign when they need to go should be the exception rather than the rule, but it's a tool in your arsenal that needs to be used.

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This Industry Sees 1/3 of Its Alumni Develop Cognitive Disorders Kris Dunn Originally Published on September 16, 2014 What would you say as an HR pro if I told you the industry you work in had 1/3 of its employees ultimately develop cognitive issues and disease due to the work, and that those disorders happened at much earlier ages than the general population? You'd say it's time to find a new HR gig, because your industry is getting ready to get shut down. Right? Of course you'd say that. But America is Rome, and as it turns out, the industry being referred to is real - it's pro football (the American version). And the stats I'm referring to? They're being reported not by a third party, but by the National Football League (NFL) itself. Holy crap. The NFL itself is reporting that 1/3 of it's players will have cogntive disorders. Does that mean the real number is even higher? More from the New York Times*:

"The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population. The findings are a result of data prepared by actuaries hired by the league and provided to the United States District Court judge presiding over the settlement between the N.F.L. and 5,000 former players who sued the league, alleging that it had hidden the dangers of concussions from them. “Thus, our assumptions result in prevalence rates by age group that are materially higher than those expected in the general population,” said the report, prepared by the Segal Group for the N.F.L. “Furthermore, the model forecasts that players will develop these diagnoses at notably younger ages than the generation population.”

What type of cognitive disorders/disease you ask? The research says Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer's, advanced dementia, ALS or C.T.E (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that can be identified only in an autopsy). We are Rome. The gladiators are football players. We are the mob. I've got one kid playing youth football at a low level. I get that NFL players have been exposed to it for 20 years, but I'm not sure I can let him play again after seeing this. Malcolm Gladwell is on record as saying that youth football won't exist once technology exists that allows a mobile MRI machine to show parents what happens to the brain on a helmet to helmet hit.

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There are really no health benefits to football. 1/3 of the professional workforce with Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer's, advanced dementia, ALS or C.T.E. - and that's self-reported, it's probably higher. Entertain us. We are Rome. War Eagle.

*  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/sports/football/actuarial-reports-in-nfl-concussion-deal-are-released.html?_r=1

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Right to Play Tim Sackett Originally Published on January 30, 2014

   Football players at the Big Ten University Northwestern are taking steps to launch, for the first time in history, a labor union for college athletes. College athletics is a growing business worth billions of dollars to the higher education institutions that sponsor these activities. It was just a matter of time until either the athletes, current or former, would come up with the idea that they wanted, and needed, a larger voice in the activities in which they participate. Let’s face it, the billions being made are being made on the backs of these young men and women. From the article*:

Backed by the United Steelworkers union, Huma also filed union cards signed by an undisclosed number of Northwestern players with the NLRB — the federal statutory body that recognizes groups that seek collective bargaining rights. “This is about finally giving college athletes a seat at the table,” said Huma, a former UCLA linebacker who created the NCPA as an advocacy group in 2001. “Athletes deserve an equal voice when it comes to their physical, academic and financial protections… “The action we’re taking isn’t because of any mistreatment by Northwestern,” Colter said. “We love Northwestern. The school is just playing by the rules of their governing body, the NCAA. We’re interested in trying to help all players — at USC, Stanford, Oklahoma State, everywhere. It’s about protecting them and future generations to come. “Right now the NCAA is like a dictatorship. No one represents us in negotiations. The only way things are going to change is if players have a union.”

Sounds very legitimate. This is a very hard topic for me to argue for – I hate Unions! With a passion and fire of a thousand suns. I see absolutely no use for labor unions in today’s society. That being said, I think are strong arguments on both sides of this fight. Here are some thoughts I have about the Unionization of College Athletics:

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1. Universities continue to empire build on the blood, sweat, talent, brand, and hard work of these athletes. It’s time that the athletes get a piece of this pie. Yes, I know they get a scholarship and free education. Yes, I know what that means for lifetime earnings. We’re talking about billions of dollars per year.

2. Only a few sports, in a few schools actually make money, and that money is usually used to fund all the other athletic teams. No, Volleyball, Baseball, Tennis, Golf, Wrestling, Swimming, etc. are not revenue generating sports. It take big time Football and Basketball in college athletics to make money. Unionizing College Athletes, could actually hurt more people than it helps.

3. The NCAA has a monopoly on major college athletics and I would love to see it

broken up. Unionization might be the first step to that.

4. We shouldn’t need Unions to keep college athletes safe. That should be the universities responsibility over all else. Aren’t these athletes students first?

5. Players want an equal voice in Academics? I’m sure that’s what they were

thinking when they used that athletic waiver to get into the school they couldn’t have if it wasn’t for athletics.

