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 [...]]]> 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.”

People get fired. People have setbacks in their life. It’s not always their fault or within their control.

What matters is what you [...]]]> Nah, this isn’t about how to screw up at work. Rather, former pro baseball player Morgan Ensberg has written a terrific story about the day he got fired (they call it “released” in baseball).

People get fired. People have setbacks in their life. It’s not always their fault or within their control.

What matters is what you do when it happens.

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 [...]]]> 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?

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 [...]]]> 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.”

===================

*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.)

(The island in the San Juans where we have a place [...]]]> My kids are watching The Blind Side as I write this. I’m sort-of watching and writing, but I saw it some months ago when I took my nine-year-old son to see it in a tiny (75-seat) theater in Friday Harbor in Washington’s San Juan Islands.

(The island in the San Juans where we have a place has no movie theater. It does have three espresso stands, four real restaurants and a few other places to eat, perhaps a dozen stop signs on an island twice the size of Manhattan, no chain stores, more sheep and cows than people, a plethora of eagles, ravens, and turkey buzzards, a nine-hole golf course where I actually managed to shoot a 46 last week, and an almost unlimited amount of peace and quiet. But I digress.)

In brief, the “blind side” is a quarterback’s back. A right-handed quarterback stands with his body facing right as he prepares to throw; anyone coming from his left arrives unseen, occasionally delivering a devastating hit. The film opens with the horrifying sack of Joe Theisman in 1985. I’m not a big football fan, but I was still in NYC at the time and happened to be watching the Giants game that Monday night. I will never forget the sight of Theisman’s leg bent in a Z shape from the compound fracture, and the moment the film started in Friday Harbor I knew what was coming and had to avert my eyes. I didn’t watch that hit in the film today, either.

But over the years, I’ve thought about that moment often. It happens all too often in the business world, where a team member fails to protect a colleague’s blind side. It’s even worse when it’s the employee’s manager delivering the hit that puts the employee out of the game, so to speak. Some managers appear to get a kick out of it, but most, like Lawrence Taylor (who delivered the hit with no intention of doing that kind of damage), inflict career-ending damage without meaning to. In fact, like Taylor, they’re often surprised and horrified by the result.

The difference is that in football, players play with the knowledge that they are at severe risk, that their careers could end at any moment. In the business world, that self-knowledge is largely absent.

If you’re a manager, it’s up to you to protect your employees’ blind side. You need to keep the blitzing executive linebackers away, even if you incur a penalty in doing so.

Do you do so?

How well do you protect your team’s blind side?

If you’ve never thought about it, watch what happens to Joe Theisman. You may want to avert your eyes 52 seconds into this (not very clear) clip. But whether you want to watch a closeup of his leg shattering or not, think about Joe Theisman and your team.

And protect their blind side.

As a manager, that’s your job.

(And in the spirit of full disclosure, while I shot a 46 on the second round of nine, I shot a miserable 56 on the first nine. I love the game, even though I’m pretty terrible at it.)

The problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape…. The slightest hint or whiff [...]]]> I was floored this morning when I came across this post about project sponsors. Some choice excerpts:

The problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape…. The slightest hint or whiff of them being on the wrong side of an issue, especially if it is your project that is the issue, then it is odds on that you will lose your project patronage…. If we do report the real project status now, it will only lead to investigation and recrimination which will ultimately delay the project anyway. [emphasis added]

In my decades in the corporate world, I have certainly seen my share of execs who fit this description. I’ve also seen at least as many who try their hardest to do the right thing by their teams, their projects, and their company.

Here are a handful of guidelines for project managers dealing with execs:

• If you bring a problem, also bring a suggested solution and some options to go with it.
• Be prepared for deep probing on any issue, not all of which may make sense to you at the time. (As a leader/manager, I would often pull hard on one particular thread of what I was presented, both for my own edification and to see if you knew your stuff. If that thread held, I was likely to accept the rest of your arguments and cut to the request-for-action section. If it didn’t hold, I deeply discounted everything you were offering.)
• Be prepared for the exec to ignore certain areas you think are important; she may know they’re not important, she may already understand them, or she may know that they’re outside her level of competence and is looking to you for an answer, not a dissertation.
• Take responsibility. Don’t point fingers.
• Execs have less do-this-now power that you think they do. If you must ask for something, ask wisely. The best (and easiest) help an exec may offer is an introduction to someone in a different group with whom you want to make contact.
• Virtually all execs believe they got to the executive suite by being smarter and “better” at their job than most everyone else — which is true more often than you may be willing to admit, though it certainly isn’t always true. (Being smarter than 90% of the other folks may or may not make the exec smarter than you… but don’t assume either way.)
• Don’t ever bring to a scheduled meeting a spreadsheet you haven’t triple-checked or a document (or PPT) with grammatical or spelling errors. (For an on-the-fly review, more leeway is given.) The exec wants to be sure you prepared — and cared enough to do your very best — before he contributes his constrained time.
• Half of what managers do isn’t visible to their direct reports; three-quarters isn’t visible at levels beyond that. Just because you can’t see what they’re busy with doesn’t mean they aren’t buried in work. More often that you might suspect, part of that work is providing “air cover” for their teams and your project, if for no other reason than you looking bad makes them look bad.

