The Dennis Rodman Paradox: What Leaders Miss About Their Best People

Forbes

05-05-2025

Every team covets a star. All need high-performing role players. A few are lucky enough to have both.
But the most quietly devastating loss any organization can suffer isn't the person with the biggest title — it's the one whose absence makes everything else wobble.
In sports, that person was Dennis Rodman.
As one former NBA executive reportedly said of Dennis Rodman, he wasn't the best scorer or leader, and he wasn't always loved in the locker room. But they don't win a championship without him.
In business, that person might be on your team right now — uncelebrated, underpaid, and irreplaceable.
I call this The Rodman Paradox.
🧠 What Is the Rodman Paradox?
The Rodman Paradox describes the counterintuitive phenomenon where an organization's most valuable contributor isn't necessarily its most talented or highest-performing member, but rather the one whose specialized skills are the most difficult to replace. Named after NBA player Dennis Rodman, who demonstrably improved his teams' winning percentages more than even his more highly regarded teammates, this paradox emerges when someone masters a critical function that few others can adequately perform. While conventional valuation focuses on overall performance or leadership qualities, true organizational resilience often depends on identifying and retaining these specialized contributors whose absence creates disproportionate disruption. In contexts ranging from healthcare to technology to manufacturing, this principle challenges traditional hierarchies by suggesting that unique specialists in seemingly supporting roles can sometimes be more essential to operational success than even exceptional generalists in leadership positions.
Named for Dennis Rodman — a player who never led his team in scoring, was never a team captain, and made only two all-star teams in a 14-year career, and yet consistently made good teams great, and great teams elite — the paradox challenges leaders to look beyond the org chart when assessing value.
🏀 The Role Player Who Changed Everything
Dennis Rodman never led a team in points. He wasn't a face of a franchise. He was traded, fined, and famously unconventional. For most of his career, he was considered at best the third best player on his team - even by his coaches.
But here's what else is true: Rodman's teams won five NBA championships, reached six Finals, and consistently posted higher winning percentages when he was on the floor. He has one of the highest winning percentages in NBA history, and the HIGHEST winning percentage in NBA playoff history.
When the Detroit Pistons drafted Rodman, they went from a team that could not get past the Boston Celtics to one that celebrated its first championship in two years.
When Rodman joined the Chicago Bulls in 1995–96 — with Michael Jordan already back and Scottie Pippen in his prime — the team jumped from 'champion' to 'historically great,' going 72–10 and kicking off a second three-peat.
When he signed with the San Antonio Spurs, the team went to the NBA finals for the first time in its history, and David Robinson won his only MVP award.
In his lone season with the Los Angeles Lakers, they won games at a 60-win pace when he played and fell to .500 when he didn't.
That wasn't a coincidence. That was the Rodman effect.
📊 Rebounding as a Superpower
Rodman didn't shoot. He didn't score. But he grabbed rebounds like no one before or since.
Stat analyst Benjamin Morris, writing for his blog Skeptical Sports Analysis, found that Rodman's rebounding performance (as measured by rebounding rate, or percentage of available rebounds Rodman captured) ranked six standard deviations above league norms — a statistical rarity so extreme it happens roughly once every 400 years. Morris, now with FiveThirtyEight, argued that Rodman might be the most underrated player in NBA history.
I am good at data analysis, but six standard deviations sounds like the realm of science fiction to me, so I asked ChatGPT to give a real-world example to help me get my head around it. It told me it was like a car getting 600 miles per gallon. I requested several other examples, and it produced this table:
Category Normal Rodman-Level Outlier Equivalent
Car mileage 30 MPG 600 MPG (20x improvement)
Typing speed 60 WPM 1,200 WPM
Stock returns 10%/yr 200%/yr with no risk
Employee output 5 tasks/day 100 high-quality tasks/day
Olympic sprint 100m in 10s 100m in under 5s
💼 Rodmans in the Workplace
You've worked with a Rodman. Maybe you are one.
These are the people whose titles don't reflect their influence, and whose impact is not recognized or fully appreciated, but whose absence would immediately strain teams, delay results, or cause key accounts to wobble. They're often overlooked — until they leave.
I reached out to my network for real-world examples of role players being more valuable than more senior and highly compensated. Three stick out.