6. Players want financial protections. Isn’t that what they are getting by getting an

education? The ability to make a living outside of their physical attributes? I always say that I see no use for Unions in today’s society, with one small caveat, if there isn’t legitimate competition and that group is then being taken advantage of. The problem is we aren’t really talking about ‘college athletics’, we are talking about major college Football and Basketball. No one cares that the rower at Cornell isn’t getting extra payments for the big win last weekend. With no competition, the NCAA has put their member schools in a precarious position of making unionization a real threat. *  http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10363430/outside-lines-northwestern-wildcats-football-players-trying-join-labor-union

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I Don’t Want to Work with a Gay Person! Tim Sackett Originally Published on February 17, 2014

   Michael Sam’s announcement last week, becoming the first openly gay NFL player, rekindled some hot workplace topics. His acknowledgement has talk shows buzzing about whether NFL players would be comfortable with a gay teammate in the locker room. I think most people concentrated on one area of the locker room, the showers. Would male NFL players be comfortable showering with a teammate who was homosexual? So far, no NFL players have said they would not be. I wonder what most HR professionals would tell an employee who did come to you and said “I don’t want to work with Tim, he’s gay, and I don’t agree with it.” I’m assuming 99.9% of HR Pros would come up with something like this:

“You know Mr. Employee, we are an inclusive and diverse company, and that means we support all of our employees and don’t judge them based on things like sexual orientation, religion, etc. If you feel uncomfortable working with Tim, maybe this isn’t the place for you to work.”

Seems about right, right? Let’s add some real-life to this scenario. What if, in your work environment, employees had to share a community, locker room type shower environment, as part of the job function. Dirty, chemical filled, environment, employees shower after their shift as a normal course of their daily working environment. Now what would you say? Does it change what you might tell Mr. Employee? You’re lying to yourself if you say it wouldn’t. All of sudden you start trying to make concessions and talking about building individual showers, or asking Tim to shower in a private shower and locker room. You start accommodating, like being ‘Gay’ is a disability.

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What if it is your policy for employees of the same sex, when traveling, to share hotel rooms. This is a common practice with many companies. What do you tell Mr. or Mrs. Employee when they feel uncomfortable sharing a hotel room with a gay employee? Do you make an accommodation for that employee to have his/her own hotel room? What if your top sales person came to you and said they don’t want to work with a gay employee. The sales person who controls and has your largest client in their back pocket – 60% of your current business. Do you give them the same line above? “Go work someplace else!” I’ll be honest with you, you won’t, because executives would have your job for letting that person walk from your company. Oh, I’m sure you’re reading this saying “No, Tim, I would!” That’s great for you. You have to know most people are unwilling to lose their job over something like this. That’s real life HR in the trenches. It seems simple. So what, we have employees that are gay, who cares. Until another employee cares. Then HR has issues. Being an inclusive employer doesn’t mean you just look for the gay employee, it means also you value the beliefs of the person who doesn’t agree with the gay lifestyle for what ever reason that might be. That’s really, really hard to except for many of us. I want to tell the gay-hating employee to go take a walk, but if I do that, I cease being ‘Inclusive’ and begin being ‘exclusive’. It’s HRs job to make it ‘all’ work. So, what would you do with an employee who has a problem working with a gay employee?

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Are You ‘Entitled’ to One Mistake? Tim Sackett Originally Published on May 13, 2014

 Current NBA LA Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, got in a heap of trouble for making racist statements that were caught on tape. The NBA is going to kick this guy out of being an NBA owner, and it’s probably about time, as he has a history of just being racist. He doesn’t want to stop owning the Clippers, so now he’s trying to do all he can to save what he can, and possibly still hang on to the team and not be forced to sell. What is an 80 year old racist NBA owner to do? Why go on CNN with Anderson Cooper! Sterling is doing PR to try and get the public on his side, which is a colossal waste of time, but when you’re a billionaire you do silly stuff. Sterling believes we should all forgive him for making one big stupid mistake. This is his exact quote from the interview:

“Am I entitled to one mistake, am I after 35 years? I mean, I love my league, I love my partners. Am I entitled to one mistake? It’s a terrible mistake, and I’ll never do it again,”

First off, this isn’t Donald Sterling’s first mistake. He has a history of being a bad guy. The one mistake argument doesn’t work well for him. But should it work for anyone? That really is the question for all of this. Should someone, like one of your employees, get a second chance? In the HR world this is almost a daily dilemma that is faced. On one hand you want to say, “Yes!”, shouldn’t everyone get a second chance. But, as HR Pros know, many times, we don’t give employees a second chance. Of course, there are reasons of why you wouldn’t give a second chance. Like the Sterling case, you know of a history of prior bad decisions, coupled with this evidence, you make the call to say, “Nope! No second chance!” This is what makes HR tough. I’m not a big believer in the concept of ‘setting precedent’. Which means basically using a previous example to guide a decision. HR people (notice I didn’t say Pro) love to use this concept to make tough decisions,

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easy. “Well, we fired Jill when she was late three times, so we also have to fire Bill!” No, you don’t! Now, you might have some risk, but unless the cases are completely the same, you’re just trying to take the easy way out! Maybe Jill was late without excuse. Maybe Bill showed evidence of going to extraordinary lengths to make it to work and just couldn’t. Just because you made one decision one way, doesn’t mean you always have to make it that way. That’s uninformed and naive. You get yourself in trouble when you start making decisions differently, for similar circumstances, based on things like gender, race, etc. That’s when you get yourself into problems. But if Bill was a much better performer than Jill, should I give him another chance? That’s the decision I need to make with my business partners. But to go and just say “No” we need to fire Bill, doesn’t make a well informed partner. What about true first time, one mistake, issues? Does someone ‘deserve’ a second chance? I tend to believe it’s all based on context. Mess up a major presentation because you didn’t crunch the data correctly, and we don’t get the sale. Okay, I’ll give you another chance. Forget to turn off the power to a machine when you’re finished, and a coworker gets badly injured because of it. You’re fired. Second chance decisions on contextual. Donald Sterling didn’t mistakenly become a racist in a conversation once. He should be done forever. The NBA’s main ‘employee’ is predominately African American. He’s a racist. I have enough of the context.

