Hidden Talents, Winning Teams (part 2)
Understanding the Threshold Effect
In our last post, we posed a simple but perplexing question: How is it that two athletes as different as soccer player Roberto Firmino and basketball player PJ Tucker experienced so much success for so long, despite unspectacular abilities in the primary responsibilities of their respective roles? And what does this success have to teacher business leaders and team builders?
Today we will begin to articulate an answer.
First, let’s back up to 2018. As mentioned last week, Liverpool in 2018 lost perhaps their most skilled and creative player, Phillippe Coutinho, yet somehow became better. How?
The simple answer: better defense. The more nuanced answer: Coach Jurgen Klopp’s famed “gegenpress,” in which the entire team defended aggressively as soon as it lost the ball, attempting to win it near the other team’s goal and immediately go to score.
“No playmaker in the world,” Klopp said more than once, “can be as good as a good gegenpress.”
Even though he played center forward, a role normally associated with scoring goals above all else, Firmino’s true value was in his defensive contribution.
The answer for PJ Tucker is similar. His Houston Rockets teams were successful by shooting more 3 point shots than any other team in the league–even if they didn’t make them at an above-average level, the higher points-per-shot tilted the math in their favor over the course of a game–and playing a tough, hard-nosed, “switching” brand of defense in which every player needed to be able to guard every other player on the court.
As the team’s starting center, PJ Tucker needed to be able to defend the other team’s biggest players and rebound missed shots–the core responsibilities of every center in the NBA–but he also needed to be able to guard smaller, quicker players, and shoot three point shots on the other end of the floor.
We could look to other team sports and see similar trends. American football is perhaps the most specialized team sport in the world. Each position has its own techniques, vocabulary, coaching teams, training methods, subcultures, and more. And yet one coach in the modern NFL has repeatedly turned quarterbacks into receivers, receivers into defensive backs, defensive backs into safeties, etc., both in situational spot-duty and as semi-permanent changes based on team needs. That coach is Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, the dominant coach of the modern era. Promoting positional flexibility allows him to confuse teams with unexpected wrinkles on both offense and defense, overcome injuries more effectively, and make the most out of a limited roster.
In his best-seller Range, David Epstein challenged the famous “10,000 hour rule” of elite performance, and advocated late specialization rather than early specialization in everything from sports to arts to academics to scientific research to career choices. He found that, in nearly every field, elite performers are less likely to follow the path of Tiger Woods—golf prodigy by age 2, best player in the world by age 21—than they are that of Roger Federer, who dabbled in over a dozen sports before specializing in tennis as an adolescent.
Teams, he continued, do better by having members with a range of backgrounds and interests and specializations. Even better than a team with a diverse range of specialists, though, is a team full of individuals who each have a range of skills. Those teams derive the greatest insights and the most effective solutions.
But it is not really accurate to call Firmino, Tucker, or Belichick’s New England Patriots players “generalists,” in the pure sense. Firmino, for example, may not have been the best attacking player in the English Premier League…but he was good enough to hold his own against the best defenders on earth. He wasn’t Ronaldo, but he was still in the top 0.001% of attacking soccer players in the world. PJ Tucker was able to regularly hold his own against the biggest, strongest, most athletic and most skilled basketball players in the world—not really something an average “generalist” can do.
In each of their primary job descriptions, they had to hit a minimum bar, to complete the tasks required of them competently and consistently. And that “minimum bar,” in their cases, was quite a high bar! Very, very few people in the world could hit that minimum bar. And the 99.9% of people in the world who could not hit that minimum bar were not candidates for their positions.
But, of the 0.1% of people who could reach that minimum bar, the difference in effectiveness was not primarily in individuals’ ability to complete their primary responsibilities. Once they could complete their tasks competently (once again–not easy to do!), success came down to their other non-core skills–e.g. defending for Firmino, shooting for Tucker.
This matches the research into elite performance in business and academia. In numerous studies, it has been found that an IQ of ~120 or so is helpful for strong performance in several highly complex professions. A score of 140, however, offers minimal benefit over a score of 120. Creative geniuses in arts and literature, when tested, have shown similar IQ scores, with additional IQ points once again showing little added benefit.
This consistent finding has led to what is currently known as “threshold theory,” the idea that above a certain level of ability, the impact of any one skill (such as cognitive reasoning) on performance becomes limited.
I (Jay) have seen this phenomenon with the graduates of my high school. I was lucky enough to attend a very small, extremely high-performing high school. The median SAT score of my graduating class was above 1400–a level that currently 5% of American high school students achieve, and fewer reached in those days.
Our principal frequently told us that the most successful alumni from the school were often those who struggled through with middling grades, rather than those who achieved consistent A’s. We mostly didn’t believe him. After all, there was a direct relationship between the grades earned and the prestige of the universities graduates attended, and the data across the United States shows a very strong relationship between high school grades and career success.
Now, more than twenty years after graduating high school, I can say for certain that he was 100% correct. There is no clear correlation between high school grades and adult success–if anything, there is a slight inverse relationship, as he predicted.
What would explain such an unusual phenomenon? Threshold theory. Among this group of particularly high-achieving students, everyone’s academic performance was good enough to be removed as a barrier to success, and other qualities (work ethic, interests and priorities, luck) played a larger role.
So what are the implications of this finding for building teams?
First of all, there is more than one way to build a successful team. We will not say that we should over index for threshold theory in every role–sometimes being better at your specific role really is the most important thing!
But in many cases, we can achieve just as strong results without the same superstar talent, by following a two-step process. We can begin by limiting our selection to those who fit the minimum performance bar for the primary responsibilities, and then make our selection among those that meet this bar, based on other factors. We should not necessarily base our selection of CEO’s primarily on strategic vision, of CFO on financial management skills, of CTO on technical expertise, etc. As long as the candidates hit a certain level in their core skills, we can use other criteria to select.
Notably, these other criteria should not be vague things like “how much do I like this person?” or “do they seem like a good fit for how we generally do things around here?” Instead, we should be thoughtful and intentional about the secondary skills and tasks that will impact the person’s contribution to the team, and come to a clear-eyed view of how well they are likely to fulfill these secondary roles, and how much value that contribution entails.
Here is one example. Harvard Business Review published a report in 2017 on the four behaviors that set the most successful CEO’s apart–speed of decision-making, stakeholder engagement, proactive adaptation over the long term, and reliability. Top performers tended to consistently exhibit at least two of these behaviors, while just 5% of lower performers did. Notably, academic performance had no correlation with success, and integrity and work ethic were “table stakes”--not distinguishing factors separating the best from the rest.
Finally, this perspective provides an opportunity to view our internal development efforts from a new and exciting lens. The important secondary skills individuals need to succeed are often much easier to develop later in life than the primary, technical skills. Firmino was never going to become a significantly better scorer or playmaker in his mid-20’s. But given the right attention, effort and support, he could become significantly better at fulfilling his role in the gegenpress. An executive with twenty years of strategy experience may have maxed out on his or her strategic thinking abilities. But if this executive has put less effort over the years into developing top-level stakeholder communication skills, this becomes an area that can drive real performance improvements.
As we think about our own performance and the performance of our teams, let us not become overly myopic, focused only on the core skills associated with a role. By widening our aperture, we can find and create more value in more places.
Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team
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