March Madness matters…
I was reading an article about tips for how to pick the best bracket winners for the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament. They were straightforward tips. Tips on how to have the best teams. Upon further reflection, I said to myself, “Dave, this could also help at work with your team”. So ... beyond the issue of me talking to myself, let me share my thoughts on how these two seemingly different topics inter-relate.
The ultimate goal of this fascination around tournament madness, is picking the best teams. The ultimate goal for us as leaders is to pick the best teams. How do we go about pulling together the best teams? Teams matter (see my blog yesterday).
Tip number one - do not think you will have the perfect bracket. Bracket math isn't an exact science, but for years mathematicians have told us that the odds of picking a perfect NCAA tournament bracket are a staggering 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (that's 9.2 quintillion). How big is that number? And thinking along the same lines, what are the odds of you having a perfect team that always gets along, always delivers, always exceeds expectations? I took out my handy dandy 24 digit calculator and spent about 6.2 minutes determining that the odds of picking a perfect work team are a staggering 1 in 19,223,372,036,854,775,805 (that's 19.2 quintillion) {full disclosure, that is a made-up number}.
As David Sturt and Todd Nordstrom wrote in an article in Forbes, “…Little League baseball is the place to find the embodiment of a successful team. Imagine those eager kids, whose hard work all season long has brought them to the Little League finals. Think about their focus, grit, and team spirit. And then, look a little closer. You’ll realize that the best Little League teams look a lot like the most successful teams in the workplace." There are five attributes that all successful teams—whether they’re big or small, on the field or in the office— embody: clear vision, inspiring leadership, team cooperation, constructive communication, and abundant appreciation”.
Much like advice about making our investments, the bracket experts recommend variation in your picks. Diversify your portfolio. Pick some teams who have a style of play different from the norm. Think slow pace of play (Virginia) or strong outside shooting (Virginia Tech) or turnover winners (Florida). For your work teams, diversify your team. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded a higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board. A recent Harvard Business Review article cited that “in recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: non-homogeneous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance.”
The next tip was to differentiate your picks from your opponents because the goal is not to build the perfect bracket – it is to beat your opponents. The pool is won when you make a pick that others did not. The odds this year say Duke has about a 17% chance of winning it all. That said, nearly HALF of the CBS brackets people have submitted have Duke (not a Duke hater or lover so please no Duke bashing) winning it all. Everyone is in search of the perfect bracket versus the winning bracket. Much like the difference at work of being a perfectionist or pursuing excellence. For a perfectionist - anything other than perfect is failure. Perfectionism is an attitude, not necessarily a behavior. In other words, two people can engage in the same behavior such as trying to win an Olympic gold medal, but one can be pursuing excellence and the other is demanding perfection. We want to pursue excellence at work. Steve Jobs said, “It is much more important to do good high-quality work over a long period of time than to seek perfection in any particular project.” Successful business careers are built-up through the repeated development and refinement of ideas.
The experts then offered that we should not be swayed by "recency bias". A team of analysts at Bracket Voodoo reviewed the last five years of tournament results and regular season results found that momentum heading into the tourney has virtually no correlation with tournament success. How does bias translate into the work environment? Think about promotions or hiring decisions. Do you look at the full body of work or only the most recent? When you conduct performance discussions, do you speak to all the projects and work or only the most recent? At times, unconscious biases impact our ability to be truly inclusive. Unconscious bias, or implicit bias, refers to a bias that we are unaware of, and which happens outside of our control. Are you biased? How do you check your biases?
David Rock has done a lot of work in this field and he offered this in an interview with Work Human, “Yes, it’s a big story. I’ll give you the cliff note: essentially, the human brain has enormous, enormous bias. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s actually essential. It’s important. It’s fabulous. Bias is just another way of saying approximation or generalization or categorization. You can’t look at every table and start to think again, “Is this a table, is this a chair, is this a wall?” You’ve got to assume it’s a table to put things on it. Every object we come across, we need to use some kind of bias, some kind of predetermined association. Unfortunately, where this goes wrong is we accidentally are biased against, for example, shorter people in favor of taller people. We prefer people with shorter, easier names against people with more complex names. There are many, many ways where people are unfairly disadvantaged or unfairly advantaged. On the human side, but also on the business decision side — there are many, many poor decisions made because of bias. It’s just the way the brain works. We don’t have much at all in terms of really solid rational decision-making resources. But to actually reduce bias, the path isn’t really raising awareness. You can start that way, but you need to quickly move on to strategies that actually work, which is definitely not just raising awareness. It’s identifying the kind of bias that’s happening, and then applying a mitigation strategy that actually will work for that kind of bias.”
The last tip was to know your pool – meaning know the rules, know the competition, know the prizes, know the seriousness of your peers. How does this translate into our business world? We need to know our business, our competition, our rules of engagement, our people, our culture. Are you trying to hire an uber-creative type with purple hair and tie-dye shirts to work at IBM? Or are you hiring an ultra-conservative, non-risk taking person to work the river rapids tour guide position? You get the idea. Align the talent and team with the goals and the business.
And lastly, the article offers the somber advice that you will probably not always win. Even Warren Buffett bets on nobody having a perfect pool. According to the analysts, the most optimized bracket in a 100-person pool is only five times more likely to win than the other participants … meaning you'd still have a 95 percent chance of losing. The crazy, unpredictable upsets are inevitable and part of what makes March Madness so exciting (and emotional). And guess what, life throws us crazy and unpredictable events with our teams: divorce, puppies, car accidents, spouse relocations, etc. So, we need to manage those situations as they arise. Take a breather. Do not sweat the small stuff. Keep your focus on the end goal. Be empathetic. Stay positive. Understand that life is not predictable. If you have a great team – they will rally in times of crisis to help manage through.
Good luck with your teams (both in the tournament and in the office). Remember the 16th seed is 1-135 in the history of the tournament. At least one No. 15 seed has covered the spread every year since 1985. The biggest upset in tournament history came from this matchup as No. 15 Norfolk (+21) defeated No. 2 Missouri (2012). The No. 13 seeds have won at least one round of 64 game in 24 of 34 tourneys. And finally, the No. 10 seeds that are favored over No. 7 seeds are 18-19 all-time. Teamwork works.
Together. We. Win.