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Baltimore Ravens Failed HR 101 Tim Sackett Originally Published on September 9, 2014

  By now everyone has seen former Baltimore Raven running back, Ray Rice, knock out his wife with two punches to the head in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino. My question is, why didn’t anyone in the Baltimore Raven’s organization see this before agreeing to bring him back initially, with only a two game suspension? The Raven’s claim no one in their organization saw the video from inside the elevator until it was leaked to TMZ this week. Do you buy that? I don’t. Twenty years in HR and I would have put a stop to this with one decision. “Ray, you want to be a part of this organization, we need to see what happened from inside the elevator before that happens.” But, I can’t get the tape, the casino would release it, it’s not mine to get, etc. Bullshit. Then, I guess you don’t want to play football very badly. It’s a very simple HR problem. You have an employee (Mr. Rice) who does something you believe to be really bad, but you can’t fully prove it, but you know he can. Make him prove he’s innocent. Make him go get the tape. An innocent person will do that. A guilty person will give you excuses about why they can’t. I truly think that someone on the Ravens knew what was on that tape, but had the casino’s word that it would never get out, and they believed them! Once it got out, yes, they did the right thing. But, it never should have gotten this far. Good organizations get the information they need, or they stay conservative as possible. The video footage was out there. If TMZ can get it, you better believe the Ravens could have gotten it. It’s all about money and pressure. The Ravens have both and decided not to use it to get to the truth. That’s an example of a poorly run organization. I’m guessing this guy will never get a chance to play football again in the NFL. I can’t believe another team would ever take the publicity hit to bring him in, even if he ever gets reinstated by the NFL.

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It begs the question: what if this happened to one of your employees? Yeah, you would fire them, but do you believe they should ever get a chance to work again in their chosen profession? It’s messy. It’s HR. Ray knocked her out. She forgave him and married him. Life is really screwed up. My guess is eventually he’ll have to work somewhere, or he’ll end up in prison, probably where he should have ended up in the first place. I know one thing, the NFL pays better than prison.

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I’m Not White Enough Tim Sackett Originally Published on October 31, 2014

   The world of sports tends to bring up societal issues constantly, and the NFL didn’t disappoint last week when Seattle Seahawk’s quarterback Russell Wilson was accused, anonymously by teammates, as “not being ‘black’ enough”. It’s an issue as HR Pros we face in our own workplace. More on the statements about Wilson from Charles Barkley in the Bleacher Report:

“Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we as black people, we’re never going to be successful not because of you white people but because of other black people,” Barkley said. “When you’re black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people. It’s a dirty, dark secret; I’m glad it’s coming out.” The controversy began with an item from Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman, who said some of Wilson’s Seahawks teammates don’t care for him because “they think he’s too close to the front office,” he “doesn’t always take the blame with teammates for mistakes he makes,” and “some of the black players think Wilson isn’t black enough.” “There is … an element of race that needs to be discussed,” Freeman said of Wilson’s relationship with his teammates. “My feeling on this — and it’s backed up by several interviews with Seahawks players — is that some of the black players think Wilson isn’t black enough. This is an issue that extends outside of football, into African-American society, though it’s gotten better recently. Well-spoken blacks are seen by some other blacks as not completely black. Some of this is at play.”

I want to say that I understand, but I don’t. Never in my entire life have I had someone tell me I ‘wasn’t white enough’. But I have known people who have used the phrase, “Oh, you just wish you were black!” I gotten this because there are so many things I love about African American culture (music, clothing, food, language) and I grew up in an urban area. To be honest, I never wished I was black. I have wished I was taller (I wish I was a baller…), thinner, more athletic, had a better singing voice, etc. I have always figured no one would ever mistake me for anything but white.

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To Wilson’s credit, even he responded with: “I don’t even know what that means”, when he was told people didn’t see him as black enough. According to Wilson’s background he’s mostly African American and Native American. He self-identifies as “mixed-race”. This has rubbed some of his African American teammates wrong. They want him to only identify with his African heritage. In HR we talk ‘inclusion’ all the time. The ability to ‘include’ all. Black, white, old, young, rich, poor, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Jewish. All. But the reality is, there are larger forces at play within many of the demographics we are trying to include, and most we’ll never fully understand. In the end, we just can’t take for granted that one group of people are going to do what’s best for another group, just because they identify with that group. Culture and engagement are complex, living things. You do things because you ‘think’ they will work, but they do the opposite. What are you supposed to do? Try to rise above it, when you can. Deal with it directly, when you have to. Know your own biases and assumptions.

