Have You Become Too Reliant on Star Performers?

Source: NBA.com

Tom Taiyi Yan and Elad Sherf wrote a brief article this week in the Wall Street Journal describing their fascinating new research regarding team over-reliance on superstars.  They cite a terrific study of National Basketball Association players.  Here's an excerpt:

To investigate how team dynamics worked, we started by looking outside the world of business—at basketball. In our study, published in Organization Science, we examined competitive teams in the National Basketball Association across more than 60,000 games, spanning 34 years. Leveraging motion-tracking-camera data, we examined how teams’ passing patterns and shot distributions changed after wins and losses.

We found that after winning, teams became more reliant on their star players. Teams passed the ball about 6% more to the stars, and their shot distribution skewed 15% more toward the big performers. Although doubling down is intuitive (“We want to exploit what worked before"), it ended up decreasing teams’ chances of winning the next game. The increased reliance on the star players made teams more predictable to the next opponent and easier to defend—and therefore less likely to win the game.

This tendency to stick with stars doesn’t just hold true in competitive sports. All teams—particularly ones in the business world—tend to double down on what has worked. And it is often a bad idea.

How You Handle Low Performers Can Hurt Morale and Drive Away Your Best People

I recently re-read a post from The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) about a study conducting by Eagle Hill Consulting.  The post focuses on the highly detrimental impact of not acting to address low performers in your workplace. Here's an excerpt from the SHRM blog post:

These findings, drawn from a survey of more than 1,700 professionals from across the private, nonprofit and government sectors, are detailed in a research report by Arlington, Va.-based Eagle Hill Consulting, Are Low-Performers Destroying Your Culture and Driving Away Your Best Employees? The researchers found that:

• Low-performers hurt morale in the workplace and increase the workload for others. When asked to pick the greatest problems created by low-performers, the top concern was that they reduce overall workplace morale (cited by 68 percent of respondents). Forty-four percent said that low-performers increase the work burden on high-performers.
• Low-performers stifle innovation and contribute to a standard of mediocrity. Some 54 percent said that low-performers contribute to a lack of initiative and motivation, resulting in a work culture where mediocrity is accepted.

Addressing low performance does not mean you have to fire people.  It does mean you have try to understand WHY certain individuals are not performing to expectations.  What are the causes? Don't assume you know.   Then, you must provide concrete, actionable feedback to people who are not achieving their goals.  It means putting in place a specific plan for coaching and developing low performers.  Finally, it means having key milestones at which you can check in on the performance of these individuals, measure progress or lack thereof, and take additional steps to address performance below expectations.  Failing to have the hard conversations will not only harm the organization's effectiveness, it will lead to a deterioration in employee morale.  Ultimately, it might lead to the departure of your best employees, who become frustrated and upset with the situation. 

A Downside to Rock Star Employees

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Sue Schellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal published a column this week titled, "The Downside of Carrying the Most Weight at Work." She describes too much dependence on rock star employees can be a bad thing. Schellenarger points to an interesting study by Ning Li and his colleagues published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The article is titled, "Achieving more with less: Extra milers’ behavioral influences in teams." In that study, Li and his colleagues find that these team rock stars can have a powerful positive influence on team effeciveness. The scholars argue that extra milers enhance a team's "monitoring and backup processes" - thereby enhancing team effectiveness. Li and his colleagues explain:

A high quality team monitoring and backup process involves both monitoring and backup. The monitoring aspect of the process is about developing acceptable behavioral standards and detecting deviations from this standard. The backup aspect, on the other hand, refers to engaging in cooperative behaviors, such as picking up slack, fixing errors and supporting each other. 

Schellenbarger reports, though, that Li's forthcoming publication will highlight a potential negative influence of rock stars. It has to do with the dependency that can form within a team, and how that may adversely affect individual members' creativity. She writes,

Stars who do creative work, however, tend to stifle individual co-workers, discouraging them from developing their own insights, he found in a new study of 94 sales teams and 84 R&D teams set for publication soon. “You somehow create a dependency, so that others rely on you,” says Dr. Li, an associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Iowa.

Do CEOs Matter More Today Than In Decades Past?

Do CEOs matter more today than in decades past?  A new paper by Timothy Quigley and Donald Hambrick suggests that they do.  According to this HBR blog post by Walter Frick, "The new paper confirms a pattern discovered by previous research: the CEO effect seems to be increasing over time. In other words, the CEO of a company is a more significant predictor of that company’s performance than at any time since the question has been measured, starting in the mid-twentieth century."  The scholars argue that perhaps the big strategic choices made by CEOs matter more as industries, and the economy as a whole, have become much more dynamic.   However, the paper cannot identify the main cause of this enhanced CEO effect, nor can it rule out any particular explanations.  It simply has documented this substantial increase in CEO impact. 

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