Rebooting Work: Adopting Meritocracy Over Entitlement

Guest blog by Maynard Webb, excerpted from his New York Times best selling book, Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship.

Each year more than 1.1 million American high school students play football. The best of them, the star quarterbacks, running backs, linebackers, and linemen, dream of scoring scholarships to play college ball, but only twenty thousand—just 6 percent of seniors on the team—will play their freshman year of college. By their final year, that number dwindles to fifteen thousand athletes. Only 255 of those elite players are drafted to the NFL. The chance of making it to the pros if you play in high school? A very small number: a mere 0.08 percent.

And if you think that once players make it to the pros they can take a rest, think again. Every player in the NFL must get revoted on to the team every year. No one can buy his way on to the team. It’s a model of ruthless efficiency that ensures that every player brings his A-game every time he steps onto the field. It’s a system that makes football an incredible game to watch.

Management Lessons from the NFL

I’ve always been inspired by sports, and throughout my career have taken the lessons I learned playing football and baseball growing up, as well as what I’ve witnessed through following professional sports, into the work world. Team dynamics and the importance of learning to win—and lose—gracefully were invaluable lessons to me in building my career. Further, the need to get voted on to the team every day inspired me to demand the most from myself and my teams. I have found that being transparent about performance—a tactic learned from studying baseball stats—let people know where they stood and inspired a continuous quest for improvement.

What I’m talking about is meritocracy: a system that rewards individuals based on performance and results. It’s an idea that carries weight for employees in the workplace. There also are benefits for companies that operate on this principle by committing to being open and transparent about their performance. (For example, a website should publish real-time information about its availability and system performance time, as eBay does with its announcement board or as salesforce.com does with its Trust Site.)

But what I’ve also found is that although we have some great examples of companies that are transparent about their performance, overall, most corporations don’t follow these tenets when it comes to how they evaluate or treat their employees. In fact, traditional company culture is quite the opposite of a performance-based meritocracy. Historically—meaning in the past fifty or so years—loyalty was given higher priority than achievements and results. Outside of sales organizations, goals, and ways to measure goals, were not always clear. How an individual was performing and how she stacked up against others were not often transparent.

Making Work Work Better

Although one would expect the rules of the ball park to be different from the rules of the office park, I found that by ignoring what made sports so great—essentially its functioning as a meritocracy—we were missing out on an opportunity to make work work better. The desire for security trumped the drive to be spectacular. Everyone played it too safe. And this has stymied both employees and employers.

How come as a society we support a model that embraces meritocracy—in which the best athletes, those with the best skills, are known and rise to the top—but we don’t demand a similar model at work? Generally speaking, we accept this system in school, where grades are based on performance against one’s peers, not just on showing up to class. How is it that at work we fear systems that allow us to see how we are doing compared to others, that motivate us to do better work every day, and that reward us for our meaningful contributions instead of our blind commitment? Why are both employees and employers so afraid of operating in a meritocracy, which rewards them for how well they perform, not for how long they’ve been performing?

At work, both employees and employers often fall into an entitlement mentality. For example, some employers do everything they can to keep the talent inside their walls hidden from everyone else, lest they be ‘‘poached.’’ They feel as though they know what is best for the employee and must make sure that the employee knows how to be successful in their company. Employees who leave are often shunned as being disloyal. For employees, there’s an expectation that they will be given a job, and as long as they are doing okay, they expect to keep it. By keeping their head down, doing a mediocre job, and not being a problem, they believe they will be rewarded.

A Meritocracy Breeds Transparency

I have always been amazed by how managers seldom actually want to have truthful discussions about how someone is performing, even when that individual is doing great. As a manager, I have often implemented informal weekly and formal quarterly check-ins in an effort to force a dialogue and prevent a big disconnect at the end of the year for many employees, when they find out they were not doing as well as their perception led them to believe. Think of all the wasted time and productivity when we give performance feedback only on a yearly basis. The world doesn’t operate on this type of clock anymore. When everything is happening in real time, even my formal quarterly meetings seem grossly inadequate. As a board member of a well-known technology company, I witnessed a once well-respected CEO lose the trust of his board and employees in less than ten days. In the current business environment, the idea of an annual review is so antiquated, it’s comical. We live in a world in which countries have been toppled in months, or even days, but certainly not years. It’s a world in which much is decided instantaneously, and the workplace must adapt.

Yet we are very far from this kind of culture. How can work be so out of touch with the way the rest of the world is headed?

I’m a strong proponent of meritocracy, of the value of hard work over entitlement, of talent over tenure, and of transparency over closed systems, probably because of where I came from—and because of where I am today. I believe that many executives hold these beliefs. I have gained significant freedom by embracing a mind-set of meritocracy. I’ve seen what it can inspire, unlock, and unleash, and I’ve also seen how the opposite—an organization that supports entitlement over results—can limit growth and opportunity.

Unlike the past when you got news and information from only one or two sources and a couple of times a day, today you get information in real time and from multiple sources. There is no place to hide. You can hope to keep problems in-house, but you’re unlikely to succeed. Problems do not get better with time; they get far worse. They spin out of control faster today than ever before. The only way to deal with this is to be open and transparent. If you have a problem, admit it, apologize, and fix it. No one expects perfection, but they do expect honesty. Now, meritocracy over entitlement is the only way. We are in a new age—one that is more transparent thanks to the Internet and one that is being defined by a new generation of workers who grew up with more technology and a more entrepreneurial mind-set.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship by Maynard Webb and Carlye Adler. Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.