A CFO shared that his team had a second-year financial analyst who was the only one in the company who understood generative AI. He had a controller with more than two decades of experience who was a high performer. Still, he felt that losing the analyst would be more problematic than losing the controller, as replacing the analyst would be virtually impossible in today's workforce. The controller was a better overall performer, but the single thing the analyst did was irreplaceable. This is a perfect example of The Rodman Paradox.
An account manager with just two accounts. But those accounts represented nearly 20% of the company's revenue. The president confessed that if he were forced to choose between this rep and his vice president of sales, he would pick the sales manager. He also said that the vice president was the best performer in that role he had ever seen. The account manager was playing Rodman to the VP's Jordan.
A partner at a national CPA firm shared that his top recruiter, one of the most connected people in the city, was instrumental in finding the early-career talent that is essential to a CPA firm's growth. He considered her more valuable than the head of HR or even the office's managing partner (OMP). He believed that the firm had at least a dozen people who could step into the OMP role, but there was nobody to replace such a well-connected recruiter.
These aren't outliers. They're everywhere — if you know how to look.
🔎 Why We Overlook Them
Rodmans tend to:
Specialize in something messy, niche, or unsexy
Make others better instead of seeking the spotlight.
Stay quietly competent while louder voices get the credit.
They don't win 'employee of the month.' They don't ask for promotions. They show up, do the work, and hold the whole thing together.
And because they're hard to quantify — like a rebound that leads to a fast break that leads to an assist — their influence gets misattributed, ignored, or misunderstood.
Until they're gone.
🧍🏼‍♂️ My Own Experience: Helping VCs Find Their Rodmans
Years ago, I worked with a VC firm conducting a large-scale restructuring across multiple portfolio companies. When forced to make difficult decisions, these investors realized something profound: the most expensive people weren't necessarily the most consequential. In several cases, it was a data engineer, a licensing manager, or a mid-level biochemist who was propping up the company's actual value and whose absence would be missed the most.
Those were the people we built around.
The executives were easier to replace.
🧭 How to Identify the Rodmans on Your Team
Want to build a resilient organization? Start here:
Audit by Impact, Not Title
Ask your department leads: Who is the one person on your team you hope never leaves? Then ask why.
Rethink Performance Metrics
Some contributions are hard to measure in isolation, but crucial in combination. Make space for evaluating those who make others better.
Redesign Recognition
Most recognition programs reward visibility. Add mechanisms to honor the quiet enablers.
Protect Them Strategically
Rodmans are rarely irreplaceable on paper, but in practice, replacing them can take six months and three people. Treat them accordingly.
🔚 Final Thought: Greatness vs. Irreplaceability
Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time, or at least that I have ever seen. But even he needed Dennis Rodman and other role players.
Rodman didn't replace Jordan — he did what Jordan couldn't. He handled the work others wouldn't do better than anyone ever had. And while Jordan was obviously the better overall player, Rodman was better at rebounding than Jordan was at scoring, and had a skill set that was rarer than Jordan's.
The Jordan versus Rodman debate was a central point of Mr. Morris' article referenced above. I lack his aptitude for data analysis, but I found the debate fascinating. I believe that we both reluctantly concluded that Rodman might be the more irreplaceable player.
I believed that Rodman was the more irreplaceable player due to his unique skill set. Irreplaceable in this case does not mean better. If there were a clone of Michael Jordan (Bulls fans can only wish), that would not diminish his greatness; it would only make him replaceable.
To test this theory, I selected players with skill sets similar to Jordan's and Rodman's and envisioned the impact of replacing them with those players. I only considered players I had seen play. For Jordan's replacement, I selected Kobe Bryant, and for Rodman, I picked Ben Wallace. Both players are members of the Basketball Hall of Fame, so in this hypothetical scenario, they were replaced by other elite players.
Jordan to Kobe? That's a drop-off.
Rodman to Wallace? That's a collapse.
Which is why in your company, where nobody's winning MVPs, your Rodman might be more important than your Jordan.