Three Strikes You're Out! What Business Leaders Can Learn From Baseball to Make Better Contact

In light of Aaron Judge’s recent $360 million dollar contract and Moneyball being the greatest sports strategy movie of all time – what do you do when you swing and miss??

The playbook for perceived success is easy.?A leader gives credit to people in their charge. Others say “great job”, “nice win”, “you killed it”, or some other simple cliché.?But what about failure??Several examples throughout history suggest blatant denial as the response to failure.?We’ve seen this in the highest levels of political office (take your pick, any millennia!), in corporate America (FTX anybody?), and we’ve seen it since the beginning of time (see the Battle of Allia 390 BC, Reconstruction era America, and events prior to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster).

Is there another way??Emphatically, Billy Beane would argue yes!?In your personal life, professional life, and everywhere in between – there is room for honesty, authenticity, and courage.?

The Kansas City Royals have won more World Series Championships in the last decade than the New York Yankees.?They’ve won two more pennants.?Yet some are celebrating that the Yankees (ahem, General Manager Brian Cashman) paid Judge nearly 70% more than they offered before the season.

Suggestions for how we handle failure have been covered extensively by others (Edmondson, Farson & Keys, Gelfand, Hill & Wetlaufer).?Transparency, taking responsibility, and a clear course of action is a good start.?In the spirit of baseball, here are a few questions you can expect to be asked in the boardroom when we haven’t met expectations:

Fastball (95 to 99 mph)

1) Were we successful?

2) What went right and what went wrong?

3) Is there anything else you’d like to add?

12 – 6 Curveball (80 mph, steep break)

1) What were the metrics to support your interpretation?

2) What would you have done differently?

3) Who is responsible?

Changeup (85 – 88 mph, same arm action as fastball)

1) Are you satisfied?

2) Do you need help?

3) Where do we go from here?

By preparing ourselves to answer these questions, we can take the focus off praise or penalties and place the emphasis on analysis and progress. Farson and Keyes said, “New ideas are most likely to emerge in the workplace when managers treat steps in the innovation process—those that work and those that don’t—with less evaluation and more interpretation.” Next time you find yourself on the receiving end of success or failure, ask yourself the questions above.?

As for making contact, I’ll leave that to Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, "I try to keep it real simple. I try not to add a lot of frosting on what I'm doing. Just take the swing and don't muscle the swing, because if you get in the hitting position and you take the swing, I generate a lot more bat speed, and that works for me."