Finally, one quick clue for spotting an exec who does fit the description in the quote with which I began this article: An exec willing to burn his team by name to his peers or in public. It’s one thing to share, “The Acme Project is late,” or even “The Acme Project team’s been telling me the project will be late.” It’s quite another to say, “The Acme Project team has screwed up,” or –worst of all — “Joe has screwed up” or “The leader of the team has screwed up.” That’s departmental politics in the extreme, avoiding responsibility.Even for an exec new to a department, there’s a big difference between “I know the Acme Project has been late, and I’m going to find out what’s wrong and fix it” and “My predecessor screwed up the Acme Project.”

Exec, grunt, or in between, take responsibility. That’s leadership.

Most recent attention has focused on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to these so-called Oxfordians. I won’t go into all their arguments, but here’s a [...]]]> There has long been academic debate as to who wrote the work attributed to William Shakespeare.  (The word “academic” is important; see below.)

Most recent attention has focused on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to these so-called Oxfordians. I won’t go into all their arguments, but here’s a summary:

• How could some rude glover’s son from Stratford know all about the English court, Italian mores, and so on?
• Nothing survives in Shakespeare’s hand… perhaps because he wrote nothing.
• de Vere had a long-term relationship with Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Southampton, prime movers in  the Globe Theater in one way or another.
• de Vere was an established poet.
• de Vere traveled extensively in France and Italy, scenes of many Shakespearean plays.
• There are parallels between de Vere’s life and some Shakespearean plots, particularly Hamlet.
• de Vere was very cultured, educated, and sophisticated.

There are a few problems with this theory, not the least of which was that de Vere died in 1604, which sort of leaves out some plays… like Macbeth and The Tempest, dated well after 1604. de Vere’s supporters construct an elaborate — and not entirely impossible — structure around how the plays were actually written before de Vere’s death but not published or even staged until afterward.

So what does this all have to do with management?

The First Issue: Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest solution that fits the facts is most likely to be true. That doesn’t guarantee that it is true, but the more convoluted a solution, the more unlikely.

Or, in more modern terms, never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.

Saying that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays, epic poems, and sonnets requires a very complex construction to explain away all sorts of contradictions, from the 1604 issue to the fact that folks like his playwright contemporary — and non-friend — Ben Jonson was in on the conspiracy. It’s one thing for the players to keep a secret, since their livelihood depended on it, but it’s another for a competitor who didn’t like Master Will to play along. (On the other hand, one of Jonson’s snipes at Shakespeare can be stretched to suggest Jonson is mocking the attribution of plays to “Shakespeare.”)

Lesson: When a co-worker or someone on your team describes a complex scenario to explain why sales are down or a product is late, be very skeptical. Exhaust the simpler explanations first.

The Second Issue: Listen to the People on the Factory Floor

The people closest to the production of something generally are more knowledgeable than management about the mechanics of production. (There’s a fancy Lean Six Sigma term for this.)

If a project is late, ask the project manager and (in the case of software) the developers. Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft did a brilliant job of this in figuring out why it was taking so long to ship versions of Windows, and got the very successful Windows 7 out the door on time.

If sales are down, ask the people actually out trying to sell the product. They won’t have all the answers, and may well couch it in ways to protect their jobs, but their feet-on-the-ground insights are invaluable… and likely “spun” by their management.

If you’re trying to design something, listen to the users — and, even better, watch what they actually do. Their managers can’t tell you what they do, or even what they think they do; managers can only tell you what they think they want their employees to do.

In the Shakespeare controversy, ask the actors. Any competent actor or director experienced with playing Shakespeare will tell you that it’s clear that the author was a man of the theater, someone who understood in infinite detail how to move an audience, how to get them to laugh, cry, and see themselves in the mirror held by the playwright and the players. There’s nothing to suggest that de Vere had serious familiarity with the theater other than as an occasional playgoer.

