There’s a lot to be learned from the Super Bowl from a talent management perspective. While some HR professionals may have grown weary of sports analogies, this weekend’s Super Bowl serves as a great reminder that talent management often resembles professional sports team management.
Here are our top five lessons from the Super Bowl for talent management:
- If you want to win, you need top talent - The Denver Broncos would never have made it to the Super Bowl without Peyton Manning, who was poached from the Indianapolis Colts, and Wes Walker, who was recruited from New England. Marshawn Lynch was recruited from Buffalo by Seattle and was a huge contributor to their success. Recruiting skilled talent from leading organizations in your industry often plays a key role in competition because it’s not always possible to develop talent slowly from within. Having a sophisticated recruiting function that has the capability to attract and retain top performers is often a double whammy, as it enhances your organization's ability, while detracting from your competitors' teams capability.
- Champions monitor metrics – Every team in the NFL monitors, reviews, and analyzes the performance of their players on each and every play. Manning is famous for studying the statistical tendencies of his competitors. The lesson here is that analytics, metrics, and paying attention to your KPIs can dramatically improve workforce productivity and success.
- Great players aren’t always great managers – Neither Super Bowl team coach had ever played professional football – and they didn’t need to. The skills required to manage are very different from those required to execute. As such, sometimes it’s not optimal to promote your top performers into a management capacity, because the skills required to succeed in a management role may be drastically different than the area they specialize in.
- The best college hires don’t always have the best credentials - Russell Wilson is a key example of this. The star Seahawk quarterback was a third round draft pick from the University of Wisconsin. He was considered too short and was picked 6th out of the 11 chosen in 2012. The key takeaway here is that great talent can be found in many second-tier schools, and it can be extremely valuable to use a remote college recruiting approach to find talent that may be flying under the radar.
- Age shouldn't determine a player's performance potential – In spite of his performance on Sunday, Peyton Manning is still both a Super Bowl and a Pro Bowl starting quarterback and he accomplished both feats at the age of 37, making everyone think twice about the adage that “pro football is a young man’s game.” By the same token, the Seahawks are the second youngest team in Super Bowl History with an average age of 26 across the team. Similarly, leaders shouldn’t stereotype, but instead they should closely assess the capabilities of all candidates, regardless of how far to one side of the age spectrum they fall.
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