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The New York Knicks and the New York Yankees – What Can They Teach Us About HR?

Written by: Jennifer Loftus

Article Overview: With basketball season about to head into playoffs and baseball season just about to start, it's a very exciting time in the world of sports. It's also very exciting to see just exactly what professional sports can teach us in HR.

The New York Knicks and the New York Yankees – What Can They Teach Us About HR?

I say it’s more important that a coach hold guys accountable and treat them all the same than it is for him or her to be a fountain of information about the technicalities of a specific game. It always helps to have a technical genius but I’ll take a coach with the proper people and communication skills every day over one without.

But I also say the best coaches are flexible and willing to examine their own theories and beliefs on a continual basis if it means his team responds to what he’s trying to cajole them into doing. I’d take a leader over a dictator. A charismatic manipulator over a bully. A Jim Boeheim type over a Bobby Knight type (and both those guys, for example, are excellent coaches who get great results but by using quite different methods). Sekou Smith | Thursday, January 4, 2007, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Great managers recognize our natural talent, our True Colors, and bring this out. They don't worry about the weaker colors. They know people don't change. You are born with your talents, they can not be learned. You just use them naturally and get great satisfaction when using them. Great managers recognize this talent in an individual even before the individual does.

Great managers don't worry about the employee's weaknesses. They have learned to build a team where the skills needed in your last color are provided by others where this is their strength. Emil K. Kalil, Ph.D. “Follow Your True Colors To The Work You Love”

If you live in the metropolitan New York area, you know that sports teams are a big part of life. There are two baseball teams (Mets and Yankees), two basketball teams (Knicks and Nets), two football teams (Giants and Jets), and three hockey teams (Islanders, Rangers, and Devils). The New York market provides for some of the most passionate fans, some of the harshest media coverage, and some of the biggest names in sports. But having big name players on your team is not the key to building a winning team. Being able to properly manage these players – an exercise in Human Resource Management – and bring in the right players to win are the way that champions are born and money is made in the New York sports market.

The Yankees that came out of the 1980s were a mess. In the 1970s they had the “Bronx Zoo” with players fighting in the dugout and Billy Martin, the manager of the Yankees, constantly being fired and rehired. The 1980s featured the Yankees’ impulsive owner, former ship tycoon George Steinbrenner, spending the team’s money on any and every player with a big name, but producing little results. The last straw was early 1990s suspension of Steinbrenner from baseball for hiring someone to dig up dirt to discredit Dave Winfield, a player on his own team. As detailed by Buster Olney in The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: “Steinbrenner would not be around to impetuously override the judgment of his baseball executives. He had changed general managers 14 times in his 17 years as owner of the Yankees, but now it appeared [General Manager Gene] Michael would have carte blanche for at least a couple of years, maybe longer.”

After years of reckless management, the Yankees needed not only careful managing, but some stability which Michael, as well as his appointed manager, Buck Showalter, intended to provide. They didn’t just sign free agents because of their names, they signed them because of how they fit into the clubhouse, their personalities, how they could handle the pressure of New York. Instead of treating the team like a car collection, they treated it like running a business from a Human Resources perspective. They started to develop people from within and surrounded them with people who fit in well from other organizations. They added Paul O’Neill and David Cone to a team that already had a young Bernie Williams and an aging leader in Don Mattingly. And from within they developed players such as Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada. When Steinbrenner came back into power, he replaced Michael and Showalter (replacing the latter with New York native, Joe Torre), but the seeds of their work had already been planted. To date the Yankees have made the playoffs in twelve straight seasons, which included four out of five World Series wins from 1996-2000, and, even after their so-called dynasty had ended, trips to the World Series in 2001 and 2003. But, as detailed by Buster Olney’s book, after the 2001 playoffs ended in failure, Steinbrenner went back to his old ways of buying players, and despite nine straight American League East titles and enormous payrolls over $200 million – higher than any other major league team – the Yankees have not won a championship since.