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Special NBA Summer League Section

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NBA Summer League Part 1 – The Relative Value of Talent Steve Boese Originally Published on July 21, 2014

I'm just back from a great 8 Man Rotation trip to Las Vegas to take in a few days of the NBA's annual Summer League and tournament that features 24 teams of rookies, less experienced veterans, and guys trying either to hang on to their NBA dreams just a bit longer, or ones trying to crack that elite 450 or so of players that get to call themselves NBA ballers. It was a super fun trip with the boys, and I will have more on some of the really interesting things we saw, heard, and talked about during the trip, as well as a amusing in a watching a car accident kind of way, HR Happy Hour Show and Podcast* I recorded with the 8 Man crew while having cheeseburgers and beers. In the run up to Summer League, much of the talk around NBA circles was centered around free agent player signings and player movement in general. Most notably, the league's best player LeBron James made the biggest news when he signed to return to his original NBA team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, which set off a chain of events including his former teammate Chris Bosh re-signing with the Miami Heat for a massive, 5 years and $118M. This Bosh contract led to tons of internet chatter about whether or not in the wake of losing James, that Miami was indeed overpaying to keep Bosh, their next most important player from the last four years, to maintain some semblance of competitiveness in the near term. The problem with most of the 'Miami overpaid for Bosh' takes, (and there are plenty of them), is that they usually fail to address the context in which the Bosh contract was given, and the set of circumstances that make Miami's decision to pay Bosh near the maximum amount allowed by the NBA's collective bargaining agreement with the Player's Association. This contextual factors, also apply quite often to the day-to-day decisions that HR/Talent pros have to make every day when tackling compensation issues - either

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offers to candidates, counter-offers, (probably a bad idea to even try them, but still), and the nuts and bolts of annual compensation package decisions for existing employees. In both cases, these are the kinds of questions that HR pros and NBA GMs need to think about, plus I will hit you with some of the rationale behind the Bosh decision from which (hopefully) you'll see some parallels to your comp-related challenges. What's the 'right' salary? What, in the classic 'perfect information' kind of economy that academics like to talk about, would be the 'correct' salary' for Bosh? This is close to the market rate, but not exactly the same, as the 'market' for any NBA player, as well as for that Ruby on Rails developer you can't find, is never truly perfect. What would the market value (and actually pay) for his/her role, skills, and ability to contribute to an organization? This is the classic, 'What did the last 3-5 players similar as we can find to Bosh actually get paid in their last contracts?' question. These numbers create an interesting set of data points that may or may not be relevant to your team. If that last team that signed a 17 and 10 guy like Bosh to an insane contract, does that mean necessarily that you should? Or maybe another team got a relative bargain for a different player (like a Tim Duncan), who at this point in his career is more concerned about winning titles than maximizing his personal earnings, and thus accepted a 'discount' on his deal. Don't think that applies to you? I bet you have lots of employees that turn down 10-20% bumps in salary from competing firms because their 'transaction costs' (moving, pulling kids out of school, learning a new corporate political game, etc.), seems too steep. These employees are probably already giving you the home team discount like we hear about in the NBA. Bottom line, the 'market' doesn't represent you, or anyone other specific firm for that matter. It is just more data. What kind of compensation would this person be likely to get from a specific competitor that might be interested in their services? This piece of 'market' data is much more interesting (and valuable). In the NBA GMs often have to factor in what might happen if a given player like Bosh were to end up on a specific rival team, and how that move might impact competitive balance (and chances to win). Overpaying to keep a player away from a specific rival can happen, and might be one of the few times in the NBA, (and possibly your business too), that tossing money at a problem makes sense from a business standpoint. This takes more insight and effort than simply looking at the 'market' rate, and knowing the compensation and business strategies of your rivals. What is this person worth to his/her current company or team? This is the flip side of the last question - what specific skills, capabilities and knowledge of company-specific operations, products, culture, politics, etc. does the person have that

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are uniquely relevant to your organization, and need to be factored in to the discussion. With James leaving the Heat, Bosh now assumes the role of the team's #1 star, and the Heat elected to offer him a contract reflective of what #1 stars in the NBA are making. He also knows the city, the coaching staff, the other players on the club, etc. There aren't any 'transaction costs' with retaining Bosh, and there is some value in that. There has been a fair amount of research that suggests that in many fields that employee performance degrades when switching organizations. The amount and importance of local, situational understanding of people, process, and culture can provide employees a performance boost that is immediately lost when they jump to a new organization. Simply put, Bosh was probably 'worth' more to the Heat than to many other teams in the league, and while seeming to overpay him, the Heat might have made the smart move for their own team. With Bosh, and with compensation decisions for just about every other important contributor, context matters. *http://hrhappyhour.net/?p=253

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Stuff the Capitalist (aka KD) Likes – The NBA Summer League… Kris Dunn Originally Published on July 18, 2014

