These past few days it seems like I can’t stop from hearing a conversation about how the Vancouver Canucks didn’t make the playoffs which is a disappointment. With that the conversations seem to revolve around the salaries that people get paid to play and more specifically most people seemed to be very cynical over the goal tender who has a very lucrative contract and performed rather poorly this year.
One person was telling me how it is crazy to pay someone so much money as when you are paid a certain amount the level of expectation creates a situation where trying simply isn’t good enough. In this case, the person told me that for the salary he was paid allowing more than 2 goals in any game isn’t really acceptable.
I was thinking that was kind of a harsh expectation in many ways as this isn’t necessarily a one objective goal such as say buying a $100 drink which better be one of the best things you ever drank for that price. While the view is understandable in many ways too, I think many times even in a business you are paying for a person’s presence too.
For example, I’m sure in a sales environment it is easy to just pick the guy with the best numbers and assume all will be fine and dandy. On the other hand, there could be another person that doesn’t have impressive numbers yet people like working around him/her better which in affect gets more small results from many to outweigh the advantage of that other one person.
Now obviously in this case the whole team didn’t do incredibly well anyways, but I just thought it can be a little too narrow sometimes to think of only one aspect to associate a person’s salary with.