The Importance of Turnover
December 8, 2008
We in North America love our sports metaphors. I was reminded of that recently when I was speaking with the president of a successful and relatively forward-thinking security company, and he was telling me about his management philosophy.
“I want the people on my team to stick around. I mean, look at the New England Patriots – you think they build a dynasty with huge amounts of turnover? Nope – they kept the core of that team intact over the years.”
Well, I personally don’t agree with his stance. I have always believed that teams that stay together for too long lose the freshness and innovativeness that is required for success in these times. I heard a great quote (attributed to Tom Peters) recently:
“If the rate of change outside your organization is greater than the rate of change inside your organization, then the end is near.”
Brilliant. And true (in my experience).
But not in the opinion of my colleague. Nor, in the opinion of the New England Patriots, apparently.
But I’m a football fan as well, and something about that didn’t smell right.
So, I put together some research on the matter. And it showed exactly what I’d expect – the New England Patriots are a dynasty not because they keep their core together, but because they have built a system that manages turnover.
To summarize the research: from 2003-2008, the Patriots had approximately 33% turnover among staff and players – that is, the entire team could be expected to be replaced EVERY 3 YEARS. Yet they remained competitive during that time.
In fact, only 13 players TOTAL (3 offensive, 5 defensive, and 5 coaches) were on the team for all five of those years. (And they’re hardly “core”, unless one considers the long snapper and the running backs coach “core”). The two most important of those are Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, and even Brady’s importance has been minimized this year, given the play of Matt Cassel in the same system.
More importantly, when you look at the coaches, the turnover has all been where it would be presumed to be most important: at the top. The team has used 3 offensive coordinators and 3 defensive coordinators in those 5 years – in product development terms, that’s like switching VPs of Marketing and Engineering 3 times in 5 years.
So, I assert that the New England Patriots make my point: the reason that a company (or a football team) is successful isn’t its ability to avoid turnover, but its ability to create (esp. talent development and knowledge capture) systems and (most importantly) a culture that minimizes the impact of turnover.
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5 Responses to “The Importance of Turnover”
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Interesting. I wonder if government jobs would also be subject to this idea.
The military clearly believes this as do most serious management-training programs. I hypothesize that the inverse is also true, though — that if the rate of change inside the organization is greater than the rate of change outside than the end is near. In other words, it is possible to turnover too much, as in so many things, balance is the key.
Innovativeness? Mike – creative language is creative but innovativeness is not an innovative word. And relationships that last more than ten minutes do not necessarily go stale – whether they are couples or teams. Change for the sake of change often looks like innovation when it really just creates a lot of activity without a lot of productivity. Let’s dig deeper for the model of what is really making the difference between churn and innovation.
You couldn’t be more right. All the research says exactly what you’re saying. Studies show that keeping the same team in place results in groupthink, lack of creativity, conflict avoidance, etc. You can execute more rapidly with a tight, closely knit team than with a new team, but the ideas will often lack the quality from a new team.
My experience is exactly the opposite– the more turnover you have, the less likely you are to succeed. If people are jumping ship at this rate you have a management problem, and perhaps staff issues to boot. The idea that you have to get your innovation from outside your group points directly to your problem. Innovation comes from keeping your staff up to date in current practices, having a flexible and adaptable team structure (keep mixing things up), and from simply *expecting* creativity. If you’re dumping a significant percentage of your staff every year, you’re wasting resources constantly retraining the latest suckers (do you tell people you hire they’re not going to be around long?), you’ll be very unlikely to be able to carry out long-term projects with any consistency, and you’re blaming your employees for your own inability to keep innovation going. Trying to attain innovation through turnover is just lazy management.