Monday we considered the idea that a team can have too much talent, i.e., stars.

Bosses claim they hire stars because they are the rocket that drives a team further, faster.

I think many do it because they are lazy.

As Wally Bock puts it, “We live in a world of microwavable answers and quick fixes” — and bosses see stars as quick fixes.

Which, if you will excuse the bluntness, is really stupid for two reasons.

• Stars are often a product of the culture and don’t necessarily transplant well.
• Stars can cost you the rest of the team.

The so-called slow fix takes more effort, but provides far greater ROI.

And you, personally, do much better, and have more fun, with fewer regrets, building your own team of stars — usually the only things lacking in this approach are egos, prima donnas and drama.

A slightly offbeat story illustrates the kind of stars that can result­­­.

Faculty from Bard College coach a debate team from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security lockup.

They recently beat the national and world champion Harvard team. They have also beaten the University of Vermont and West Point teams.

They are home-grown stars, since it’s doubtful that a world-class team of debaters were all incarcerated at the same facility.

The point of all this is that if you want to be known as a great boss, then be the coach who builds an extraordinary team, as opposed to being the one who hires shooting stars.

Flickr image credit: Michael Pollack

Stars. Everyone wants to hire stars.

Sports teams buy them for astronomical salaries.

Companies use salaries, stock, sign-on bonuses and anything else they can.

Beyond bragging rights, stars are supposed to goose innovation, boost productivity and all kinds of good stuff.

But do they?

In 2010 the Miami Heat bought LeBron James and Chris Bosh to add to the triple the star power of Dwayne Wade — and had a terrible season.

What happened?

Stars want to be stars.

When individual interests take precedence over what is best for the collective, group performance declines. It no longer functions as a cohesive whole. (…) For chickens [another example], businessmen, and basketball players alike, high-levels of performance comes with high-levels of competitive spirit. These status conflicts drive performance down.

Down, not up.

You can still hire brilliant individual contributors if you are willing to put in the time and effort to make them a team.

It takes work, because they won’t become one left to their own devices.

Just remember that all teams aren’t created equal, so be sure your team plays basketball and not baseball.

Bill Simmons referred to baseball as “an individual sport masquerading as a team sport.”

President Barack Obama referred to basketball as “the quintessential team sport”

Flickr image credit: Kentucky National Guard

When hiring ask yourself what’s more important?

Who they are or what they know?

Education or experience?

In my eyes, personality always wins over book smarts. Company knowledge and job-specific skills can be learned, but you can’t train a personality.

Expert qualifications or skilled generalist?

Time and time again I’ve seen people with a background of broad-ranging employment and skills hired for a job where they don’t necessarily tick the specialist criteria boxes, but become incredibly successful by offering a new level of understanding to the role.

Do you hire what you know or what you don’t.

Spanx’s CEO Sara Blakely once said to me: “The smartest thing I ever did in the early days was to hire my weaknesses.” I couldn’t agree more. I can attribute a lot of my success in business to hiring people who had the skills I lacked.

Is their passion/purpose focused on your vision or to learn enough to focus on their own?

Purpose is no longer a buzzword. It’s a must-have. Passion and purpose will keep people focused on the job at hand, and ultimately separate the successful from the unsuccessful.

Do you grab available talent or hold out for the right person?

While it may seem like a desperate rush to get somebody through the door to help carry the load, it is worth being patient to find the right person, rather than unbalancing the team.

So the next time you find yourself salivating over a programmer who can crush Ruby, but thinks he is a god, think like Richard Branson, before doing “whatever it takes” to hire him.

Flickr image credit: Get Everwise

Did you know there is a luxury condo called Riverside South in New York City that has separate doors for those who pay market rate and those who rent the planning-mandated affordable units?

Not only separate doors, but a separate affordable wing—heaven forbid the wealthy should have to share an elevator with “them.”

Some bosses run their organizations the same way.

The “stars” are lavished with money, stock, perks, visibility and praise, while the rest are ignored or worse, treated as disposable.

There’s an old saying that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people, but that doesn’t hold true for any company.

If you don’t believe me create a fantasy company with just 10% of your staff and see how far you get.

If you choose to split your company into “stars” and “the rest” then you probably should consider separate entrances like Riverside South, because you will be creating separate accommodations even if they share a desk.

Dividing a company into “stars” and “the rest” was a prescription for failure.

People aren’t stupid; they know when they’re being treated like second class and will usually vote with their feet.

Flickr image credit: Adam Conlon

You can learn a lot from the Chrysler turnaround and here’s one of the most important points.