Who am I? Who cares? Good questions. It's my site, so I'm going to tap into a Friday once in a awhile by telling you more about who I am - via a "Stuff I Like" series. Nothing too serious, just exploring the micro-niche that resides at the base of all of our lives. Potshots encouraged in the comments. Talent. You think you know it when you see it. Maybe. Probably not. The difficulty of evaluating talent (along with a big preference for hoops) is why I'm in Vegas today, watching the NBA Summer League. 24 NBA franchises put a team in, with all the teams basically comprised of the following:

-2 draft picks from this year. -3 guys that did time on the end of the bench last season. -5 guys that have never played in the NBA, but are still among the top 1000 players in

the world. They're just not good enough for the show (the NBA). That last piece is really why I've been here 3 times on my own dime. Those guys are among the most talented you'll find, and they'd throw a tourist off the Bellagio for a contract in the league. They scratch. They claw. They're trying to do what it takes. The NBA's just like you and I - they miss on talent all the time. I'm here to watch the drama as number 500-1000 in the world try and find a way to picked up by a team. Here's another reason you have to love this scene. Early this week, a player got ejected after getting shoved to the ground, then turning to the referee and saying, "Really M*********er". See the story here*. Pressure. Queen wrote about it. Vanilla Ice ripped it off. I'm in Vegas to see how people who have been working there whole lives toward one goal react when it looks like their goal may be out of reach.

• http://deadspin.com/ivan-johnson-gets-ejected-from-summer-league-game-for-s-1606275391

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My Weekend with the 8-Man Rotation (Featuring How Pro Hoops Misses On Talent – Just Like You)… Kris Dunn Originally Published on July 21, 2014

Went to Vegas last weekend with a few bloggers of note - Steve Boese, Lance Haun and Matt Stollak. Our destination had a nerd quality to it - The NBA Summer League, where professional basketball hopefuls convene to prove they have what it takes to be one of 450 players that play in the best hoops league in the world. Now - you should know that only about 20% of the players who attend and play in the Vegas Summer League are actual NBA players - the rest are draft choices and free agents who are scrapping and doing whatever it takes to impress the teams. Why go to this event? First, we like hoops. More importantly, I go because there's a huge morality play on talent going on at the Summer League. If NBA veterans are the best 450 players in the world, what we saw is 451-1000, and the differences are pretty small between spots 350 to 450 in the NBA and the better players in the summer league. Who decides? What makes the difference between making a NBA roster and going to Turdistan to play next winter? As it turns out, the NBA's probably no better at evaluating talent than the rest of us - and there's a lesson in that. He's the story of the weekend as told through my Instagram account Snapshot of Vegas #1 - It All Looks Serene From 2,000 Feet You have a to have a great picture of Vegas in any series like this, right? Well, considering the fact there were two shootings within a half mile of the Trump hotel (where most of us stayed) during our 3 days in Vegas, the safest place to view Vegas is from up high. Steve Boese got the best picture flying out on Sunday. He had to get up and get to the airport at 3:45 am to get it. I was in bed at the Trump when Steve, the hardest working man in HR Tech, snapped this beauty. Thanks SFB!

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Snapshot from Vegas #2 - I'm going with the Trendy Choice and Hiring Dante Exum (or someone from Google) The first thing you need to know about how the NBA evaluates talent is that it wants potential over past performance. Potential means that you have a chance to uncover the next Kevin Garnett. Past performance means that you're drafting proven college stars. The problem with drafting college stars is that after you've played for a couple of years in college, the NBA has had a chance to pick over your game and decide what it doesn't like - as opposed to what it does. So college stars are undervalued in the NBA draft. Talent that no one has really had a chance to see gets overvalued, because again, the NBA wants the home run when it comes to talent - not the solid hire. With that, meet Dante Exum below. Dante Exum was drafted 5th overall by the Utah Jazz. He looks like an NBA player, but there's just one little issue - no one has really seen him play much. He played in one international tourney and then returned to Austrailia. He never played in the US. He got drafted that high on potential alone, and because no one ever had a chance to tear him down via the college evaluation process.

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Snapshot from Vegas #3 - G-Rondo Was Last Year's Dante Exum, and It Doesn't Feel As Great This Year Pictured below is Dennis Schroder, a 20 year old drafted in 2013 by the Atlanta Hawks. Dennis is from Germany and was drafted in the first round by the Hawks based largely on a single positive performance in a US tourney/camp. He never played college basketball in the USA. We saw him last year and nicknamed him "G-Rondo" because he's a miniature version of Rajon Rondo of the Celtics.

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G-Rondo is what Dante Exum looks like in year two when you're not sure the pick (or hire in your case) is going to work out. He was in the Hawks playing rotation last season until he famously punched a Kings player named Boogie Cousins in the nuts coming off a screen. The new Hawks management, which is basically a bunch of hires from the Spurs and professional in nature, froze him on the bench for the rest of the season. I love the way he plays, but the Hawks have figured out he can't shoot, which is a problem in the NBA. He's got 2 years to figure it out (length of rookie contract). Snapshot of Vegas #4 - It's 8pm on a Friday Night in Vegas - Where Are You? It's 8pm in Vegas on a Friday night, last loser's bracket game of NBA summer league. Guess who the guy at the top of the gym is? Danny Ferry, Hawks GM, Duke legend, former 1st overall pick. Grinding. Looking for a nugget...

