What is the job of the goalie? Global vs. local maxima.

I recently had a long catch-up with a friend from way-back-when who now is running several businesses and doing very well for himself. At one point during our catch-up we started talking about the difficulties in getting one's staff to feel ownership and acting for the best of the business, not just themselves.

How do you get people within an organization to lift themselves outside their respective area or function to try to maximize value for the overall company?

This is about global maxima versus local maxima, something that is very difficult to get right. Our discussion reminded me of an anecdote that Jeff Weiner once shared after successfully recruiting Fred Kofman to LinkedIn.

Fred had the following great analogy:

In football (soccer) - what is the job of the goalie?

Is it preventing the other team from scoring? Managing the defense? Provide confidence for the team? Start the offence with the outlet pass?

No one who hasn't heard this before has ever gotten it right, Jeff claims. My friend once played football at an elite level so I asked him this question during our chat. He didn't get it right either.

The goalie's job is the same as the other 10 players on the field; it's to win the game. If the goalie's job is to prevent the other team from scoring he/she might get bogged down into analyzing his/her own performance, statistics etc and lose focus on the overall objective. However, it's not very important if the other team scores a goal in case our team can ensure we always score one more goal than what they do. The goalie can help out in other ways than just stopping balls to ensure his/her team scores one more goal than the other team. That's what the goalie should be doing and it's the same for all the players on the field.

As soon as you think your job is solely and exclusively focused on your responsibilities that pertains to your position you will only reach a local maxima. If that's how all the 11 players on the field is playing the outcome is certain: they won't win the game.

When a coach gets a group of players buying into a program, a philosophy, amazing things happen and you get teams that win and win and win. The players that buy into the program buy into something that's bigger than themselves. They optimize for the global maxima.

Jeff Bezos likes to talk about missionaries and mercenaries and the difference between an individual who maximizes value for him or her, versus being a part of something bigger than themselves. So, how do you build a team of missionaries instead of mercenaries? Jeff Weiner argues that one of LinkedIn's most important core values is acting like an owner. They take ownership and say "why do we do like this" instead of "why does the company do like this?" Reinforcing to all staff that they can have an impact on the way the company does business - irregardless of how big it becomes - is key for this, he argues.

Furthermore, the more you can hire against your core values and not compromise on them, the higher the likelihood of success. In my experience, sitting down with your core team and collectively formulating your company culture is incredibly important (I’ve written about building a culture before here). Even though you might be part of a young start-up and feel like there are plenty of other more important things to do, this is time well spent. I think that hiring is one of the most important things to get right for a company, big or small, and if you have a clear idea of what type of people you want to work with you’ll have a better chance of creating a recruitment process to get the right people in. Make sure your culture deck clarifies what type of people your company wants, then you hire according to it. When you have like-minded people by your side you'll have a great chance of getting them to buy into the narrative, the mission, the vision. Once you have buy-in you'll have a better chance of getting your team to optimize for the global maxima and focusing on winning the game.