https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-giants-coaching-staff-11651493931?mod=e2fb
This article was posted on a volleyball coaches’ group as an
example of what the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball is doing in
putting together a coaching staff, thinking outside the usual boundaries of
credentials and skillsets that were the unchallenged constraints of what the
coaches need to have under their belts. The diversity of the staff and the
courage that it took for this manager to hire these people for his staff is laudable
and long overdue.
The article had also made a statement ascribing the Giants recent
successes to this group of coaches and
their diversity in backgrounds, skillsets, and knowledge. Someone in the group
disagreed with that assessment, as do I, but for a different reason. I don’t
believe that the coaches have had enough time with the team to say definitively
that their successes are directly caused by their influences. I am not saying that they had no
impact, I am saying that conclusions should not be inferred from the immediate
results. It is once again the very human
to draw the conclusion that correlation is
causation. We all know that is false,
both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The diversity addressed in the article does not just mean
the usual definition of diversity: by race and gender. Diversity in this case
means that the coaches for the San Francisco Giants are diverse in their
baseball and intellectual background. Much
staff are players who never made it into the major leagues, which is contrary
to the baseball hiring practices, they played at a level well below the Major
League level. They had coaches whose previous professions were not strictly
athletic, which gives them a different perspective regarding the context of the
everyday decisions that needed to be made. It is interesting that one of the
coaches is a Japanese player who worked for many years as a bullpen catcher in
the major leagues because he was not skilled or athletic enough to make it a
player; it is interesting because it is a baseball truism that the bullpen
catcher usually makes the best managers because they're the ones that must observe
the game from a most fundamental level. They have the investment in time and are
passionate about the game to invest themselves into understanding the ins and
outs of the game.
The original person who disagreed with the inference that the recent success of the Giants are due to
the non-traditional backgrounds of the coaching staff used the argument that because
the LA Dodgers are the class of that division, and the efficacy of the Giants’
hiring philosophy cannot be celebrated until the Giants have overtaken the
Dodgers. He argues that winning and losing should determine whether the hiring
philosophy is worthy. He goes further in
saying that the successes of the Dodgers are based on traditional ways of
building a strong farm system by spending money and paying for great players. His
point is well taken, but no one ever said that the Giants were not doing that.
He did not really address the merits of a diversified coaching staff. It was a
head fake.
Many successful leaders and coaches have preached the mantra
that you have to surround yourself with the best people and you need these people
to speak truth to power, to disagree with the leader and be allowed an opportunity
to sway the leader. This is not to say
that chaos and discord needs to be introduced within the organization; what is
needed is people who are willing to challenge rote thinking and the status quo,
to stir the pot, to make decision makers examine their assumptions, logical
fallacies, and internal biases.
This disagreement is a matter of the fixed mindset versus
the growth mindset.
There are obvious advantages to staying with the known,
everyone in the organization knows what is expected of them and any dissent can
be resolved or tamped down quickly because the decision making becomes procedural
and immediate rather than be conceptual, exploratory, speculative, and time
consuming. A typical argument in defending the status quo is that everything
new is not necessarily always good, that there is a reason for the traditional
and procedural, and it is ill advised to throw out the baby with the bath water.
When someone employs that tact, they are saying by inference
that the jury is still out. But they go deeper by eliciting the skepticism that
comes with that line of thought which lightly insinuates that the old way is
the best way. Which is a dead giveaway to a leadership in a rut. One that is
dying a slow death internally,
The subject of the impact of a diverse coaching staff does
not and should not be judged by only considering strict wins and losses. It
should be judged by the human factor: the amount of player and team development
and how that impacts player production; how invested are those players in their
team and organization — so much so that they are producing above and beyond
their ceilings. The hiring philosophy should be judged upon the return on what
the organization had invested. It appears that the players are happy, and they
are buying into the what the coaches are saying, which is more than half the
battle. They are producing on the field
as well, perhaps not as much as some would like as a litmus test.
On the other hand, having a diverse staff is a welcoming
change but just making the change does not naturally infer that the new philosophy
is going to pay off 100%. I remember one day while I was working in corporate
America that one of the human resources person addressed a room full of middle
aged engineers; saying, without any apology, that all the old engineers should
be fired and replaced with new and inexperienced engineers straight out of
school because the young engineers are more creative, more willing to change
what doesn't work, they are more aggressive, and they have the newer ideas. What happened was
that the new engineers became the old engineers within a few years, bought into
the corporate ways within a few years and became stalwarts of the old ways in a
few years. Indeed, all the experience
that had resided with the older engineers were lost and now needed to be
rediscovered. So new is not necessarily better and old is not necessarily
better.
A key fallacy that we all readily employ is to view this
situation through the prism of a dichotomy, of a win/loss end game. There is
much intelligence that are embedded in
the old because there's value in it; there
is much intelligence that are embedded the
new because there is value in it. The question is: how to integrate the two views and resolve the
surface incongruencies between the two sides and overcome the either/or mindset. How can the sides achieve win/win?
The real magic is finding a way to leverage, combine,
integrate, mix, and blend the new and the old: intelligently leverage the
diverse coaching staff and what they bring to the table with what we assume to
be tried and true. I am an optimist in this regard, I believe that it is
possible to diversify the composition of coaching staffs, challenge the
mythology of the tried and true while also retaining the embedded wisdom
inherent in the procedural and time honored. Playing the either/or game is
silly and counterproductive; most importantly it does not serve the team or the
individual athletes at all.
The first thing that needs to be of course is to stop being
so defensive and start thinking critically, fully acknowledging our individual
fallacies and bias.