Ferry’s the bald one in a black shirt I like Ferry. I work in Atlanta a lot, and he's basically trying to create a version of the Spurs organization in the ATL. The NBA Summer League is a huge social scene for the executives and people who work for the teams, and you can tell some things about the way people carry themselves. The Hawks didn't even play on Friday, yet here he is, trying to be alone and watch some meaningless game to see if there's a nugget/undervalued asset he can steal from someone.

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Ferry drafted Dennis Schroder, by the way. So it's good to see him looking for value. Snapshot of Vegas #5 - Four Years in College? That Guy Has to Suck This picture below is Adrian Payne, recently drafted rookie of the Atlanta Hawks we watched a couple of times at the NBA Summer League. He stayed at Michigan State for 4 years and saw his draft stock stall or fall because that's what the talent system in the NBA does. If he stays healthy, he'll have a better career than at least half of those drafted before him, most of who played 1 year in college. He can shoot the 3, has size (6'10") and seems to get it in all aspects. He was drafted in basically the same position as G-Rondo. Hmmm. Maybe that's Ferry creating a learning organization.

Snapshot of Vegas #6 - We All Hate The New Process Change is hard for everyone. Even in the NBA.

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Two of the Four Knicks pictured here are in the wrong spots. In a league famous for isolation 1-on-1s, the Knicks hired coaching legend Phil Jackson, who believes in an offensive system called The Triangle. This picture is a summary of that transition. If you look closely, you can see the big guy in the middle has his palms up in classic "what the f are you doing?" mode. Except he's in the wrong position, not the guy he's looking at. Change is hard. Fingers are pointed. The Triangle emphasizes spacing, reads and ball movement. In other words, they're changing their whole culture. It takes time... For more on the triangle, click here. Best way to get invited to the Knicks' training camp out of the Summer League - show you're smart enough to run this offense and be willing to do it. Unfortunately, most of the players pictured haven't grown up in a system to prepare them for what they experienced with the Knicks in Vegas. Snapshot of Vegas #7 - Sometimes Nailing "Black Hole Sun" Isn't Enough All hoops and no play makes KD a dull boy. Thanks to Matt Stollak, we were able to score great seats to Soundgarden/Nine Inch Nails on Saturday night.

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I'm a huge Soundgarden fan. But they didn't win the contest for best performance Saturday night. Nine Inch Nails secured the victory by understanding that the performance is as important as the music. More on that in a post later…

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YEAR-END PERFORMANCE REVIEW: The Outcast, the German, and the Guy with a Heart Condition…. Kris Dunn Originally Published on December 11, 2014 Some of you are aware - some painfully aware - that fellow HR bloggers of note - Steve Boese, Lance Haun and Matt Stollak and I take an annual pilgrimage to the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas every year. Our destination has a nerd quality to it, where professional basketball hopefuls convene to prove they have what it takes to be one of 450 players that play in the best hoops league in the world. I always do a review via Instagram and give my opinion in July about what's going to happen, so I thought it would make sense to do a year-end performance review on 3 players, executives and organizations in the NBA that I featured earlier this year. View my original writing in July as a mid-year check in, and my additional comments as the formal performance review. You'll see I was wrong more than I was right, which is alarming, but also sounds about right. Ready? Let's do this.

Earlier Performance Check-In from Vegas in July - G-Rondo Was Last Year's Dante Exum, and It Doesn't Feel As Great This Year

What I Said Then- Pictured above is Dennis Schroder, a 20 year old drafted in 2013 by the Atlanta Hawks. Dennis is from Germany and was drafted in the first round by the Hawks based largely on a single positive performance in a US tourney/camp. He never played college basketball in the USA. We saw him last year and nicknamed him "G-Rondo" because he's a minuture version of Rajon Rondo of the Celtics.

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G-Rondo is what Dante Exum looks like in year two when you're not sure the pick (or hire in your case) is going to work out. He was in the Hawks playing rotation last season until he famously punched a Kings player named Boogie Cousins in the nuts coming off a screen. The new Hawks management, which is basically a bunch of hires from the Spurs and professional in nature, froze him on the bench for the rest of the season. I love the way he plays, but the Hawks have figured out he can't shoot, which is a problem in the NBA. He's got 2 years to figure it out (length of rookie contract).

Today's Performance Review - MEETS EXPECTATIONS - Dennis, you have recovered nicely. You've worked your way into the Hawks rotation, learned to move the ball, acted like your normal cat-like self and have controlled yourself - you haven't punched a single guy in the nuts all year long. Well done. You're so hot that you even got featured by Grantland, a rare accomplishment for someone coming off the bench.*

Earlier Performance Check-In from Vegas in July - It's 8pm on a Friday Night in Vegas - Where Are You? (Danny Ferry)

What I Said Then - It's 8pm in Vegas on a Friday night, last loser's bracket game of NBA summer league. Guess who the guy at the top of the gym is? Danny Ferry, Hawks GM, Duke legend, former 1st overall pick. Grinding. Looking for a nugget...

