What employees deserve (and don’t deserve)?

July 23, 2008 · Filed Under For the love of HR 

I swear this hasn’t turned into a sports blog yet but it always seems to go back there for me. I love sports, I love HR and I love analogies so those three things really work for me. My Brett Favre article along with Kris Dunn’s over at Fistful of Talent have slowly attracted the dreaded Favre sympathizers. I don’t mean dreaded as in “Agh, I hate them” but more along the lines of “Hm, I should have explained myself better and now it is going to be an entirely new post.”

First of all, I want to acknowledge that the NFL is special. It doesn’t have to worry about things like being a monopoly, it has a collective bargaining agreement, a union and a ton of different levels of contracted employees. So to say the NFL is unique is an understatement, it is unlike all other non-sport businesses.

That being said, the general philosophy is the same: clubs that have been losing for the past umpteen years, have terrible management or make bad employee choices continue to fail at attracting the kind of talent that will help them win.

That’s why the Brett Favre scenario is awful to me. Here is a guy who is currently on contract for the Green Bay Packers. He is clearly still the best Packer player. He did the retire/unretire thing. Pretending he was forced to is a silly argument considering how much power he has as the best player on the team. And Green Bay has botched the situation as bad as any club can.

Still, what it comes down to is what Brett Favre deserves. That seems pretty simple to me:

  • He deserves to play out his contract if he wants. That’s the obligation he signed. I don’t think there is a “I’ll be a starter” clause in the contract so whether he starts or not is a coaching decision, not management.
  • He deserves to be treated with respect. That means if he comes back and the Packers want to trade him, they should try to find a good fit with another club if at all possible.

In my mind, the organization’s commitment to the team and the owners (a.k.a. Green Bay) outweighs the commitment to a single player (even the best player). Releasing him would be foolish and could hurt the team and owners if he signed with a divisional rival. No matter how important and loyal a person has been to the organization, you can’t allow something like that to happen if it is preventable. If Green Bay wants to get rid of Favre, they deserve to get something for that. That serves the organization and team much better than releasing him. Those are the only two things either party deserves.

And really, Green Bay fans should accept the fact that with or without Favre, they aren’t winning the Superbowl next year. End of story. So if you knew that, no matter what you did as a club, you weren’t going to win a Superbowl this year, what would you choose? It seems obvious doesn’t it?

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