Every organization knows who its stars are. But the person you can’t afford to lose? That’s often someone else entirely. They may not be the highest-paid or most visible, but they bring an expertise that makes them irreplaceable, sometimes even more than your MVP.
In sports, that person wasDennis Rodman.
As one former NBA executive reportedly said of Dennis Rodman, he wasn’t the best scorer or leader and wasn’t always loved in the locker room. But his teams don’t win a championship without him.
In business, that person might be on your team right now—uncelebrated, underpaid and irreplaceable.
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 the one whose specialized skills are the most difficult to replace. Named after NBA player Dennis Rodman, who in the late ’80s and ’90s 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.
I call this The Rodman Paradox.
What Is The Rodman Paradox?
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. It suggests 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 the 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 NBA 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 theDetroit Pistonsdrafted Rodman, they went from a team that could not get past theBoston Celticsto one that celebrated its first championship in two years.
Later, when Rodman joined theChicago Bullsin 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 Rodman signed with theSan Antonio Spurs, the team went to the NBA finals for the first time in its history, and the Spurs David Robinson won his only MVP award.
In his lone season with theLos 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 analystBenjamin Morris, writing for his blogSkeptical SportsAnalysis, found that Rodman’s rebounding performance ranked six standard deviations above league norms in rebounding—a statistical rarity so extreme it happens roughly once every 400 years. (Rodman led the NBA with 18.7 rebounds per game in the ‘91-92 season, a feat unmatched in the 33 years since.) Morris, now withFiveThirtyEight, argued that Rodman might be the most underrated player in the history of the NBA.
I am good at data analysis, but six standard deviations sounds like the realm of science fiction to me. 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 per 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 their absence would immediately strain teams, delay results or cause key accounts to wobble. They’re often overlooked—until they leave.
I contacted my network for real-world examples of role players being more valuable than the 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 over 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.
An account manager had just two accounts, representing nearly 20 percent 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 account 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 essential to a CPA firm’s growth. He considered her more valuable than the head of HR or the office’s managing partner (OMP). He believed 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
- Not win “employee of the month.” They don’t ask for promotions. They show up, do the work and hold the whole thing together
- Allude easy quantification. In basketball, there’s no stat for a rebound that leads to a fast break that leads to an assist. The influence of Rodmans 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 propping up the company’s actual value and whose absence the organization would miss the most. Those were the people we built around. The executives were easier to replace.
How to Identify The Rodmans
Want to build a resilient organization? Start here:
- Audit by Impact, Not Title. Ask your department leads: Who is the 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 require three people. Treat them accordingly.
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 did what Jordan couldn’t. He handled the work others wouldn’t do as well as anyone ever had. And while Jordan was 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. After reading Morris’ analysis, I have concluded 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 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 considered only 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 they were replaced by other elite players in this hypothetical scenario.
Jordan to Kobe? That’s a step down.
Rodman to Wallace? That’s falling off a cliff.
This is why, in your company, where nobody’s winning MVPs, your Rodman might be more important than your Jordan.
