The best professional sports organizations form their teams through a combination of four key types of players:
- Franchise Players: Able to create successful outcomes despite adversity.
- Threats: Unrefined, energetic, high-potential risk-takers.
- Vets: Veteran members who are dependable and can mentor threats.
- Role Players: Specialized players who fill a team’s missing gaps.
Software engineering departments can follow this pattern as well. The teams that have the most impactful franchise players typically outperform their competitors. To develop franchise players internally, you need a mix of threats and vets. Threats bring fresh ideas and optimism, boosting the team’s capacity to experiment. Vets provide the experience needed to shape and execute these ideas. Together, they create a culture where creativity meets practicality, helping to develop your threats into the team’s next generation of franchise players.
A Balanced Approach to Integrating External Talent
Throwing big salaries at top players from other organizations isn’t the only way to build a great team. In addition to compensation, top talent seeks roles that offer meaningful impact, personal growth, and resonate with their values. To truly attract and retain these individuals, it’s important to provide opportunities that promise a paycheck and a chance to contribute to something significant.
External veterans can bring invaluable experience and fill specific skill gaps, yet their integration into the team must be handled with care to preserve team harmony. They often arrive with their own experience, which can clash with your team’s established practices. This clash can lead to disagreements, as external vets might be convinced their way is the best way, potentially disrupting the team’s dynamics.
However, this isn’t to dismiss the value of hiring external veterans. When done thoughtfully, they can be a great asset, especially when mentoring newcomers and enhancing the team’s skill set. The key is to ensure these external hires are not only skilled but also a good cultural fit, willing to respect the existing team’s dynamics. Strategies for balanced integration include:
- Structured Mentorship Programs: Design programs that pair external hires with internal team members, facilitating a two-way exchange of knowledge and culture.
- Emphasizing Cultural Fit During Hiring: Determine cultural compatibility during interviews to ensure external veterans can seamlessly integrate and uphold the company’s values.
- Positive Reinforcement of Team Dynamics: Encourage external hires to share their knowledge and perspectives while also being open to learning from the existing team.
Another important consideration is that many teams will have skill gaps that constrain their effectiveness. Hiring specialized role players can remove those constraints for your team. You may even have those role players already in your organization working on other teams. You can spread their expertise across multiple teams if those skill sets are lacking. I remember, on a previous project, borrowing a network engineer from a different team to cover for a lack of specialization when we were setting up our new cloud environment. Having this person was instrumental to us getting the job done quickly.
If you can properly manage the lack of cultural fit risk when adding experienced/role-playing people from the outside, you’re set up for good short-term performance. To build a team that’s stronger than conventional teams, it’s important to develop franchise players.
Develop Your Own Franchise Players
In the world of sports, the value of having franchise players is obvious. Icons like Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, etc made their organizations dominant. It’s hard to put a price tag on their contributions because they brought so much value. Most franchise players lost a step or two when they moved on to a new organization (there are some notable exceptions). Developing franchise players is more reliable than buying them. Although it requires a lot of patience.
Developing threats into franchise players from within ensures they embody the organization’s culture and goals. This internal development has a much lower risk of culture clashes than hiring externally does. To reliably develop these talents requires a mix of threats and vets.
If your team is full of potential but needs senior guidance, bring in veterans. Companies like Pragmint can serve as the vets, offering the wisdom and direction to nurture your internal talent without having a conflicting interest in how the culture evolves. Conversely, if you’re rich in experience but short on new innovative energy, consider launching an apprenticeship program. These programs are perfect for spotting threats with the raw potential to become your next franchise players. Pragmint has an apprenticeship program and has helped clients start their own. If you have questions about what an apprenticeship program could or should look like, reach out.
Try to take a step back and ask yourself if your teams have the right mix of threats, vets, and role-players required to get the job done in the short-term while building the next generation of franchise players.