During the NCAA National Championship game, we saw Butler put on the most impressive displays of missing baskets in the history of the game. And to take nothing away from Connecticut’s stellar interior defense, Butler missed a lot of wide open looks. I counted over a dozen open looks at the basket missed by Butler, easily within the margin of victory that night.

The next night, I watched the Portland Trail Blazers put on a similar spectacle in the second half of their game against Golden State. Seeing two of our best shooters off the bench go a combined 3 for 20 from the field (including 0-7 from the three-point line) was disappointing. And considering many of those shots were unchallenged or lightly challenged, it was rough.

For both teams, there were some supporting excuses. Butler was outsized so they played outside of the paint almost the entire game. The rims seemed incredibly tight (leading to less baskets overall) and playing the most important college basketball game in a football arena is still one of the worst ideas ever. For the Blazers, they had just learned they clinched the playoffs and were going against a team much more motivated to win than they were.

But to a certain extent, those excuses didn’t matter. Both teams had the opportunity to make shots, makable shots, shots that could have switched the game around, and just didn’t do it.

Sometimes you just miss.

You spend years honing a skill like shooting a basketball and you miss. And no matter how good you are at your skill set, you’re going to grow cold at some point. As a writer, it’s happened to me. As an HR professional, it’s happened to me. Even my typically poor basketball shooting has been hurt by cold streaks.

Fixing it is sometimes as simple as waking up on the right side of the bed one morning. Or shooting a couple hundred more shots. Whatever it takes to get your grove back.

What is similar among all of these people is the one’s who get back their mojo get up the next day and work harder at it. That doesn’t mean Brandon Roy won’t have another 2-11 shooting night or that Matt Howard won’t record just a single three pointer in a game ever again. It just means they are going to try to put some distance between those two lows.

The workplace lesson is simple: for your best employees, stop looking for excuses for occasional poor performance and help them create distance (major distance) between low points. Get them back up, encourage them to perform and move on.

Still, something doesn’t strike me right about blaming the lawyers for this one. It is the easy route. Saying your legal team won’t let you do it is the biggest business cop-out you can give. And honestly, it isn’t an excuse I am willing to accept anymore.

Understanding A Lawyer’s Role

A good lawyer will help you evaluate one thing: the legal risk of a given business action. They can research past case precedents, key decisions and give you the skinny on what has happened in similar situations. They can tell you how you can help yourself setup the best possible legal case for what you want to try to do. This is useful and good.

Now this may be just the lawyers I’ve worked with but I’ve never had a lawyer help me evaluate the business risks associated with a certain decision. So for example, if I’ve had a lawyer look at potentially using Facebook as a recruiting tool, they’ve told me about the risks associated with possible EEO issues but they’ve never told me the risk of having a competitor use Facebook and get higher level talent at a much more reasonable cost.

That’s a serious business risk. One that needs to be weighed against other risks that you’re taking (including the legal ones).

Abdicating The Power Of Decision

So when the lawyer comes back and says that social media is risky to be involved with, business leaders will often abandon their power of discretion and risk evaluation and say it was outlawed by legal. Progressive business people cry foul at the fear mongering lawyers who have set in motion social media bans and have frustrated the lives of many Gen Y employees. Meanwhile, the true danger of such actions are swept under the rug:

Company leadership is often abandoning decision making and are instead adopting the least risky moves suggested by their legal, HR, marketing, accounting and IT teams.

Now all of these departments mean for the best I am sure but business leaders simply aren’t using them correctly. Yes, when you’re accountant says you might have a cash flow problem if you make a business purchase, you should listen. That being said, if it is the right decision to make, you find a way to mortgage some of your future for a chance to make the right decision. When HR says hiring 30 people in two months is going to be next to impossible, you should listen. But if you absolutely need those people, you lean on them and make the impossible happen.

That’s what real leadership is: it is understanding the risks and challenges from different perspectives and pushing forward on the correct broad strategy for your company with those challenges and risks in hand.

A Delay On Killing All Lawyers

When we resort to throwing lawyers under the bus for decisions that company leadership have made, we hold the wrong people responsible for some of the awful business decisions that happen. Of course various teams in your organization are going to tell you about the risks from their interest areas.

Leadership is about defending the lawyers and owning your decisions. It is easy to blame lawyers for a 10 page social media policy but much more difficult to target the people who signed off on the policy at the top (or who earlier abdicated policy generation to their legal team entirely).

What say you?

