Each quarter, my employer gives our awards to people in our organization. Over the years, these have gone by many names – performance, grit, tenacity, reliable, team player, club, etc. Almost every sales organization does this at some level. I’ll spare you the motivational science behind it, but it works well enough to motivate people to forgo $30,000 in compensation just to win inclusion in a sales club.
One quarter I’d blown it out. I was the Genghis Khan of regional inside SaaS sales for precisely 90 days. Deal after deal, win after win. An inexplicable 3 weeks after the quarter we finally had our all hands call. My time had come. This wasn’t a competition for an award, it was my coronation. I was happy to ignore all of the other awardees, who cares? It was my time. And as the slide clicked over I saw another name, and another manager’s photo. A manager with worse results than mine by a mile. I promise what follows isn’t just an entitled middle-manager coping with not winning a meaningless corporate award1
Award giving is fundamentally a utilitarian process for the giver. If that’s your friend in a low stakes situation, they can be wholesome, but in corporate America it’s a matter of performance. An experiment at Duke found that award giving is potentially even more potent for those who don’t get the awards. They imply those low performers are out of the norm. In my case, the awardee’s was a team performing well in a business that was struggling. Go figure. The brutal reality is that my numbers or how deserving I think I am are entirely irrelevant to the calculation. Fairness is not a variable with any weight, only the utility of having given the award. My unbridled fury persisted, though.
Jake Scott was a safety and punt returner in the 1970’s NFL. He had 35 interceptions in six seasons with the Dolphins, and 14 in three years with the Redskins. He is, as of writing, the Dolphins all time interception leader. He went to the pro bowl 5 times, won the super bowl twice, and was the Superbowl MVP of one of those teams (the perfect 17-0 Dolphins.) Despite all of these accolades, Jake Scott is not a member of the pro football hall of fame. Very clearly lesser players have made it, but Jake didn’t.
Unlike the NFL HOF, Jake Scott is in the College Football HOF. He didn’t attend the ceremony. He told the Sun-Sentenel that year “I don’t need it for my ego.” This was not an exception. Jake hardly stayed active in football circles, he had a quiet retirement before dying in 2020. In the NFLs case the award of a HOF induction is not fixed to the merit of on field performance but something much more corrosive: Politics. I could, but will not, note players who were inducted more thanks to political considerations than on the field contribution during their career.
How much can we trust any hall-of-fame as a real measure of achievement, versus being a way to reward insiders who remain loyal and contributing to their respective league?
Art is not immune, either. Oscar campaigning is a well known coercion of what’s supposed to be a pure voting process. The schmoozing, media promotion, and the construction of the films themselves all try to cater to that voting audience. In recent memory, the Rock’s attempts to manufacture artificial Oscar buzz for his movie The Smashing Machine comes to mind. A fifteen minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival, which a shocking number of films get, followed by a series of interviews highlighting that fact, only to totally flop in this effort in the end. It’s no indictment of the film2 but rather of the system where The Rock thinks this is a valid approach to get award buzz. It’s hitting me over the head with fake hype in hopes of an award that’s devalued by that fake hype itself. Looking at the last 10 years of Oscar winners, this process isn’t really highlighting or awarding the greatest films each year in the same way the HOF isn’t just a list of the best players by metric, and my sales awards aren’t just a list of the top attainers.
Those of you who’ve actually won one of these might suggest that considering deep context beyond basic metrics is essential to great award giving. Anyone who’s seen box office numbers or your worst rep close a big deal can see that’s true to an extent. The premise of these systems is that additional discretion. In their case, being a great team in a struggling organization might very well be an important thing to consider. But it’s rigged. That breathing room is being abused for the gain of the awarding organization. In cases like these, the titles being awarded overwhelmingly do not align with the process being used to determine them. When celebration turns to incentivization, the value to the awarded escapes out the sides.
I’m still bitter about my award robbery, if these thousand words haven’t made that apparent. Writing about this makes me feel silly for caring about this, like putting it into words cements my irrationality. The obvious truth is that these sources of validation have little value to us, even when they’re more accurate to reality. It’s hard to actually live this way, and it always has been. The Roman historian Tacitus said nearly 2 millenia ago in Histories that “The desire of glory is the last infirmity cast off even by the wise.” The wise have a hard time with this.
Stan Stanfill, a longtime friend of Jake Scott’s said of him: “He’s the only man I’ve known who lived life entirely on his own terms.” If there’s anyone who understands the value of real self fulfillment, it’s the guy who himself was ripping that fulfillment away from NFL quarterbacks and running it 95 yards in the other direction.
RIP Jake Scott, you didn’t need it anyway.
Colin
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