Fixing the product isn’t enough.

Developing recruiting and retention of knowledge workers isn’t enough.

Fixing basic problems that affect lower-level workers is imperative.

It took five years, starting in 2009 and when Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne finally owned Chrysler (free registration required) the situation in the manufacturing areas was worse than expected.

Marchionne is a smart guy; he knew that no matter how many billions were spent on design and other high-level needs Chrysler wouldn’t turn around without the full support of the blue-collar workforce.

Marchionne said the company also made sure to spend money on the parts of the plant that touched employees more personally — bathrooms, lunchrooms, parking lots and reception areas. Why?

“The state of disrepair, of neglect of the work environment that these people were offered to make a high-quality product that was supposed to compete internationally with the best of the best, right?” You can’t do that when you can’t walk into the bathroom at one of the plants because they’re just not presentable.” Along with retooling and good leadership decisions, he said, the success of Chrysler “was due to the unwavering commitment of a group of people who make up the blue-collar force of Chrysler.”

A lot of people believe that union employees don’t care. Therefore, because it’s hard to get rid of them it doesn’t matter how you treat them.

And it’s not just in unionized areas.

Wall Street is famous for treating its pink-collar and back room employees, including IT, poorly.

Tech companies do everything for so-called stars, while treating the rest as replaceable ciphers.

The bottom line is that bosses who treat any part of their team as replaceable is, at best, short-sighted and, at worst, plain stupid.
Flickr image credit: Monikah Wiseman

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

I hear a lot of bull disguised as best practice from founders (and other bosses) regarding hiring and management.

• We only hire stars.
• All our people are self-starters.
• Our people are self-managing.
• We’re not into hand-holding here.

And all forms of variations on the theme.

The reason it’s bull is that most people prefer to be part of a cohesive team (think family)—with the exception of those who are out for themselves and their own glory.

The smartest founders know that it’s the power of the team that confers long-term success.

Christopher W. Cabrera, founder, president and CEO of nine-year-old Xactly is a good example.

He has a 300 person workforce, mostly in their early thirties, which means most were in their twenties when hired.

He uses a prominently displayed rubber band ball to drive home how the company works.

Every month we have an all-hands meeting where every new employee puts their rubber band on the ball. Rubber bands come in all different sizes, shapes and color. Together, when they’re combined, they take on a whole new set of properties and the ball can be bounced or thrown where an individual rubber band can’t. So our motto is, “That’s how we roll.” Somewhere in that ball is my own rubber band. There is no single band in there that’s more important than any other. It’s the collective that counts. Our employees are part of something bigger and we’re trying to build something great.

Take note: no stars.

Hall of Famer and current SMU (turnaround) basketball Coach Larry Brown puts it this way,

“They all want to be coached. They all want to get better. They all want somebody who cares about them.”

Which pretty well sums it up.

A place to make a difference and a boss that gives a damn.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Do you really need to hire stars?

Can a manager build a winning team with other teams’ castoffs?

Before you say no take a look at the Phoenix Suns.

“By making feature artists out of other teams’ backups, Ryan McDonough, the Suns’ first-year general manager, has created a group that performs in perfect harmony.”

He also avoids all the ego and drama that comes with hiring so-called stars.

McDonough understands that before anyone can perform they need the opportunity to do so.

“Just because somebody hasn’t done something doesn’t mean they can’t do it. It might just mean they need an opportunity.”

If you listen to the media and a plethora of managers you will hear abut a talent shortage.

They will moan that amidst the enormous number of job-seekers there is not one shred of the talent that they need.

Managers forget that that “proven talent” happened under a specific set of circumstances in a specific culture and with a specific management style—change one or more of those and there is no guarantee of the same performance.

They also forget building a winning team is a key ingredient of the job for which they were hired and are paid the big bucks.

They also will never have the pleasure and personal ego trip of hearing a team member say something like this.

“I kind of always knew I had this in me,” Miles Plumlee said, “but I never guessed I’d be where I’m at already.”

Flickr image credit: Arya Ziai

Parallels are constantly drawn between business and sports—building and motivating teams, leading in all its many guises and, of course, the importance and power of stars—whether first round draft choice or coder from the hot startup.

I am not a believer in stars and have written numerous times on why they are a bad idea.

I frequently told I’m wrong, especially sports-wise; I’m told that every winning team has stars or they wouldn’t be winning

Not true and thanks to Craig Bohl, North Dakota State’s football coach, I have someone to point who has a very winning team sans stars.

