Would you want to hire a Joel Cotti?

On Zoom, Joel Cotti displays nervous energy; his hands seem to be continually moving, and his eyes are never still. Yet, he has this beatific smile and completes his Brad Pitt look with a sandy mustache and a goaty that oddly appears out of place. When he speaks, he smiles with his eyes, and it instantly adds warmth that would appeal to anyone. 

I talked to Joel at the behest of a friend, Dan, who knew I was researching on the subject of the Future of Work. Dan suggested that the work Joel did maybe of interest to me in my research. After initially stalling, as I was unsure what I would gain from the conversation, I finally contacted Joel, intrigued by his longish job title: Human-work performance analyst and coach. So here I was, in front of a Moneyball kind of a Brad Pitt wannabe, wondering if I had questions to fill the one hour we had set aside for this meeting. 

Joel introduced himself...he was someone who was always interested in sports, and did his masters in sports science. His undergraduate degree was in statistics, and he had always aspired to work in baseball. Joel wrangled his way as an assistant analyst to a professional sports team in Chicago, spending five years with them until they laid him off earlier due to the pandemic. For a month, he survived by being delivering groceries for Instacart. Used to an adrenaline-pumping sports routine, Joel soon got bored and approached Dan, a healthcare company service manager. Joel had this unique idea- he suggested that he use his sports analyst techniques to study and improve Dan's team's performance. As every interaction in the last few months is digitized, Joel felt confident that he could use the digital footprint to observe, analyze, model, and suggest enhancements to improve performance at an individual and a team level. He clinched the deal by persuading my friend that his 'fees' would be success-based, i.e., only if the manager saw a difference in performance, he needed to pay him. 

My friend swore by Joel's tactics just three months later and referred him for a conversation with me. So here is the brief transcript of my interview with Joel.

Question: So what exactly do you do?

Joel: Every day for five years as a sports analyst, I woke up thinking about making the team win. I do the same here. I asked Dan what winning would like for him and worked backward to figure out what that involves- the dynamic mix of resources, time, players (team-members), effort, and motivation. I look at three things, past data on performance, data on players and their skills (he never referred to team members as employees, always players), and finally develop a predictive model to plot to see if we can win, what and where are the gaps. Then I monitor the team as it performs and figure out what adjustments are needed to win the 'game.' I also spot weak spots and strengths in the players and other logistics so that Dan can continually balance the team to obtain the performance he needs. 

Question: How has the team received you?

Joel: When people know I was an analyst in a World Cup-winning team, they are quite welcoming and are intrigued to try out those techniques in their group. They like the sports metaphor and tools being applied to their work environment and are willing to go along. 

Question: Tell me some of the things you do?

Joel: I must confess that I got lucky. My team services a certain kind of healthcare equipment that is critical during COVID. So the KPIs are pretty measurable; things like machine downtime, service engineer technical proficiency metrics like first-time resolution, service time, etc., parts consumption and availability, etc. I added some additional KPIs like COVID cases among the engineers, Quarantine time off, intending to keep this to the minimum. 

I added the hospital data to the mix; each hospital has its nuances- some have extra equipment, others don't; some have experienced technicians, others don't, so looking at data from hospitals allowed me to see hotspots. Earlier, geography determined service engineer coverage; for instance, one engineer covered Skokie, while another covered Glendale (both suburbs of Chicago). I changed that to base coverage on service call type to match service engineer proficiencies to the service request. This change helped in first-time call resolution and machine downtime issues. Based on the hospital's data and equipment usage, I could also plot which equipment needed prioritization and which hospitals could wait. 

Question: How about people data? What did you do with that? 

Joel: One of the advantages of being a sports analyst is that you continuously monitor the players, their strengths, weakness, who will fail, and fill the gap. I did the same thing for Dan. I tracked the go-to players in the team, who got left out, who was resourceful or resilient. 

Question: Wait. How do you do find out who is most resourceful or resilient?

Simple. I use the critical incident method. Every morning when we have the team meeting, we ask people to go through their story from the earlier day- if you listen carefully to their stories, you can plot who showed resourcefulness or resilience. Stories to me are data.

Question: How would you measure your success?

Joel: Well, I have made Dan pay me based on me, making sure that he exceeded his KPIs! Just kidding! I have used my analytical and observational skills to plot the game strategy and tactics to create a winning combination. I am not sure I want to go back to sports. I feel that there is so much opportunity in business; if I could do it with one team, can you imagine how much possibility exists for a massive multi-billion dollar company? I could retire at 40! Jokes aside, I think organizations are not leveraging the equivalent of sports science in performance improvement. The good news is that with everything having gone digital, there is a lot of raw material to work with. It is not perfect, but there is enough to start. 

Question: What would be your takeaway?

Joel: Organizations seem to get confused between process improvement and performance improvement. They associate process improvement with system-level enhancements (using Six-sigma, Lean, etc.) and performance improvement with individual employees (rankings, ratings, etc.). I am sure those are important, but organizations can learn from sports yet another type of improvement. I would call that real-time improvement. On the field, you have what you have- the time is set, the players are set, the competition is on you right from the start- you have to work your magic to maximize performance and win, while the game is in progress, real-time. I call this dynamic monitoring. That's what I do. 

As we ended the interview, I was inspired and intrigued. Joel may be starting a trend here. As the world of work changes, right in front of our eyes, there may be new ways of doing things and managing things. Imagine if every team had a Joel embedded in it? Someone who could predict and monitor for future performance rather than conduct a postmortem of the past. And balance out the opportunities and challenges to win.

I called Dan, my friend, and complimented him. When many organizations and leaders want to 'go back to normal,' he, instead, had leaped forward into the future. By hiring Joel, he had changed his management model, and that was something remarkable. 

Are you doing something different that propels you into the future of work? Or are you dying to get back to what was? The real opportunity for the Future of Work lies in experimenting with new solutions as Dan did. Now is the time to take a risk. Are you aware of any such best practices, and if so, can you kindly share them in the comments section?