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I like Ferry. I work in Atlanta a lot, and he's basically trying to create a version of the Spurs organization in the ATL. The NBA Summer League is a huge social scene for the executives and people who work for the teams, and you can tell some things about the way people carry themselves. The Hawks didn't even play on Friday, yet here he is, trying to be alone and watch some meaningless game to see if there's a nugget/undervalued asset he can steal from someone. Ferry drafted Dennis Schroder, by the way. So it's good to see him looking for value.

Performance Review - DOES NOT MEET EXPECTATIONS - Danny, Danny, Danny. You built this team that's sitting in 2nd or 3rd place in their conference without a superstar. Well done. But it matters how you got the results. You famously got caught on tape making comments that could easily be viewed as racist, and as a result, you're on paid leave. Where are you? I haven't seen you around the office for a bit. We love what you did, but there's no way you an meet expectations given the circumstances. Sad. Are you on a beach or watching high school games to feed your basketball jones? I hope the latter.

Earlier Performance Check-In from Vegas in July - Four Years in College? That Guy Has to Suck (Adrian Payne)

What I Said Then - This picture above is Adrian Payne, recently drafted rookie of the Atlanta Hawks we watched a couple of times at the NBA Summer League. He stayed at Michigan State for 4 years and saw his draft stock stall or fall because that's what the talent system in the NBA does. If he stays healthy, he'll have a better career than at least half of those drafted before him, most of whom played 1 year in college.

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He can shoot the 3, has size (6'10") and seems to get it in all aspects. He was drafted in basically the same position as G-Rondo. Hmmm. Maybe that's Ferry creating a learning organization.

Performance Review - DOES NOT MEET EXPECTATIONS - Dude, our team is built for you - we love to space the floor and jack up 3's. Yet you haven't seen the court yet this season. I'm still high on you, but you've got work to do. That's it. Be sure to include "jack up 3's" in at least one performance review you do this month. *http://grantland.com/the-triangle/could-dennis-schroder-evolve-into-atlantas-answer/

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Finding “A” Talent is Overrated Lance Haun Originally Published on July 23, 2014 I just got back from NBA Summer League in Las Vegas. For those not in the know, it’s a time when rookies and those looking to make a team’s 15-man roster come to play for almost two weeks in scrimmages. The event is small and fairly inside. It was my second year going with the guys from The 8 Man Rotation. The biggest names in the NBA aren’t there. There was no LeBron James. Nor was there Kevin Durant. Instead, you had rookies getting their first taste of team action and free agents and walk on’s looking for a shot at riding the end of the bench (or just making the roster) because there is usually better money in trying to make it work in the NBA than going overseas. The basketball can be ugly at times and while these are — by any objective measure — some of the best basketball players in the world, most of them are not the top players in the league and a vast majority won’t see significant time as even a starter. It got me thinking a lot about this pursuit for top talent. Everybody wants “A” players. Any team in the league would’ve welcomed James onto their team this offseason (yes, even the Spurs). With the collective bargaining agreement with the NBA Players Association in place, any team that signs him gets a great deal. There are only a handful of players like him ever, much less playing at any given time. For the 26-28 teams a year that can’t snag a once a decade player like James or Durant, they figure out ways to remain competitive. Most teams have a great player or two, a few good ones, and then a long tail of flawed players in one way or another. You take a look at the San Antonio Spurs and you see that method. Tim Duncan may be the best power forward to play the game but he wasn’t the best power forward this year. You see a lot of players who are great to good to flawed, in one way or another. You look at Miami’s successful title runs and see the same line of players. Some great. Some not-so-great. Identifying the top players in the NBA is easy. If you have the salary and they have the desire to join your team, you make it happen. Convincing them to come to your team over the 29 other options? I’ll give you that. But no team wins on top talent alone. The Spurs had nine guys who averaged at least 19 minutes game over the full season last year. There are probably a few names a casual fan wouldn’t recognize in that list too: Belinelli, Splitter, Diaw, and Mills. These aren’t the top players in the league. They are good role players, with some great strengths and some significant weaknesses. And they were available within the budget they had to work with.

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While everyone will talk about the stars in the NBA, especially when it comes to winning a championship, what it really comes down to is who can step up from your supporting cast. Even the best and most fit players need to spend time off the court. Who can give you those 10-15 minutes off the bench every night and keep you in a tight game in Memphis on a Tuesday night in January? The difference between good teams and great teams is that talent identification didn’t end with just figuring out who can be your “A” talent. They went down the line and looked at who best fit in “B” or even “C” roles on the team. Every team has a budget they need to stay in and you can’t fit more than two or three top paid players on your team. With five guys as starters and at least three regular rotation players, that means every team out there is playing a lot of non-top talent night after night. You won’t see their highlights on SportsCenter. Their contribution is critical, though. And smart teams have spent time and significant money finding better ways to identify who will be the role players and backup talent needed to win. When you’re talking about the “War for Talent” and hunting purple squirrels, just remember one thing: successful hiring is more than just finding the best talent, it’s about finding the right talent, for the right price, that fits with the current skill set of the organization. Anybody should be able to identify the best and if you have the budget to afford hiring the best in every position, you are welcome to try. Smart teams make strategic moves to find the right A, B, and C talent to fill a roster without going over their cap. The best ones can spot B and C talent and knows where they fit in. Let your competitors figure out where they can find a LeBron James of your industry, while you figure out how to fill your team with solid contributors who can make a difference at the right price.

