Supervisory Leadership

I have never been much of a baseball fan. I've never enjoyed the game the way some of my friends seem to. I certainly don't understand it. But that's not because I didn't try.

A decade or so ago, I read George Will's book, "Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball." It inspired me to really try to learn about baseball. I figured that if I understood the game better, I would like it more.

I never learned to like baseball, but I did learn a lot of other things. Some of them were about teams and how to put them together.

It seemed to my untutored eye that most baseball team owners put teams together by spending tons of money on great stars who would lead the team to victory. They were clumped together with lesser stars (as rated by their salaries) and sent out on the field to bring victory.

That strategy didn't seem to work. Teams with gigantic, government-budget-sized payrolls didn't automatically win. Teams did not finish the season in order of their salary expenditure.

In 2002 the Oakland Athletics finished first in the American League's Western Division with the smallest player payroll of any major league baseball team. Then Michael Lewis, who is a wonderful writer, wrote a book about how they did it.

That convinced me to buy one more baseball book, which turned out to be a business book and was worth the money even if, after reading it, I didn't like baseball any better. There was one key lesson in the book: great teams outperform clumps of folks.

One reason that the A's won as much as they did is that they had a better team than a lot of the competition. They didn't have a better team because they had the best players on the planet. They had a better team because they had a group of men who could do all things that it took to win. And they had a better team because the pieces fit together.

There are other reasons that the A's had such a good year. They got lucky. Beane is a great negotiator. They were using some analytical techniques that other teams were not using, at least not yet.

If you're a baseball fan, you might want to read what Lewis has to say about all those things. But if you're responsible for the performance of a group, pay attention to those two lessons about team building.

The 2002 A's had a better team because they had a group of men who could do all things that it took to win. Having just one or two players with incredible skills is not enough. To be effective a baseball team needs to be able accomplish a range of specific tasks.

The same is true for your team. What are the important things that the folks on your team have to do for the team to win? Do you have them all? If not, will you acquire them by training or recruitment?

The 2002 A's had a better team because the pieces fit together. The whole idea of a good team is that all the pieces work together to achieve a synergistic result better than the simple sum of the parts.

There have been plenty of books about this. One of the newer and better is James Surowiecki's book, "The Wisdom of Crowds."

Surowiecki tells us that the best teams have a diversity of skills and viewpoints. Your job as a supervisory leader includes getting that productive mix on your team.

Your team will be more effective if all the pieces work together toward a common goal. In general, winning, whether in baseball or business, creates an atmosphere where it's more fun to go to work.

That said, your job as a supervisory leader is to maintain the balance between the tension that good decision making demands and the cohesion that turbocharges productivity. That is not easy and it gets more complex and harder to do, the bigger your team becomes.

The lesson of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's is really simple, though. A team is not just clumps of players. A team brings a variety of skills to bear to achieve a common purpose. A team is more than the sum of its parts.

Here are some books you may enjoy.

• Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball by George Will
• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
• Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street by Michael Lewis
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki

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