The off-topic part is that it involves baseball. The “semi-” part is that it’s about leadership, an all-too-rare quality.

Morgan Ensberg is a former slightly-above-average infielder for the Houston Astros and a few other teams. But he’s also a keen observer of the game.

(Related question: Why do great players rarely make great managers? There are exceptions — Joe Torre in baseball and Phil Jackson in basketball were above average though not great players — but by and large, the most successful managers or coaches were mediocre as players. And yes, this is a relevant question, your honor.)

He describes a baseball problem in part 1 of this two-parter. If you’re into baseball, read it because it’s a really good problem. If you think baseball is a simple game where the sole tactical issue is figuring when to bring in a relief pitcher, read it because it offers a good look into how complex tactically the game really is when played at this level.

He offers the answer — at least, his answer — in part 2. If you’re curious about the tactical problem he posed in part 1, read it all. If you want a great insight into leadership, skip down to the heading “What I Really Just Did….”

The manager’s real job in this situation is to instill confidence, to remind the players to believe in themselves and their abilities, to move quickly and surely and not second-guess themselves. Having a manager watch over your shoulder, ready to pounce on any mistake, is the surest way to make mistakes — maybe not the particular mistakes the manager is watching for, but the mistake of withdrawing, the mistake of trying-not-to-fail rather than striving-to-succeed-and-risking-failure.

The prosecutor who brags about never having lost a case in court makes sure that only slam-dunk cases go to trial; how many miscreants go free or plead to minor crimes because this prosecutor is unwilling to place the mission of determining facts in the hands of the jurors? The manager who claims never to have made a bad hire may never had made a great hire, either, because great hires are often risks. (That said, good managers will have more success with all of their hires, and good prosecutors will win cases that bad prosecutors lose.)

Why Don’t Great Players Make Great Managers (Coaches)?

Ensberg was never a great player. There are two ways to make it at the big league level. One way, the one everyone sees, is to have enormous talent. The other is to be of average talent but become a student of the game, taking advantage of situational knowledge and small mistakes. (Exhibit A, 47-year-old pitcher Jamie Moyer still getting folks out with a fastball that is “fast” only in that it’s not as slow as his other pitches.) One of those situations, incidentally, is getting along with other players, especially those more talented than you.

Come time to manage, and your athletic skills don’t matter. What does matter is your knowledge of the game, the ability to apply and transmit that knowledge, and your ability to get along with and motivate highly talented — and highly paid — athletes. Who’s more likely to be a successful manager, a superstar like Alex Rodriguez or a player like Morgan Ensberg?

The same is true in business. Many people who are enormously effective as managers weren’t necessarily the best salesperson, the best programmer, the best attorney. People management is a skill, and an art, that is not necessarily correlated with the manager’s skill in the area being managed.

To get the worst of both worlds, take your most productive individual contributor and make her a manager, simply because she’s so productive. All of a sudden she won’t be as productive because she now spends time managing rather than producing, and there’s not certainty she’ll be able to teach or inspire others to produce at a higher level.

It’s hard for many organizations to recognize that leadership is a special skill, not something you simply glue onto a top producer. Both managerial and leadership skills can be taught, and learned, but they don’t necessarily come with the original package; they’re extras.

They’re extras well worth paying for, however.

As Ensberg’s “manager” says, “Alright guys.  No problem here.”

As most of the world knows, Tiger Woods was back playing golf for money this weekend.

Sunday, I was at the airport waiting for my flight and found myself watching the finish of the Masters tournament with a bunch of other folks outside an airport bar. With about two hours to go in the tournament, the best players were playing the last nine holes in various groups. Tiger Woods was among them, and the cameras were focused on him rather heavily.

(I find golf on TV rather weird these days. They jump cut from shot to shot, Tiger swings on one hole and then Phil swings on a second and someone else putts on a third and then there’s a commercial, and there’s no context to any of this. TV is no better at showing the thinking and strategic parts of the game than it is with baseball.)

Anyway, Woods was not hitting his driver very well, even by his standards. Tiger Woods isn’t terribly accurate with his driver, the big club, but he’s extremely creative about getting out of the trouble he gets himself into. But that’s a story for another day.

So Woods winds up and smashes a ball off the tee… deep into the piney woods. Woods in the woods, I guess. I don’t know whether he hit any of the spectators or had to have his caddie search for his ball; TV was off showing some other random shots. But when they finally get back to him, they’ve managed to get the camera behind his ball looking toward the green. It’s obvious he has an impossible shot through the trees; you can see a little bit of daylight through an opening perhaps 15 feet above the ground, but his chances of hitting it through there are small — even as good as he is at what’s called scrambling, or getting out of trouble.

