Rex Ryan, Management Genius, Motivates an Under-performer

One of your team members is a chronic under-achiever. How do you, her boss, respond?

For one idea, let's travel to the practice field of the New York Jets football team, courtesy of the HBO sports documentary Hard Knocks. Head coach Rex Ryan is contemplating the mystery of a former No. 1 draft pick, Vernon Gholston, whose effort is in real question. He's a classic under-performer.

Guessing ahead of Ryan, I thought Gholston might respond to peer pressure. Or maybe just sitting him down for a couple of days could wake him up.

Ryan's solution? Enlist another player to go pick a fight with him to get Gholston's juices flowing. It worked! (We'll see for how long.)

OK, so that tactic probably wouldn't fly at my HR office. But in the football world Ryan has an emotional IQ that would make Ghandi look like a caveman.

Can we think of a similarly out-of-the-box solution to motivate our Donna DoNothing, something short of a brawl? What would Rex suggest?

(Rex Ryan photo by cool13902008, CC 2.0)

Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

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