NCAA Tournament Lessons: How to Ruin Your Team
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Culture

  • Staff
  • Culture, Job Search Tips, Leadership
  • March 15, 2016

NCAA Tournament Lessons: How to Ruin Your Team

A quick look at USA TODAY Sports’ 2015-16 Preseason College Basketball All-American Team shows that every player from first team through third team will be competing in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Well, that is everyone except Louisiana State University star, Ben Simmons.

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It seems like common sense that the very best players in the nation would all be competing in the game’s top tournament at the end of the season. At the college level an individual star is often all a team needs to make the dance (i.e. Steph Curry and Adam Morrison).

Simmons certainly fits the profile of an individual star. In his freshman season, Simmons averaged 19.2 points, 11.8 rebounds and 4.8 assists per-game. He has been compared to Cleveland Cavaliers and NBA Superstar, LeBron James and it is widely believed he will be the first pick in the 2016 NBA Draft.

Hot Read: Need Some Motivation for Your Week? Check Out These 5 NCAA Motivational Quotes

Yet here we are a few days before tournament play, and Simmons and LSU are on the outside looking in. How is it that arguably the best player in college basketball isn’t in the tournament? Simply put, LSU just wasn’t a good team.

Simmons had very little support from his teammates this year. In fact, Simmons led the Tigers in almost every major statistical category. He was their best scorer, rebounder, passer, blocker and stealer. Yes, Simmons is a great player but even great basketball players can’t be expected to win when they are forced to shoulder the entire load.

Another former LSU star and great example of how individual performance does not necessarily define team success, “Pistol” Pete Maravich, to this day holds the record for points in a career at 3,667 (all without a three-point line). In one season he averaged 44.5 points per-game. However in three seasons, not one of Maravich’s teams made the NCAA tournament.

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In both Simmons’ and Maravich’s cases, they were two great players who took it upon themselves to become one-man teams. While this sort of attitude for both players was probably brought out of a necessity to make up for the lack of talent surrounding them, it certainly is not a recipe for team success.

As the saying goes, a team is only as good as the sum of its parts. Great teams are those whose parts understand their roles and are able to see how their role plays into the big picture. This concept is equally important in the sports and business world.

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How to Make Sure Your Team Doesn’t Fail

To get all parts working toward a common goal takes leadership and a vision. A strong leader can influence both culture and expectation. A leader should be able to look at all the parts of his team and see a realistic goal. Whether the goal is to hit a certain sales number or a certain number of wins, a vision for what needs to happen should be created.

In college basketball, we see this all the time with elite programs like Kentucky and Duke. Every player enters those respective programs expecting to win a championship. That expectation has been created after years of proven success by both the previous players and their coaches (John Calipari for Kentucky and Mike Krzyzewski for Duke). Without that kind of successful precedent it can be hard to convince a team to buy into a championship.

Success doesn’t have to be defined by a championship or profit margins. Success can simply mean improving upon a previous result. The point is having the entire team work toward this defined success point which can only happen after an expectation and vision has been set.

Once expectations are set, how is it then that teams meet them? The answer can be found in assigning roles.

Chances are “Joe from accounting” isn’t going to handle marketing, HR and supply chain along with his accounting duties for a Fortune 500 company. Even if he was the best worker on the planet who wanted to handle all of these areas, it is reasonable to expect overall business production would suffer because of time and the inevitable drop in quality of the work he produced.

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It is best for the sake of the team that Joe sticks to his accounting duties. If he clearly understands his role and its purpose in the company’s overall vision, he can put all of his valuable time into improving in that capacity. Multiply that same logic across every employee and you have a cohesive team clear on their roles and how those roles play into team success.

This is where LSU has failed in both Simmons’ and Maravich’s cases. Both players were asked to handle the roles of an entire team. Their respective coaches should have focused more on fitting the two stars into roles for the team’s overall vision instead of making them the center of that vision.

The moral of the story is, it doesn’t matter whether it is your business or an NCAA basketball team, teams need strong leadership that sets clear visions and roles. Without doing this, teams can expect to come up short of success and miss the big dance.

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  • Staff
  • Culture, Recruiting, Retention
  • February 20, 2015

How Corporate Culture Prevents Turnover

Turnover: An issue every company faces. For some businesses it is an inevitable part of their operations because of seasonal peaks and valleys. For other businesses, turnover can be a costly expense that hurts their ability to turn a profit. The direct cost of an employee leaving isn’t what is costly. It’s the cost incurred to replace them as well as the value of the loss of production that is expensive to the company. Josh Bersin of Deloitte Consulting LLP lists the costs as such:

