Assessing Talent is HARD—Ask the NFL

The National Football League (NFL) is holding its annual talent draft tonight (as I write this).  So, yes, you’re getting two sports related blog posts this week.  What’s fascinating about this is how the 32 teams evaluate a large pool of potential players and how wrong they are in the most critical evaluations.  If you’re familiar with the NFL draft, you can skip ahead past the bullets.  If not, here’s a quick primer:

  • Each year, the NFL forces the top players who have not yet played in the NFL (think of guys who played college football) to participate in a process where teams select which players that they want (the draft).  The order of the draft is determined by the teams’ records the year before, with the worst team (Jacksonville) going first and the team that won the championship (Tampa Bay) going last.  There are 7 rounds in the draft.
  • If a team wants a particular player, but thinks that he will be taken before it is their turn, they can trade players and/or their draft picks for a better pick.  This is called trading up and can be very expensive.
  • The most important employee (player) on an NFL team is the quarterback.  Teams that do not have an “elite” player at this position will do almost anything to draft one.  There are economic incentives for drafting a quarterback rather than trying to get an experienced one from another team.
  • Each team has an entire department of people whose sole job is to evaluate the skills and abilities of college players, determine the needs of the team, and recommend players to draft and in which order.  The NFL even sets up what are essentially job fairs where the teams can look at players up close, interview them, and they even give a league-wide cognitive ability test.  These players really get put under the microscope.

So, we have a situation where the skill and ability levels of the players are well known.  Given that, you would think that teams can select players, especially quarterbacks, with uncanny accuracy.  And you’d be wrong.

If we look at the quarterbacks drafted in the 1st round (63) since 2000, it’s pretty fair to say that (not including those who are too early in their career to judge):

  • 15 turned out to be very good (consistently led their team to a winning record and won playoff games)
  • 13 were/are good (there teams won more than they lost, but were nothing fabulous)
  • 30 were not good (losing record, didn’t stay with the team long, etc.). 

Those of you who are football fans may quibble with the categories where I put the players, but even if we move players around a bit between the categories, teams have about a 25% success rate and about a 50% miss rate.

In roughly the same time period, teams have “traded up” 25 times to draft a quarterback in the 1st round.  In other words, they paid a premium to “get their guy.”  14 of them were/are not very good, 3 were/are good, and 6 were/are very good.  Again, we see this 50% miss rate, though slightly higher hit rate.

How can this be?

Most obviously, football is a game where all of the players on the field need to do their job well for the team to be successful.  Like it or not, the quarterback gets outsized credit and blame for the team’s success and failures.  But, regardless of his skill level, he cannot control a lot of what goes on around him.  This makes for a very difficult selection situation.

There are also some confounding factors.  The first being that the worst teams pick before the good ones and they are more likely to choose a quarterback than good teams.  And, one of the reasons these teams are not very good is that they don’t judge talent well and do a poor job of developing and retaining the good players that they have.  Related to this, they often take a quarterback before they have good supporting players around him.  It’s entirely possible that several of the quarterbacks who were drafted early, but performed poorly, would have been successful with other teams.  And, a few of them, but not a lot, were after they changed teams.

To make the success rate seem even worse, teams choose to ignore players are other positions that are more likely (historically) to be successful in order to make the sexier, and riskier, play for a quarterback.  And I get that—there are enough examples of a highly drafted quarterback completely changing a team’s fortunes that teams are willing to miss 2 out of 3 times to get one.  Any team would be happy to draft 2 not so good quarterbacks to get to the one that leads them to a championship, even if it takes them several years to do it.

What we do know is that new quarterbacks tend to succeed where the team has a sustainable plan.  Often times, teams change their playing philosophy if they don’t have a successful year so they fail to implement one that fits the quarterback’s skills.  Successful quarterbacks rarely play for multiple head coaches (managers).  The lesson here is that good plan that senior management sticks with is more likely to be one where your most expensive talent can succeed.

