Wall Street Journal, When Being a Good Co-worker Pays $22 Million':
Hard data is one way to measure employee performance. But so are soft skills. They’re the reason a role player is now the highest-paid player on his NBA team.
The beginning of free agency in the National Basketball Association each summer is the annual spectacle in which billions of dollars get distributed in a few hours. And the most resonant deal in this year’s spending bonanza involved a player many sports fans have never heard of.
He’s not a superstar. He wasn’t a starter for his own team last season. He doesn’t have particularly great stats, either. Even his salary was average: There were roughly 200 players in the league paid more last season than Bruce Brown.
But his value has changed in surprising and revealing ways since he was on the job market a year ago.
Minutes into the opening of free agency two weeks ago, the Indiana Pacers won a battle for his services by offering Brown a two-year deal potentially worth $45 million. His salary of $22 million next season is not just a massive pay raise. It’s more than Brown made in his five previous seasons combined. In fact, if the team exercises its option for the second year, the deal will have tripled his career earnings.
And the most remarkable part of his improbable contract is that Brown now has something in common with the NBA’s most recognizable names: He will be the highest-paid player on his team next season.
Even by the standards of pro sports, his compensation might look a little bonkers. Wait, who got paid what? But there are now more NBA players with $30 million annual salaries than CEOs of S&P 500 companies who are guaranteed that much. Once you get over the sticker shock of today’s lucrative sports economy, you can understand why Brown found himself in such high demand—and why it’s important to recognize the overlooked people whose contributions at work are not the most obvious and can’t necessarily be quantified.
NBA teams were fighting over this somewhat obscure role player because they knew that Brown was quietly essential to the success of his team by amplifying the performance of the stars around him.
That much became clear when he came off the bench last season for the NBA champion Denver Nuggets. He’s not the biggest (6-foot-4) and doesn’t score the most points (his career average is 8.5 per game), but those numbers don’t capture what he brings to a team.
He complemented the talents of his colleagues. He handled the basketball grunt work so they wouldn’t have to. He threw his body around, moved the ball on offense and embraced the selfless defensive assignment of making life miserable for the other team’s best players. He also made himself a key piece of the organizational culture by coming to the office with a smile on his face—and, last year in Denver, a cowboy hat on his head.
Basically, he was the ideal co-worker. You know the type: good at his job, good with the vibes. He helped make people who are the very best at what they do slightly better, which is useful in every business. In basketball, if that employee can also hit some 3-pointers, he might be paid $20 million a year. …
[T]he Pacers decided Brown was worth more than anyone would have predicted—including Brown. His production on the court was solid, but they wouldn’t have paid him so much based on hard data. They were after his soft skills.
Those rare qualities that made Brown a harmonious presence in his workplace happen to be as valuable on the basketball court as they are in a cubicle. They can be found in a colleague with a knack for asking the one inspired question that can improve an entire project, or the connector who knows everyone in the office, or that hero who brings cupcakes on a random Tuesday just because.
At a time when sports teams have increasingly sophisticated methods of measuring performance, Indiana’s scouts and executives targeted Brown because they liked his incalculable traits: his toughness, his competitive fire, his versatility, his comfort defending multiple positions and especially his willingness to do basketball’s dirty work.
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