Our country recently had the chance to witness corporate America functioning at its worst when the NFL locked out their referees and hastily filled their positions with replacements. Football may be a sport but it is also an incredibly lucrative business, and the NFL is very much a corporate entity.
As we watched the inexperienced replacement refs struggle to control the games and miss a number of major calls, we wondered how much money was worth the NFL risking the safety of its players and damaging the reputation of their brand. As it turns out, the amount of money the NFL team owners and the regular referees were fighting over was negligible compared to the annual profit the NFL rakes in each year.
No, the fight between the NFL and the referees wasn’t really about money. It was about power. The owners were offended that the referees asked for increased salaries and benefits and decided to demonstrate how insignificant they actually were by replacing them. Once the replacements were shown to be just as good at officiating football games as the regular refs, they reasoned, the regulars would stop fighting the owners.
Well, things didn’t exactly work out the way the owners thought they would. To put it kindly, the owners learned two valuable lessons. First, NFL referees are a highly-trained, skilled bunch and it is extremely hard to replace them. Second, the referees serve a vital role in every NFL game – and thus a vital role in producing the billions of dollars a year in football revenue that keeps the owners “in the money.” Unfortunately the NFL, like many other companies in corporate America, had to learn these lessons the hard way.
Many companies, especially in times like these when the economy is struggling, focus too much on how much their employees are costing them while losing sight of the value each employee contributes to the company.
Early in his career, my brother worked for a firm where every executive board meeting started with all present bashing the guy in Atlanta who was the company’s top producer by far. And by “top producer by far,” I mean this guy was responsible for bringing in a quarter of the company’s annual business.
My brother would scratch his head and wonder why they were giving this guy such a hard time when what they should have been giving him was a nice raise and a pat on the back. Clearly they were focusing too much on his annual salary and too little on how much annual business he created for the company each year.
Unfortunately it happens all the time in corporate America. Egos often cause people’s otherwise sound judgment to become clouded. The company tries to replace their valuable, high-salary employees with someone willing to do the job for half the money. The problem is, that person doesn’t usually add nearly the value to the company that the previous employee did. Then the company learns the painful lesson that you don’t really realize what you have until it’s gone.
Fortunately for the NFL and all of us fans, the regular referees are back. We don’t usually get a second chance in life, so we and the NFL should enjoy it and the rest of the football season. (Go Redskins!)
Have a great weekend,
Ro