Problem: Management Decision
Do You Assemble a Team of Stars or Ordinary Players? What criteria will you use to assemble a work team?144 Is a team composed of all-stars better than one composed of ordinary players? Recall that the United States baseball team that included Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Johnny Damon lost to Mexico, South Korea, and Canada and failed to reach the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic. The 2004 U.S. Olympic basketball team consisting of NBA star players fi nished third and lost to Lithuania. How could a Fortune 500 company that was run by a brilliant former McKinsey consultant and that only hired graduates of America's elite business schools dissolve into fraud and bankruptcy? It happened at Enron. "Some of the worst teams I've ever seen have been those where everybody was a potential CEO," says David Nadler, chief of the Mercer Delta consulting fi rm, who has worked with executive teams for more than 30 years. The most important lesson about team performance is that the basic theory of the dream team is wrong, says Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor at Fortune. Consider the 1980 U.S. hockey team that beat the Soviets at the Lake Placid Olympics; it was built entirely on anti-dream-team principles. Coach Herb Brooks based his picks on personal chemistry: "I'm not looking for the best players, I'm looking for the right players," he said at the time. CEO John McConnell of Worthington Industries, the Ohio-based steel processor, says, "Give us people who are dedicated to making the team work, as opposed to a bunch of talented people with big egos, and we'll win every time." That's the philosophy that powers teams such as the New England Patriots, which is only the second team in NFL history to win three Super Bowls in four years.
Questions: 1. Briefly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of assembling a team composed of (a) star players, and (b) ordinary players.
2. If you were to include star players on your team, what should you do to make sure the team is not dysfunctional and is able to perform as well as expected? Explain.