Manager Project Design and Personal Development

My previous post was about how we implemented a data driven hiring process. Now, I’ll further outline an example of how we actually execute projects and provide resources for the personal development of our managers.

Many of my beliefs in this area are formed from personal experience, but also largely molded around Ray Dalio’s “Principles,” Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One,” Dan Heath’s “Upstream,” and some impactful courses I took at JMU such as “Evidence-Based Decision Making”. Overall, I feel it is important to acknowledge that not every single manager wants to work in baseball. Rather than gearing everything we talk about towards baseball, we try to focus on the bigger picture. What do they want to do one day? What are they good at? What do they want to get better at? We then try to narrow those three questions into how they can be implemented with JMU baseball, where everybody wins.

Since COVID prevented us from meeting in person in the fall, we held Zoom meetings 1-2 days a week. We had guest speakers that included a MiLB pitching coach, an MLB Agent, and an MLB travel director. Student presentation content varied from presentations on pitch tunneling and regression analysis for our team, to having “feel” when on the field and thinking from first principles. Overall, I feel that it is less important to teach our managers what to think, and more important that we teach them how to think from an evidence-based point of view. From there, it is our job as leaders to put them in the best positions to be successful.

Clifton Strengths Assessment

Personally, my favorite thing we did was having everyone take the “Clifton Strengths Assessment.” All managers took the assessment that asks 177 questions, then a report is generated that is supposed to be their “Natural Strengths.” It is some really interesting stuff, and many of our managers (including myself and one of our coaches) felt like it was extremely accurate.

We had a few goals in mind following the assessment and seminar in which members of the JMU Student Leadership Center went over the results. 1) Understand the natural strengths of our managers so we could assign them tasks in which they are more likely to be successful; 2) understand the weaknesses so that we can compensate for them by getting help from others who are strong in a particular area, and also as a focal point on where we can improve; and 3) create manager “Baseball cards” (s/o Ray Dalio) to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each individual so that other managers can look directly to someone for help when trying to fill the gaps on a project. Ideally, every project consists of at least two people. Preferably one of which is an underclassmen who can continue building on the project for at least another year and pass it along.

As a whole, here’s what the strengths of our team of managers looks like.

The yellow-shaded portion of the chart is Analytics managers (many of them are hybrids and will also help on the field post-Covid restrictions), while the purple-shaded region is primarily On-Field managers. It’s pretty interesting to see the overall dynamic of each set of managers. Our On-Field managers are great executers, while our Analytics managers seem to be more skilled in the “Strategic Thinking” and “Relationship Building” sections. Not only will this help with all of the goals I previously mentioned, it could open up insights into future hiring—if we know for a fact that On-Field managers are naturally-skilled “Executors,” what types of qualities and questions should we be asking in an interview process to find the best “Executors”?

I personally envision this as being helpful in defining specific qualities of every task/project we take on. For example, a manager assisting in putting together an advance report would require a high level of attention to detail, responsibility and discipline to complete on time. Maybe we are brainstorming new ways to improve our advance reports, that would be more suitable for a “Strategic Thinker.” When a task is created, the leader of that project needs to clearly define the traits required to make it a successful outcome. Then refer to the strengths sheet of our managers and determine who would be best-suited to take on that project. (Adding technical skills to the sheet for projects that would require, say, data visualization, web scraping, photoshop, etc.).

All in all, I am a big believer that personal development is often overlooked because it does not produce immediate results. That is a very short-sighted view. Student managers are constantly helping our coaches and players at practice and in the office, which is undoubtedly a great experience builder. But, there needs to be some reciprocity. Being a manager who helps set up practice is highly valued, but what if that student wants to be a graphic designer? Let’s assign an additional project where they can create aesthetically pleasing reports for our players and coaches. We need to show our managers we are interested in helping them develop while pushing them to apply what they are learning and skilled at to the overall program.