Here’s where the “academics” thing comes in. Academics generally see Shakespeare as a poet, a word stylist; lacking a deep involvement themselves in rough-and-tumble theater, they tend to ignore that astonishing playability of Shakespeare’s work. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s characters are what theater folks call “actor-proof,” meaning that they work on stage no matter how bad the performance. I have seen Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Romeo, Juliet, Bottom, Oberon, Polonius, and numerous other characters performed abysmally by actors who had little understanding of what they were saying… and yet these characters were still affecting — and drew huge laughs where they should have. Of course, they missed loads of subtleties and nuance, but they were still good enough to “get by” and not destroy the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Note that I’m not suggesting every Shakespearean role is actor-proof, as numerous mediocre performances of Hamlet prove.

Lesson: Pay attention to the people closest to the action.

The Third Issue: Trust Your Ears

As I noted, de Vere was a poet.

He was, in fact, a terrible poet. His verse is to Shakespeare’s as The Archies were to The Beatles.

Now perhaps he got better as he got older, but even Shakepeare’s earliest work, such as Titus Andronicus, is far beyond anything de Vere wrote under his own name before Shakespeare (or, if you must, “Shakespeare”) came on the scene.

Lesson: If you’re listening to someone and something smells fishy, it probably is.

By the way, this last item points to a significant problem in hiring at large companies these days. A manager who trusts her instinct in this regard may wind up hiring only people who look like her with regard to age, gender, ethnicity, and so on. A good interviewer has to spend most of the interview consciously trying to revise or justify the first impression. First impressions are powerful — for both good and ill. Or as de Vere Shakespeare said, this “soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good.”

But what’s in a name, anyway?

In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.”

Joel, you’ll be missed.

I can think of no one in the tech [...]]]> Joel on Software — by ex-Microsoft veteran and Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky — has been my favorite tech-world blog by far for the past decade.

In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.”

Joel, you’ll be missed.

I can think of no one in the tech world with more common sense than Joel, and perhaps only Scott Berkun was his equal.

If you’re a techie, read Joel’s prescient comments on how Microsoft lost a key developer market — written six years ago. (If you know who Don Box is, don’t read the last few paragraphs while drinking milk.) If you’re not a techie, read the section titled The Two Forces at Microsoft, about a third of the way down the page. Even if you don’t understand a few specific references in there, it’ll give you an enormous insight into why Windows has captured market share over the years, one that few folks outside of Microsoft recognize. (It’s also one that increasingly few folks inside Microsoft recognize, unfortunately, though I think Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows for the past three years who shipped a high-quality Windows 7 in a timely manner, does get it.)

I completely understand Joel’s reasons for abandoning blogging. It’s a significant endeavor, if you try to do it well. (I may not be in Joel’s league, but I do try try to write well, and it takes a fair amount of time even for someone who is a fluid, fluent author.)

I understand it, but I’ll still miss his insights on the world of technology, and on the larger world in which technology lives.

He nails four issues around believing that data = truth:

5. New 1LMs should “shadow” senior 1LMs for a significant period of time. (“1LM” is [...]]]> Tom Peters (a/k/a TomPeters!) has a terrific post today about building great first-line managers. I won’t repeat all 20 points here, but I want to call out a few specifically because they are so often overlooked in lists of this sort:

5. New 1LMs should “shadow” senior 1LMs for a significant period of time. (“1LM” is his shorthand for first-line manager.)

12. “Business” training should also be a central part of 1LM training.

13. 1LMs should be treated as the company’s principal “culture carriers” and principal “change agents”—and be treated and trained and “used” accordingly. [emphasis in original]

18. …[T]he quality of the 1LM portfolio should, in turn, be a central element in the evaluation of the department head and division head.

My only issue with this list hearkens back to Peter Drucker: Too many objectives is no objectives. Shorten the list, Tom!

Here’s my short version:

1. Spend as much time selecting – and evaluating and culling — managers as you do on any other core aspect of your business. 1LMs make or break your business.
2. Use mentoring, shadowing, and coaching to develop managers at all levels.
3. Develop great training – and insist that execs put skin in the game by (a) taking the training themselves and (b) speaking regularly to the training classes.
4. Make understanding how the business works a major and ongoing component of managerial training. Every manager should be able to explain how both the business and the specific division make money or otherwise contribute to the bottom line.
5. The most important skills are “people” skills (leadership) and cross-functional abilities. They’re harder to build or select for than functional skills. (And don’t confuse cross-functional with politics; they’re opposite sides of one coin.)
6. Never forget that managers carry your culture.