At this point, he’s trailing the leaders by a few shots. And he has two choices:

1. Try and punch the ball through the opening in the trees — possible, certainly, but likely to have bad results if he fails.
2. Knock the ball out onto the fairway, basically at right angles to the direction he really needs to go — but a safe shot for a competent golfer, which he certainly is.

Only if he gets the ball through the opening in the trees can he win the tournament. Doing so doesn’t put him in the lead — he still has a lot of work to do — but he almost surely cannot win if he takes the safe route, which will cost him a stroke.

Now keep in mind that everyone who finishes in the top ten of a tournament like this makes a lot of money. The winner takes the biggest piece, but most people could live quite well for a year on what, say, the fifth-place finisher receives. And Woods was staring at the difference between, say, eighth and second-with-a-possibility-of-first:

1. Hits through the trees successfully, has a good shot at second or even first if he plays the remaining few holes well.
2. Safely pitches the ball sideways back onto the fairway, probably ends up fourth — where in fact he did finish.
3. Tries to hit it through the trees and fails. Best case, he gets a good bounce off a tree and winds up in the fairway pretty much the same as if he’d pitched it out to begin with, finishing fourth. Or it could bounce back toward him and give him a repeat of this situation, except now it’s cost him a stroke to get there; maybe he finishes sixth. Or, worst case, it could bounce off a tree the wrong way and go out of bounds or be unplayable, costing him three strokes (the one he took plus a penalty plus having to play again from a bad lie) and he’s eighth.

Which would you choose?

You’re a leader in a tough situation. You can take a big risk and — if everything comes out right — make a huge score, but create a mess if things don’t go well. Or you can play it safe, assuring a comfortable profit but not a dramatic victory.

Woods, of course, went for it. And missed, though he got a good break when his errant ball smacked a tree at exactly the right angle and bounced out onto the fairway. But that’s the Tiger in him — nothing matters except victory.

But was it the right choice? The best choice? Would you have done it?

As it happens, eventual winner Phil Mickelson found himself facing a slightly easier version of the same type of shot a few minutes later, deep in the pines after an errant drive, but with a somewhat bigger window in the branches to hit through. He went for it and wound up about six feet from the hole with a terrific shot. On the other hand, former champion and still-among-the-leaders Fred Couples took one of these dangerous shots trying to get into the lead and put it in the water; it doesn’t always work out.

Three leaders, three very difficult risk/reward shots, all went for it. One nailed it, one missed but got a lucky break, and one fell short (literally, as Couples’ shot hit just short of the green and rolled back into the water).

That’s the way it goes. None of them took the safe route. It cost Couples and Woods money, made Mickelson a winner.

You’re the boss. You’re facing a tough shot, high risk, high reward. What do you do?

Is this the right time to be a Tiger?

Does your company “take the pulse” of employee satisfaction once a year, or perhaps twice? Does it do so at regular, scheduled times?

Do all the managers scramble in the six weeks ahead of the survey to provide “morale” or “motivation”? (And do half of them spell it “moral”?)

Does it work?

The same goes for employee feedback about their managers. Is it solicited only around performance reviews?

Does that change behavior for the long term?

What if no one* in the company knew when these surveys or feedback forms were going to be sent out?

If you’re a manager and that thought has you even the slightest bit uneasy, then you need to examine what you’re doing and try to fix it. Right now, it’s hard for employees to vote with their feet, but times will get better — and the very best, the ones you most need to retain, can always find new positions. And even if they’re not leaving because there’s nowhere else to go, morale and motivation affect performance, which in turn affects your own review — to say nothing of the lives of everyone involved, from your team to the other teams that interact with yours to the customers who might purchase your output.

There is no “time” for morale and motivation except the present time, every time. It’s not about events, or presentations, or gifts, or pithy and overworked sayings. It’s about how you relate to them, the level to which you extend trust, the extent to which you help when needed and avoid over- and micromanagement. It’s about having their backs, about recognizing that your job is to eliminate the roadblocks that make it hard for them to do their jobs.

Succeed here, and you won’t have to worry about “surprise inspections.”

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*When I say no one, I mean no one, including HR. It’s not hard to have these surveys and mails prepared to go out at any time. Let’s say a company wants to “take the temperature” twice a year. It’s trivial to design a program — I could write it in Excel in under five minutes — that you’d run once every two weeks, with a random factor that will come up “Yes” only, on average, twice a year. You send the surveys and such within minutes of the program coming up “Yes,” so everyone, including your own manager, has no advance warning. Of course, you’d suspend running it for eight weeks or so after it comes up “Yes” and you send the survey. (And the programmers out there recognize that you’d have to account for those eight weeks — and the two weeks at the end of the year when you can’t send anything useful — in calculating the odds for the random-number generator.)