I’m a little late but finally watched Moneyball and this should be required viewing for managers and HR because there are some great takeaways. I only wish we could make things move as fast when it comes to Human Capital decisions. For example, in Tim Sackett’s post on ‘3 Things HR can Learn from Moneyball’ he talked about straight talk with employees – viewing them as professionals who can take bad news while understanding it’s a business decision. This idea is shown in the following scene from the movie:
Can you imagine if HR could do that? And the point is well made as Brad Pitt states, “Would you rather take one bullet to the head versus five bullets to the chest and bleed to death?” Often Performance Improvement Plans are just that. It’s a document created for compliance purposes even though PIP’s are usually the result of a decision to get rid of someone. That is not how they are intended but they get used that way. So rather than speak frankly with an employee that his or her performance is suffering, behavior is poor, or skills are outdated, we go through processes like PIP which only delays the inevitable decision to cut the person.
This idea leads to the other point of the movie which is talent. How do you select talent when you have roadblocks like budget, skills availability, location, etc.? Dr Jac Fitz-Enz has spent years driving the human capital metrics game with great results but it’s not exactly like baseball where you can be as precise in certain parameters that can precisely define a top talent profile. That’s not to say you can’t – we are much closer today to doing that then twenty years ago, but Moneyball-like results are not quite mainstream HR practice. If you are interested in metrics, here are some links:
Measuring Employees like Moneyball:
http://www.weknownext.com/workforce/how-moneyball-measures-up-as-an-hr-approach
http://www.slideshare.net/jbersin/data-science-and-analytics-in-human-resources-moneyball-comes-to-hr
http://www.shrm.org/Education/hreducation/Documents/Moneyball%20Original%20Article%2045-1.pdf
Ahead of finding the secret Moneyball sauce that will apply consistently to the corporate world; we can say that we are getting closer and closer to the union of individual expertise and interests, and business needs and interests. The faster we bridge these gaps both humanely and mathematically, the higher engagement and retention we will witness—not to mention profits.