The New York Knicks would make the NBA finals as an eighth seed in 1999 but before the 2000 season, they traded Patrick Ewing in one of the most ill-fated deals in NBA history. It was not the trade itself but the “series of unfortunate transactions”, as Steve Kerr points out, that doomed the Knicks. Instead of letting Ewing’s contract expire and rebuilding the team, they made their star player from the past decade feel unwanted, overcompensated by paying Allan Houston $100 million despite bad knees, and started the team off on a series of bad contracts. To make it even worse, the Knicks brought in Isiah Thomas, a high-profile former NBA player to be their General Manager. He has not only filled the team with huge contracts to saddle the Knicks for many years, but also filled the locker room with players who do not fit well together, do not work hard, and do not care about winning.

Isiah Thomas also embarrassed the team off-court also with a sexual harassment suit and a public feud with former — and future Hall of Fame — coach Larry Brown. A manager who has led his company to bad performance and has also created a bad public image to the outside world would usually be fired. But Cablevision boss, James Dolan, continues to keep Thomas around, even defending his actions. Yet, as pointed out by Forbes magazine, the Knicks are the most valuable team in the NBA, have the second-highest revenue in the NBA, and yet somehow lost over $50 million last season. Forbes created a “wins to player cost ratio” in which 100 would be player cost even to win level; the Knicks scored a 42. In Forbes ranking of the worst-valued players, the Knicks were home to six of the bottom seven.

Two winters ago, Steinbrenner gave General Manager Brian Cashman free reigns over the staff of the Yankees team. An unprecedented move for Steinbrenner, this showed a faith in Cashman. Unlike Thomas, Cashman has been heralded as a good executive who has the Yankees going in the right direction. Despite another first round exit by the Yankees this past season, few would call this team a laughing stock; yet that is just the title many have given to Thomas’ Knicks, another team with managerial free reign.

The Knicks and Yankees can both take a lesson from Madison Square Garden’s other team, the New York Rangers. When forced to comply with budget restrictions after last year’s institution of a salary cap in hockey, the Ranges made a team of passionate players who would work hard and reinstall integrity to a franchise that had not been in the playoffs for a long while. Although the Rangers also fell in the first round last year, many predicted them to finish last. Their intensity throughout the season brought life back to a sport which had not even been played the season before. The Knicks, and managers in similar situations, should look towards the Rangers’ model as a way to manage their team back to greatness.

The key difference in the success, or lack thereof, with New York sports teams comes down to the difference between what it means to be a leader and what it means to be a manger. According to Leadershipdirect there are many differences:

* Leaders direct, managers execute.
* Management is like investment – getting the best return from all resources – your own energy, talent, and time plus all other resources at your disposal.
* Management requires efficiency, profitability, and depends on minimal inputs for maximum returns.
* To manage well, regularly review your priorities, just as you would your investments.
* The same person can both lead and manage – they are different functions.
* Managers are like sports coaches – they inspire and develop people to get the best performance out of them.
* Managers provide structure and measure output.
* Leaders champion change. They may or may not manage people.
* Management is a role, a set of responsibilities.
* Leadership is not a role. It is an occasional act, like creativity.


Hence it is vital to differentiate between leadership and management. The former serves the function of finding a new direction, the latter the function of getting us there efficiently. While one person can, in principle, perform both functions, only one person would normally be the manager of a group. Conversely, leadership can be shown by all and it can shift from one person to another rapidly in any given context. The New York Knicks are an example of when there is both poor leadership and management. The New York Yankees are an example of strong management but weak leadership. To be successful in a sports franchise and in today’s competitive business world there must be those who are strong at both.

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Article Tags: atlanta journal constitution, baseball teams, basketball teams, bobby knight, building a winning team, continual basis, football teams, hockey teams, islanders, jim boeheim, kalil, knicks, manipulator, metropolitan new york, passionate fans, sports teams, technical genius, technicalities, those guys, true colors



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