Draft Day: How Lessons from Fantasy Football Can Teach About Staffing

When Matthew Berry (2014) wrote, “A bad league ruins the experience for so many…” a resounding nod amongst Fantasy Football (FF) players echoed every manager's plight: staffing. The same can be said for staffing within a higher education institution if you compare great staff with a bad "league." Staffing, much like building one's FF team, is not only critical to an institution's success but also to its strategy. Many managers, however, are not trained properly and are usually left to improvise or figure things out on their own (Wilk, 2018). To address these issues, we will discuss how FF can mimic the hiring process and can provide a model to understand what a manager requires from a new staff member (player research), the interview process (preparing ones’ roster for draft day), the selection committee's consensus process (draft day), on-boarding staff (building ones’ roster), and continual training, concluding with an effective evaluation process (maintaining one's team). We will use some of Bob Lewis’ Eight Tasks of Leadership (2011) to define how staffing is dependent on both concrete and subjective processes such as making decisions, motivating employees, communication, and building and maintaining teams. Finally, we will examine the continual evaluation process and how that aligns with winning the FF championship.