That happened just yesterday, as I thought about the relationship between coaching little league and comp strategy. I’ve been fortunate to coach my sons’ baseball teams, and I learned about how to allocate my time in practice the hard way. At first, I didn't spend enough time on the bottom half of the lineup. It took just one season for me to learn that. I watched the # 9 hitter on the opposing team drive in the winning run in an elimination game, after not hitting all season.
I changed my ways, but not at the expense of the top half. They almost always produce disproportionate results, so I also needed to help them be their best.
As managers and people leaders in the corporate world, we know that it behooves us to think about the very same concepts. But for so many of us, that has been an ideal to which we aspire. Do we disproportionately reward our top performers because they are force multipliers (e.g., Laszlo Block's Power Curve), do we stack rank along the lines of the Bell Curve, or do we do something entirely different?
For years most companies outside of the most well-resourced businesses, like Google, lacked the data and tools to answer these questions systematically. And using any framework has its limitations. Bucketing people into groups is inherently flawed, demoralizing, and can lead to an “us versus them” mentality. It doesn’t honor the fact that everyone has a doorway in.
We ask questions like these:
So do the best people leaders – they just haven't historically had the tools they need to bring it to life. But that is all changing now, and it's long overdue.
– Bobby Benfield, CEO of OpenComp
