Most professional sport teams use the star system. Two or three guys who play every game and make every play take home most of the payroll. You know their names. That’s part of the point. The rest of the team gets what’s left over. There’s not a lot of incentive, nor opportunity, to move forward in these closed systems. Many players tend to stagnate.
The New England Patriots are different. This organization follows a no-star system. Rather than isolating top players on the field for one-on-one marquee plays, the Patriots deliberately spread the ball around on offense (the guys who run and catch) and frequently swap out defensive players (the ones who tackle the ones who run and catch). without warning or fanfare. The result: Few players have stellar individual statistics, but the team overall has two of the longest winning streaks in National Football League history. And it has won three Super Bowls in four years.
What’s compensation got to do with it? “The Patriots bring in people who value being part of a successful organization, and like to be around other hard-working guys who want to win,” says James Lavin, an economist who studies high-performance work organizations. “They don’t want a team of overpaid stars and a bunch of resentful journeymen making the league minimum.”
Lavin, who wrote Management Secrets of the New England Patriots; From Patsies to Triple Super Bowl Champs, says sports is the most visible pay-for-performance model in our culture, with, perhaps, the exception of Wall Street. A contract often requires a player to make a certain number of specific plays. For instance, it may require a receiver to catch a certain number of passes, and penalize him for fumbling the ball.
“The problem is a player, or any worker for that matter, will overemphasize that dimension of his or her job and underemphasize others,” says Lavin. So a linebacker paid a bonus for quarterback sacks may continually rush the offensive backfield too quickly, leaving a hole for an opposing team to exploit, damaging the team overall.
But under Patriots’ Coach Bill Belichick, who took over the team in 2000 and led it to its Super Bowl victories, the Patriots have shied away from individual performance goals and focused instead on broad measures.
If the team wins a set number of games, or if fans and coaches vote a player into the Pro Bowl, bonuses kick in. There are also smaller penalties and incentives meant to bring about shared responsibility. For instance, if an offensive lineman jumps offside during practice, the entire offense does a lap, not just the player. Or the coach might challenge a defensive lineman, who doesn’t usually catch balls, to catch one. If he does, the full team may get the rest of the day’s practice off. “The idea,” says Lavin, “is make everybody feel responsible for everybody else.”
But pay-for-performance systems, says Lavin, requires employers to first think carefully about the notion of performance. It is neither a pure function of individual ability nor a pure function of the organization, he says. It’s about the fit between person and environment.
The Patriots often sign players who haven't performed well elsewhere, but whom they believe will thrive in their specific system of coaches, schemes, locker room chemistry, high expectations and cerebral approach. For example, the Oakland Raiders thought veteran wide receiver Randy Moss was washed up, slow and grumpy. Then he moved to the Patriots in 2007 (for less money) and set the all-time NFL single-season touchdown receptions record (with 23).
“The Raiders are an awful team, and just playing for such an awful team sucks the life out of competitive players,” says Lavin. “The Patriots saw that player’s statistics said more about the Raiders than about how that player will perform in a Patriots’ uniform. That’s your pay-for-performance model. Offer them a place to win and way to do it, and you’ll get what you pay for.”
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