Since 2011, the Bison have posted Division I’s best winning percentage (36-2, .947), slightly ahead of Alabama (33-2, .943) and Oregon (32-3, .914). N.D.S.U. has beaten four Football Bowl Subdivision opponents in four years, most recently the defending Big 12 champion, Kansas State, in this season’s opener on Aug. 30, and is 7-3 against F.B.S. teams since 2006.

Bohl’s understands that with the right attitude and hard work he can build his own star team.

“A lot of our guys come from the farm or hard-working backgrounds, and we’ve leveraged that as we’ve developed our football team. It goes a little counterculture to the way college football is now, with spreads, up-tempo offenses and all those other things. We’ve taken a blue-collar approach on playing hard-nosed, physical, disciplined football, great defense, controlling the football. That’s how we’ve won.”

He’s pragmatic; he doesn’t believe his winners have to walk on water; they just need to be damn good.

“I don’t think there’s a team in the country that would absolutely destroy us, 70-0, or anything like that. Obviously, there are teams that have more talent than we do. I won’t deny that either. But I think we could hold our own with a lot of teams out there.”

Bohl’s approach isn’t rocket science, other than few other coaches want to bother building a team this way or prefer splashier players whose glory can provide a halo effect for coaches and teammates alike.

While Bohl qualifies as a star, and there is constant talk about who will lure him away, he doesn’t seem to be interested.

And he stays for the same reason talented employees always stay.

“When you find a place that fits your value system, the allure of ‘what the big time is’ is not such a big hook.”

Image credit: Ilco

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Founders are much like football (and other sports) coaches when it comes to managing their people.

Coaches are notorious for accepting/ignoring bad behavior, especially from key players, in the name of winning.

And while that may work in the very short term, longer-term results usually plunge and indirect collateral damage escalates.

Founders often hire “stars” and cut them the same kind of slack when they act out, with far more serious effects.

In fact, tolerating the bad attitude and actions of a few stars can either spread to the whole team or tear it apart and destroy it.

Not all coaches turn a blind eye.

With reports of poor grades, cyberbullying and attitude problems, the coaches were unwilling to support the declining behavior of their team. So just before the homecoming game, they suspended all 80 players.

Doing that meant forfeiting the game, but what then?

They gave every player the opportunity of earning their way back on the team.

Head coach Matt Labrum reset the standard of acceptable behavior. He clearly articulated what was needed, provided support to develop the vital skills, and raised the bar on what was expected. Players knew exactly what choices were required to remain on the team.

Notice they weren’t just told to improve or stop X, they were given clear goals, the support to achieve them and were held accountable.

No company succeeds based only on its so-called stars.

Just as “it takes a village to raise a child” it takes a team to build a successful company.

It also takes a founder willing to draw the line and hold it in a constructive and meaningful way.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I find obituaries fascinating and inevitably learn a great deal reading them.

Although not familiar with Eiji Toyoda, a member of Toyota Motor’s founding family and an architect of its “lean manufacturing,” who died recently at age 100, I am familiar with his results.

In addition to lean manufacturing, he championed the idea for the Prius and, most importantly, the concept of kaizen.

Kaizen is the philosophy that underlies Toyoda’s culture and is responsible for its amazing decades-long growth and success.

…“kaizen,” a commitment to continuous improvements suggested by the workers themselves, and just-in-time production, a tireless effort to eliminate waste. Those ideas became a core part of what came to be called the Toyota Production System and a corporate ethos known as the Toyota Way.

I’ve heard the concept discussed by hundreds of managers over the years and heard many say that it didn’t work when they or their company tried it.

Kaizen reaps only modest success or fails outright in many companies for the same reason that consultants are hired.

Much of American management prefers its solutions and improvements in the form of slickly designed reports and impressive PowerPoint presentations from outside the company and that attitude seems to increase with rank.

Unlike Toyoda and its ilk, where, sans monetary rewards or stock options, workers strive to improve both products and processes.

“One of the features of the Japanese workers is that they use their brains as well as their hands,” Eiji Toyoda said in an interview with the author Masaaki Imai for the 1986 book “Kaizen.” “Our workers provide 1.5 million suggestions a year, and 95 percent of them are put to practical use. There is an almost tangible concern for improvement in the air at Toyota.”

Too often, when US companies invite suggestions from throughout their ranks, they implement only a small number of them and those usually come from “recognized” stars.

That approach/attitude does, however, create jobs by giving rise to an entire industry of high-earning consultants dedicated to teaching management how to “increase employee engagement.”

I wonder if one of the slides is about listening to everyone and then using the ideas.

Image credit: Toyota, 2000GT.net via Japanese Nostalgic Car