Good for Us or Good for Me?

This past week, the NFL held its annual draft. I’ll leave out the majesty of the venue in my hometown of Detroit, or how they broke the attendance record with nearly 300K fans, or how rising star J.J. McCarthy of the national champion Michigan Wolverines ended up with the perfect team fit in Minnesota. 

Instead, I’ll point you to an interesting article in The Athletic by Alec Lewis titled “NFL teams know the best way to draft, so why aren’t they doing it?”

The article cites research showing it is very hard to predict which players will be successful and who will be a flop at the draft stage. Famously, the greatest quarterback of all time, Michigan alumnus Tom Brady, was only the 199th pick in his draft class.

Because of the uncertainty, the optimal strategy for the draft is to accumulate as many picks as possible—for example, trading a second-round pick for two third-round picks—to increase the chances of getting lucky.

However, this strategy does not match what most teams do. Lewis writes, “only a few teams are curious enough to think differently, and even fewer are disciplined enough to act differently.”

The reasons why teams find it difficult to implement the optimal strategy are actually relevant for all organizations. 

First, there’s hubris. Lewis writes, “Teams massively overestimate their abilities to delineate between stars and flops, and because of that they heavily overvalue the ‘right to choose’ in the draft.”

That is, people believe in their ability to control events even when that belief isn’t grounded in reality. I’m sure we can imagine many people we’ve met like that at work!

Second, when analyzing organizations, we often talk about them as unified entities that make decisions like robots. Instead, their decisions are usually the result of a political process between people with varied interests. 

Lewis describes how this happens with football teams and the draft. “Teams preach collaboration, alignment and shared vision, but their end goals may conflict directly with different segments of the organization. A general manager might be more focused on his job security over the long-term direction of the organization. A head coach may believe unreasonably in his own ability to mold a player. Coordinators and position coaches want to add talent to their groups, while scouts may quite literally pound the table for the players they unearthed during the pre-draft process.”

In other words, the optimal strategy for the team overall is not necessarily the optimal strategy for the individuals in the team. 

I often see leaders trip over this dynamic when developing strategy. They’ll say things like, This strategy is clearly the best, so why won’t everyone else agree with it? In nonprofits, the thought is often tinged with value judgments. This is the best option for the people we serve. I can’t believe team members are being so selfish and parochial.

What those leaders are forgetting is that even the most high-minded actors cannot completely divorce their perspective on the organization’s decisions from how those decisions affect them individually. 

Moreover, many organizations don’t give people working for them a real reason to think about the enterprise overall. Often, organization-wide decisions are made by those at the top, so other people in the organization never develop a stake in those decisions. Sometimes, information that would help everyone understand the enterprise’s challenges and opportunities—e.g., financials, competitor analysis, human capital needs—is unnecessarily restricted. That prevents everyone from making coordinated decisions. 

Finally, performance systems give people a direct incentive to care only about their results. For example, I worked with a CEO who wanted to make the top team members think like enterprise leaders. But an examination of the leadership competencies at the center of performance management showed the competencies were completely oriented toward the execution of their department-level goals.  

So, when leaders complain about misalignment with the overall strategy, they may be missing the structures and leadership behaviors that contribute to the problem.