Baseball season is underway in the US, and with that in mind, I thought I would focus on a metric that is increasingly being used in baseball to assess player value, and link it to how you should think about your own value. I do so with apologies to non-baseball fans and those outside the US who find the sport baffling.
From the time Billy Beane of the Oakland As transformed how players are assessed, (which you may know from the book or movie versions of Moneyball), baseball has had a growing love affair with new types of player statistics.
One of these is known as Wins Above Replacement. The concept is fairly simple, in the sense that it is a forecast of how many more wins your team will get with Player X on your team vs. readily available alternatives. Those available alternatives could include other players on your team who could play that position or players not currently on your team that you could sign. The more positive the number, the more valuable the player to your team.
Implicit in this measure are a few components:
- How good is the player?
- How do they make your team’s other players better?
- Who is available to replace that player?
I talk to people all the time who don’t feel that their contributions are being properly valued by their employers. Most of the time, these people eventually move to a different role in the company or leave all together, so the topic of, “What am I worth?” is definitely top of mind, even for those of us who aren’t professional athletes.
The world of work rarely offers the volume of data that could be used to calculate your value in a metric like Wins Above Replacement, but the spirit of the metric is a good way to think about it. Your absolute value is important, but perhaps more important is your relative value compared to other options, i.e.,
- Who else could do your job if you left, either someone in the company already or someone who the company could hire?
- How do you make your peers and broader organization better?
- How much better a choice are you for your role over alternatives (and why)?
You can consider similar questions about your team members if you are a manager:
- What would I do if Person X left? Do I have a viable internal alternative? Are there likely to be available external alternatives?
- How long would it take for an alternative to be as good as or better than the person currently in this role?
Essentially, these questions allow you to frame value both from the perspective of the individual and the manager or company. The answers to these questions will help you better assess your (or your team members’) relative value and, by extension, the negotiating leverage of each party as related to role, compensation, reporting lines, special projects, etc.
As an individual, your focus should be on increasing both your absolute value, but being mindful of your relative value as well. (But please don’t drive up your relative value by forcing out the alternatives!)
As a manager, your focus should be on having good back-up (succession) plans for your team. Having attractive or even passable options – especially in the near-term – is sometimes a challenge, but you reduce the risk of being in a vulnerable position by actively developing those alternatives. You also put yourself in a position to support a team member’s advancement, should a good opportunity arise for them, without it jeopardizing your broader team’s performance.
Are you thinking about your own value in this way? If you’re a manager, are you actively developing succession plans for your team members? We’d love to hear your feedback on what you do specifically. Feel free to share your thoughts by writing to us at info@pathwise.io. We’ll then share a summary with the broader member group.
JR Lowry and the PathWise team
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