It used to be that newly drafted quarterbacks would have a more experienced one ahead of him to learn from for a year or two before being elevated to leading the team.  There are many reasons why that is not the case anymore, but it does limit the opportunity for some drafted players to develop into good quarterbacks. Players drafted at other positions tend to have the luxury.  Organizations that realize which key players can contribute immediately and which ones need some seasoning are also more likely to get the most out of their talent.

The NFL (and other professional sports) draft is a unique selection system.  In some ways it allows talent evaluators to get a great deal of information, but in other ways there is a lot of mystery around what allows players to translate their college success into the pros.  And, in looking at success vs. failure of the quarterback, sports fans tend to ignore the organizational issues that allow some players to shine rather than flounder.  All good lessons to keep in mind as companies begin to hire recent college graduates.

And good luck to Trevor Lawrence.

Putting Ourselves in Learners’ Shoes

Teaching others is a great way to learn.

When training others or delegating a task, one of the hardest things to do is presenting the information in a way the person understands.  Sometimes we think of this as “explain it as you would to a 5 year old.”  It really boils down to putting ourselves in the position of a beginner when we are the expert.

This article delves into this topic nicely.  While it focuses on college professors, it really applies to anyone is I the position to help others acquire new knowledge, skills, or abilities.  Putting the educators in an uncomfortable position of learning something new really served as a reminder of how difficult it can be to pick up on something you don’t know.

While it’s not necessarily practical to have managers and trainers master a difficult puzzle in order for them to empathize with others who are learning, there are some actions that help put them in a better position to do so, including:

  1. Make sure there is good two-way communication during the learning process.  When delegating a task, a manager should ask the delegate to describe what is being asked of her/him/them in order to demonstrate understanding.
  2. Explain things to people in multiple ways. This leads us to think about tasks in more than one way (e.g., only the way we think is best) so that it’s understandable to a wider audience.
  3. Be patient with the learner as he/she/they attempts the task.  All of us learn through both success and failure.  You need to let both of them happen and that takes time.

We all learned what we do in our work with sometimes good, and sometimes not so good, teachers.  Our effectiveness in delegating or teaching tasks partially lies in putting ourselves in the position of the learner rather than the expert.  By thinking of ways to do that, we’ll be more effective in improving the skill levels in our organizations.

Trying to Stop the Tides

It seems very old-school, but sea ports are still very big business.  The twin ports in southern California (LA and Long Beach) are a huge economic driver (they are the primary sender/receiver of goods between North America and Asia) and employer.  But, they are also one of the biggest polluters in the region.  For as long as I can remember, there has always been a balancing act to keep the ports humming and making the area healthier.

A bit more under the radar has been the creep of automation. While car companies fought this battle with their unions a generation ago, the idea that automation can be stopped is still alive and well among the longshoremen.  This article gets into some of the specifics regarding the plan and it potential impacts.

From an HR perspective, the bigger story here is not the automation (it is going to happen as it makes the port more eco-friendly and efficient), but the lack of planning regarding the retraining of workers.  It is somewhat surprising that this is occurring at the ports because most of the labor disputes over the last 20 or so years have not been over wages but over the number of jobs.  The port and the union are now in negotiations about retraining and head count for different positions, but this is time and goodwill being spent now on solutions that could have been anticipated.

A better approach would be:

  1. Analyze the skills required for current jobs and for those created by the automation. Yes, new equipment needs to be programmed, maintained, etc.  Metrics of productivity and cost need up to updated, tracked, etc.
  2. Where the skills map directly, there no problem and this should be communicated to those employees.
  3. Where the skills don’t completely map, determine how the skills can be acquired.
  4. Communicate the path to skill acquisition clearly to those whose positions are going to be eliminated or changed. It should be presented as an opportunity rather than a threat.
  5. Provide adequate resources (tuition reimbursement, time away from work, etc.) to allow for the retraining.
  6. Develop and/or promote an internal posting system for those who cannot be placed in the new positions.

Automation has always been a part of business and that is not changing any time soon.  Trying to prevent is as useless a stopping the tides.  However, planning for it allows companies to keep valuable employees and for employees who are willing to upgrade their skills to stay employed.

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