In 1999, the Washington Redskins signed some of the most recognized offensive and defensive stars in the NFL. But despite adding Hall of Fame talent, the Redskins ended up losing as many games as they won that season.
Often in business as well, a company will bring in a star—or a fresh batch of talent—hoping their new employees’ skills will help them rise to the top. But then it doesn’t happen. Why? Past research clearly shows the benefits of high-performing workers. For highly complex jobs, the top 1% of employees tends to outperform average workers by 127%. In fact, researchers have uncovered the disproportionate effects of talent in nearly every industry. Cleary, then, organizations should be trying to gain as many superstars as possible.
In actuality, however, stars don’t always perform as well as they—and the companies wooing them—think they will. It largely comes down to how portable a person’s skills are. What does that mean? In the early 1960s, the economist Gary Becker identified two types of human capital: general skills, which have potential value to many employers, and company-specific skills, which are useful to a single employer. General human capital, therefore, raises portability. And company-specific capital erodes it.
The question becomes, are some jobs inherently more portable than others? This would lead to some people developing more portable skills than others, which in turn would make these people more likely to succeed in new environments.
To examine this question, Boris Groysberg, a professor at the Harvard Business School; Robin Abrahams, a research associate also at HBS; and Lex Sant, a managing director of Persimmon Tree Capital, investigated workers different than those usually studied: professional football players. The labor market of the National Football League actually provides a great laboratory. All "companies"—that is, teams—engage in identical work. All teams have the same job positions. Success can be quantified from game statistics, and employee moves are a matter of public record. The obvious choice would have been to study quarterbacks, but the best NFL quarterbacks, such as Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, rarely change teams. So the researchers focused on star wide receivers and punters, comparing the performance of players who switched teams with that of those who did not.
Wide receivers interact a lot with their teammates. They must be fast and agile enough to escape defensive players, but also run specific routes based on timing and calculated distances. They also have to catch balls thrown by quarterbacks who themselves are under duress from charging defensive players, and they have to elude the defensive backs chasing them.
Punters, on the other hand, engage in the simple but difficult act of kicking a football. How far a punter kicks a ball depends almost entirely on the player’s individual strength and skill. Punters usually practice by themselves and, even when the best punters switch teams, few sports pundits take notice. Are punters, then, more portable than wide receivers?
Yes, according to the study results. Punters move more than twice as often as wide receivers: The turnover rate for star punters during the 10 years studied was 19.4%, compared with only 8.3% for star wide receivers. This also raises the question of whether wide receivers are, in fact, aware of the risk of changing teams, given the extent to which their performance is based on teamwork.
It’s a given that pro athletes’ performances decline as they age. However, those who moved saw their performance drop much more steeply. For wide receivers who switched teams, the average number of receptions, receiving yards and receiving touchdowns all declined compared to those who stayed put. Interestingly, the performance of those who moved stabilized after a year, which suggests that they adjusted—they rebuilt the team-specific capital they had lost with the move to the new team.
Punters, on the other hand, can take it with them. The punters who switched teams did not perform any differently than those who did not. And the performance of those who did move remained stable—it didn’t improve after spending time with the new team.
Overall, the research suggests that simply adding talent to the mix doesn’t always yield the results managers might hope for, at least not in the short term. Many skills that might at first glance appear portable—whether for NFL players or portfolio managers or sales account reps—can, in fact, be difficult to transfer. Companies must consider to what degree a person’s job relies on tacit knowledge specific to an individual company, and how interdependent that job is with respect to the work of others.