Great teams don't need All-Stars: lessons from 'Moneyball'

After my previous article on how to get great performance out of an All=Star team (like The Avengers, for example), I wanted to reverse the discussion and talk about the science behind building great teams, and the People & Culture lessons from 'Moneyball', a sports film of a different sort that turned the existing narrative on its head at the time and made the point that skills and qualities, not people, make a great team.

If you aren't familiar with the term, Moneyball, it originates with the Oakland Athletic's (a US baseball team) general manager Billy Beane. The Moneyball method involved skipping the bidding war for famous athletes and building a baseball team on a smaller budget by relying on statistical analysis to acquire new players, by looking at their performance in key moments. When it came to baseball talent, Oakland knew it could never financially go head to head with the biggest teams in major league baseball, so the team started using extensive data science. This scientific approach helped them identify undervalued athletes in the competitive talent pool. Using this method the A's were able to reach the playoffs (equivalent of a World Cup) for three consecutive years. 

What do we learn from this to apply to our workplaces?

1. Traditional hiring methods - the resume and the CV - are biased because they tend to skew us towards "brand names" - big colleges, past employers - and make us overlook genuine talent that may still be raw or not have had access to opportunities. Big names don't always equal great talent. Quite often there's also big drama, big ego and big frustration that comes along with it. Be smart in evaluating the worth of a brand name in choosing one candidate over the other - if you aren't evaluating any other criteria and characteristics, then it's Lazy Recruiting and you may want to first fix that function in your company!
2. Star players aren't always consistently high performers, or great team players. In sports, often times players try to hit their personal best record but it doesn't always translate into a win for the company. Companies need 'players' who can do what's needed to make sure they win ahead of the competition.
3. Look for culture-add, not culture-fit. The Moneyball method helped Beane exactly pick the skills that were needed in the team and fit all the players together to make sure everyone brought something to the table. Hire employees not based on their individual skillset which they may be great at, but on what they bring that's missing to the team - how do they make the team, and the company, better? You don't need to always get "the best" employees - you need to get the "best for the team".
4. Get and invest in what everyone calls the "B" players, the second-in-line leaders. Give them "A" level responsibilities and watch them shine. Build your team with people not who have already proven themselves and excelled in this same role in the past, but who have the drive and hunger to do so, maybe having the knowledge and knowhow but never having gotten the opportunity to do so.
5. You have to innovate if you want to beat the leaders - the Athletics knew they couldn't afford expensive players, and that's what the other teams had been doing. So Beane found a way around that, although it wasn't easy to change longstanding tradition and "the way things are done". This is particularly relevant today in COVID times when we know we can't just do "business as usual".

There are multiple ways to build High Performing teams - we've seen that through The Avengers, through Moneyball and many other examples in our lives. The binding thread is CONTEXT - where do you need All Star Avengers each with a unique skillset and the ability to work independently in high pressure situations, and where do you need diamonds in the rough that can get the job done with some moulding, coaching and the right guidance? Both are equally effective, if you select the right approach for the job!