• Cost of hiring a new person (advertising, interviewing, screening, hiring)
• Cost of onboarding a new person (training, management time)
• Lost productivity (a new person may take 1-2 years to reach the productivity of an existing person)
• Lost engagement (other employees who see high turnover disengage and lose productivity)
• Customer service and errors (new employees take longer and are often less adept at solving problems). In healthcare this may result in much higher error rates, illness, and other very expensive costs (which are not seen by HR)
• Training cost (over 2-3 years you likely invest 10-20% of an employee’s salary or more in training, that is gone)
• Cultural impact (whenever someone leaves others take time to ask “why?”).(Bersin)

Cost Value

Fig 1: Economic Value of an Employee to the Organization over Time (C) Bersin by Deloitte

 

As these points show, replacement costs are incurred from hiring and training a new employee. Research suggests that direct replacement costs can reach as high as 50%-60% of an employee’s annual salary, with total costs associated with turnover ranging from 90% to 200% of annual salary.(SHRM) Not only are direct replacement costs high, but total costs that include the loss of productivity and errors that a new employee might make also create a huge expense for a company. Overall, turnover is a pricey process that many businesses can ill afford.

Employees leave for a variety reasons that range anywhere from compensation, to location, to growth potential, etc. So how can businesses avoid turnover? One way of increasing retention can be as simple as making sure a potential new employee is a cultural fit. According to an engagement survey done by TINYpulse, only 42% of employees know their organizations vision, mission, and values.(TINY) If employee’s are unaware of what the company’s vision, mission, and values are, they are less likely to be engaged because they lack clarity on what the company is trying to accomplish. This is why a mission and core values should be clearly established. Management at Zappos understood that a lack of knowledge of corporate culture can be detrimental to success and they created 10 core values. These 10 core values are important enough to Zappos to where they take time to train employees on what the 10 values mean and the behaviors employees should display to live up to the values¹.

Mission_Chart-6

Familiarizing employees with corporate culture should not begin after they are hired. It should happen as early as the interview process. At Zappos for example, job applicants go through an initial interview with a recruiter who assesses a cultural fit between the applicant and Zappos¹. According to Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, the cultural fit interview carries 50 percent of the weight in the hiring process¹. Right from the get go Zappos is making sure that there is compatibility between the company and the applicant. Ritz-Carlton also values that a candidate be a good fit culturally to their organization. Management at Ritz-Carlton view hiring in the same light as marriage. The way they see it, it is not advisable to marry a person with the goal of changing him or her. Instead, it is best to try to marry the right person¹. In Ritz Carlton’s case, they prefer to hire people who are well groomed, who have few body piercings, and who smile frequently.

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At NexGoal, hiring to fit our company culture takes high priority. Specifically, we have a sports oriented culture where we prefer to hire former athletes. The reason we make this our focus when hiring is because athletes have a drive and work ethic that isn’t common among non-athletes. Athletes understand that to be the best, you have to be both coachable and willing to take the time to apply what you have learned to your craft.

From my over 30 years of hiring experience, an employer wants someone loyal, trainable, and coachable who is willing to conform to company culture. You don’t necessarily want to change them, but you have to be able to identify what they do best with what the company needs are. This is why we target athletes because they are already familiar with these keys to building an effective team. The process isn’t foreign to them and it allows for a smoother transition into our corporate culture.

What can we learn from all this? Turnover is a costly process from a time and money standpoint. One of the major causes of turnover can be attributed to the fact that employees are often not familiar with their company’s core values and mission. The first step to avoid this problem would be for an organization to clearly establish their mission and values, not only in writing, but also with their daily operations. Employees should be able to put the mission statement and core values into practice. If they can’t, then the mission and values become words and nothing more. In essence, practice what you preach! Once current employees are clear on their corporate culture, management should devise a plan to make their culture clear in the interview process. When interviewing job applicants, hiring personnel should ask questions that are geared towards the firm’s core values. Depending on how a candidate answers the questions, hiring personnel can decide whether a candidate’s views match the company’s views. Understanding early if an organization and candidate’s views align does not only create a compatible working situation for both parties, but it can also prevent the costly undertaking of replacing an employee who just didn’t fit in.

If turnover is becoming a problem with your organization ask yourself: “Do your employees fit your culture?” If no, a change in this area could quite possibly be the ticket to solving a turnover crisis.

 

¹ SADRI, G. (2014). HIGH-PERFORMANCE corporate culture. Industrial Management, 56(6), 16-21.

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  • Staff
  • Culture
  • March 6, 2014

What’s Your Work Environment Like?

redtieA work environment is as important as the role itself these days. Whether it’s the attitude, the common goal, or the sensory aspect, the “Princess and the Pea” effect can play havoc on your production.

As athletes in the height of competition, the ability to block out the crowd was necessary to focus on execution.  Now in a work environment, have you been able to translate that skill? Have you tapped into your people skills dealing with different kinds of teammates and applied that to dealing with your co-workers or clients?

We’ve got a quick survey, but feel free to share your thoughts on the work environment. Is the attitude more important than the sensory experience? What’s on your wish list?

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