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Quick Lessons Learned from the 2014 #NBASummerLeague Matthew Stollak Originally Published on July 23, 2014

           I'm back from the now annual trip to the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas with most of the 8 Man Rotation (Steve Boese, Kris Dunn, Lance Haun). The trip was filled with good food, conversation, music (in the form of Soundgarden and Nine Inch Nails in concert) and, of course, basketball. So, what can be gleaned from a 3 day trip watching exhibition basketball? "You'll be pleased" is the new "Fine." Over burgers at Bobby Flay's Burger Palace, discussion turned to reference checks and performance reviews. A little less than two years ago, K.D. wrote that "neutral is the new negative,*" meaning that if the person giving the reference is only sharing basic info, the candidate is not likely to be a star at your organization. Further, like "awesome," "fine" has become overused and lost any authenticity when it comes to praise. If a person says an applicant or performer is "fine," are you buying that he or she is of quality? So, what did the group settle on as an authentic phrase of praise? "You'll be pleased." For example, to Atlanta Hawks superfan K.D., "You'll be pleased with 1st round draft pick from Michigan State, Adriean Payne." EVERYONE is looking to make an impression Not only are players looking to become one of the chosen 450 to make an NBA roster, coaches are trying to move up the ranks, and refs are trying to make the big show. But, even behind the scenes, moves are trying to be made. You have the overenthusiastic announcer trying to show off his chops, "Dennis Horner from the Corner!" "P.J. Hairston with the flush!"

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You also had the singer of the national anthem. Who was he? Not sure. Did he do a competent job? Yes. Was he paid? Probably not. But, like the HR blogger being told that writing on a blog will give him/her valuable "exposure," I'm positive someone somewhere gave the singer advice that such a performance will lead to gigs down the road. EVERYONE thinks they know talent Rodney Hood, formerly of Duke, and now part of the Utah Jazz...not a fan. Here are his stats for the 5 summer league games he played: Game 1: 3-of-13 from the floor, 1-of-10 from 3, nine points Game 2: 11-of-16 from the floor, 7-of-10 from 3, 29 points Game 3: 1-of-9 from the floor, 0-of-2 from 3, three points Game 4: 7-of-11 from the floor, 1-of-3 from 3, 19 points Game 5: 2-of-8 from the floor, 1-of-3 from 3, seven points Needless to say, I pointed out his shortcomings rather loudly during his mediocre game 5 performance. Who took exception? The trio of 10-year-old boys in front of me who knew he was the best player on the court. *http://www.hrcapitalist.com/2012/08/reference-checks-neutral-is-the-new-negative.html

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About the Authors STEVE BOESE Steve is a Co-Chair of Human Resource Executive Magazine’s HR Technology Conference, the leading global event for the HR Technology Industry, and a Technology Editor for LRP Publications. Essentially, Steve is some kind of a big shot. Steve is also a leading HR blogger and hosts the “HR Happy Hour Show” a popular internet radio program and podcast dedicated to opening the lines of communication among HR thought leaders, practitioners and service providers in the global human resources field. He is a frequent speaker at national and regional HR industry events, and has even been invited back to some of them. Steve’s blog was selected as the number one Talent Management Blog by the editors of the Fistful of Talent in February 2010. Steve is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and resides in Rochester, NY. Tweet him @steveboese KRIS DUNN Kris Dunn is Chief Human Resources Officer at Kinetix and a blogger at The HR Capitalist, and the Founder and Executive Editor of Fistful of Talent. That makes him a career VP of HR, a blogger, a dad and a hoops junkie, the order of which changes based on his mood. He currently resides in Birmingham, AL. Tweet him @kris_dunn. LANCE HAUN Lance Haun is Editor at the Starr Conspiracy and contributor to TLNT.com and ERE.net. Before writing about HR and recruiting full-time, he was an HR pro for seven years. You can find him on his blog at lancehaun.com or on Twitter as @thelance TIM SACKETT Tim Sackett, SPHR, is the President of HRU Technical Resources in Lansing, MI. 20+ years of human resources leadership experience, across multiple industries, on both the corporate and agency side – so he gets both sides of the desk. When he’s not working or blogging at The Tim Sackett Project – he’s probably coaching basketball or baseball for one of his three sons. He currently resides in Dewitt, MI. Tweet him @TimSackett.

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MATTHEW STOLLAK Matthew Stollak, Ph.D., SPHR, is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Saint Norbert College. He also serves as chapter advisor for the Saint Norbert College Student SHRM Chapter, and blogs at True Faith HR. Matt is a graduate of Michigan State University, Brandeis University, and the University of Illinois. He currently resides in Green Bay, WI. Tweet him @akaBruno

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Steve Boese's HR Technology HR Technology, Teaching, and a little Barbecue

THE TIM SACKETT PROJECT HR Pro, Dad, Backup Point Guard on my over 40 men's team

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