When I managed in the retail world, I managed the biggest slacker in the world. I’m going to call him Menjamin because I wouldn’t want to give away his real name.

He was a dumb kid who was college aged but had no ambition to do anything with his life. He lived at home and he didn’t work that much (because he didn’t want to work full time or during the day). He was content making $9.50 an hour for 20 hours a week doing the bare minimum.

Photo courtesy of ryaninc

Now anyone who has worked retail knows these guys exist in almost every outlet. Menjamin also brought down every single one of his co-workers to his level (including me, the assistant manager). Fighting this loser on every shift got tiring. I tried sending him home and you can imagine how that went over (hint: he really liked it). Given that we were more bureaucratic than the government, it was nearly impossible to fire the guy for performance reasons.

Now Menjamin was a slacker so he always rolled up late. My brilliant plan was to write him up for coming in late and get him out for misconduct. Nobody else in the store came close to him on tardiness so it wouldn’t be an issue. He was a slacker so it would work. You knew that eventually, the guy would come in hungover and ten minutes late and you’d be able to bust him.

In the first week, our plan worked great. We documented the verbal warning. We gave him a written warning. We gave him a final written warning. “This is it,” I said to myself. “We are finally getting rid of this slacker.”

What happens next? You already know.

The guy shows up early every single day. He never misses a shift. He never calls in. For six straight weeks, I sit in the office and root for him not to show up to work. And every single day, he shows up. His big grin on his face when he clocked in said it all. His overly friendly greeting of “Good evening sir!” rubbed salt in the wound. Menjamin had won. I was rooting for this slacker to screw up just once and in the process had become a bitter, cynical manager. It was the ultimate defeat.

My response to his win over me was measured: I smiled and helped him succeed. And instead of getting frustrated and sending him home, he worked his entire shift (or longer if he didn’t get it done). I stayed with him three hours after one shift to help him do the job he was supposed to complete during his shift. Menjamin grew tired of it the help, the full shifts and the work I stubbornly waited for him to complete instead of letting him ditch work as punishment. He eventually quit and I realized that he was wishing for my failure as well and it became a lot less fun when I stopped cooperating with that.

Did I feel any guilt on wishing him failure? No. He was an albatross around my neck and took up hours I could have given someone else. What I did feel bad about was that I didn’t try to push him to succeed further instead of planning for his demise. The guilt rests in the fact that it took me three months of time to figure this out when I could have approached the real problem head on.

Have you ever wished for failure? Did it work better than this?

I find this search for quantification boring and missing the mark. Here’s my problem: numbers have severe limitations. There’s another issue too: numbers give this false sense of security in judgment. If you are analytical, you can rely on the numbers for too many of your answers. It limits you or allows you to be lazy. If you have a decision to make and the numbers go one way, it is easy to point to that and say yes, do that. When it goes wrong, it is easier to justify the mistake to colleagues when you go with the numbers. It is easier to justify that approach with investors. But here’s what I know, not everything important can be measured.

Player Worth Is More Than A Set Of Numbers

Here’s my handy sports analogy because it works: if you only followed the NBA by watching box scores and knowing the salaries of the players, you would be confused. For example, you’d see that the top salaries were paid to players that scored the most points. As you got further down the list though, the impact of a player’s scoring became less and less of a factor in determining their salary. Meanwhile, you’d see guys pop up on the list who were way down in scoring and had maybe only a couple more rebounds, blocks or steals per game than many of their contemporaries.

It happened everywhere: in every front office, in every city and on every team. Somehow these people were valuable but the numbers didn’t support it. Was everyone in the NBA that bad at evaluating talent?

The Rest Of The Story…

Offense in the NBA is important but so is defense. Unfortunately defense is incredibly hard to quantify in relation to impact. Sure, you had rebounding and block leaders but even those raw statistics didn’t capture what a great defensive player can do to change a game.

Don't mess with this guy.

Take one of my favorite guys from the Blazers named Buck Williams. On paper at least, his extra talent may have impacted 4-6 possessions of a 200 possession game. Why was he a bigger factor than that? Four things that can’t be quantified but were critical:

1. Pulling down more rebounds on defense meant that the wing players could run out the court and get fast break opportunities they couldn’t have received if they had to stay in and help rebound.
2. It made playing man to man defense much easier. If your guy got around you, you knew help was behind to assist. It allowed your other players to play more aggressively on the ball.
3. Simply contesting a rebound impacts the flow of the game. When you fight for the ball on a rebound, you can disrupt the other team’s flow because they have to adjust for the extra time it will take to field the ball.
4. He kept other players away from the basket and when they came close, he was able to contest shots. While an uncontested shot within ten feet may be a gimme, a contested shot had a substantial impact on scoring.

One of the other guys that was good at this was Mark Eaton of the hated Utah Jazz. He seemed to be omnipresent within eight to ten feet of the basket and made inside scoring difficult for any team. His blocking prowess was good but was only two blocks above what other centers were doing in the league. His defensive presence impacted game plans and allowed the Jazz to be a better team than they deserved to be despite fairly average career numbers outside of blocks.

Neither one of these guys are in the basketball hall of fame. Neither are guys like Alvin Robertson, Dennis Johnson, Michael Cooper, Horace Grant and Maurice Cheeks. They probably won’t ever be since that is often a numbers game too. But they made an indelible impact on their teams.

Not Everything That’s Important Can Be Quantified

Not to get too philosophical on you but if you’re married, what’s your ROI? What’s the break even mark for helping your grandma clean out her gutters? Unless you’re crass enough to marry for money or help family members for a slice of inheritance, I am guessing numbers didn’t cross your mind.There is great value there that adds to your life in ways that don’t show up on your bank statement or resume.

Even though we internally realize that many important things can’t be quantified, we still mindlessly pursue quantifying until we find our answer. Why is that? We certainly can’t trash the idea of ROI (we still do rely on money to run our businesses) but we can also focus on important parts of our business that don’t show up on spreadsheets, don’t have a profit margin and won’t show up in EBITDA.

You have to find the Buck Williams’ and Mark Eaton’s of your company and recognize them. Their individual stats may not show it but I guarantee that everyone around them is inexplicably better because they are around. The focus on quantification and supposed fairness has pushed these people out of organizations in some cases.

Are you willing to make that same mistake? Are you going to allow your spreadsheet to dictate a talent evaluation process that really requires deeper investigation than just a cursory glance at numbers?

There are some interesting points to be made here but here is the meat of the criticism:

Strategy 1: It can be extremely taxing to ruin people’s day face to face, so create a little breathing room.

Besides e-mail, companies have been known to fire people by FedEx, registered letter, text message, voice mail and conference call.

Strategy 2: Consider the cattle call. It can build team spirit.

One company herded employees into an auditorium and gave them one of two color-coded information packets. Those with the same color packets sat together. The two groups were then escorted out of the auditorium through different exits. One led back to the office, which meant that group of employees could stay. The other led to the street, which meant the workers should file for unemployment.

Strategy 3: There is no such thing as “too low.” So don’t be afraid to test bottom. One option is to let employees figure things out for themselves.

One company deliberately left a new organizational chart on the photocopy machines. Some employees were left off entirely, and others were moved to new positions.

Strategy 4: Remember, no one is ever too old to play musical chairs.

Some companies in the middle of a merger have asked all employees to resign and reapply for jobs. The goal: to disengage from the old and reinvent the organizational structure – with fewer employees.

Strategy 5: It can be a nice touch when you offer the newly fired a ride home.

It actually can be, unless you’ve organized the corporate equivalent of a funeral procession. One company had cabs lined up around the block before alerting employees on the layoff list of their new jobless status.

Strategy 6: You know what they say: it’s always the quiet ones.So make sure the meek don’t go ballistic.

During a layoff, it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to want to protect its computer files, other property and the remaining employees. But bringing in armed guards, as some companies have done, can be completely dehumanizing. An inconspicuously placed plainclothes security person is far preferable, said Lee Miller, a negotiations expert who used to run HR divisions at three companies.

Obviously most of these companies were misdirected in their ideas of how to do a layoff correctly. There are three easy steps to do a layoff correctly:

1. Don’t put it off. Whenever layoffs are on the table as the option you are going to be taking, just do it. Don’t wait for business to possibly improve. Layoffs are bad but you can prevent more by making your business much more competitive by doing layoffs earlier and reducing future layoffs.
2. Take responsibility. Have executive management there to take responsibility in person for the end result. Apologize and offer a fair package to help move on.
3. Be sensitive. Allow employees to gather belongings and say goodbye to those who are staying. Regroup with the remaining employees and talk to them about the layoffs and concerns they have. It is critical that you don’t shut off the remaining employees from the layoff process. Your future productivity and turnover is dependent on it.

And while layoffs are one of the most heart-wrenching parts of the business, good things can come from them for both the employer and employee.