From Ballfield to Boardroom

“I have two disturbing pieces of information for you,” said Dean George Packer Barry, of Yale’s School of Medicine, to a graduating class in 1939. “Half of what we taught you is not true. However, the most disconcerting piece is that we don’t know which half it is.”

I spent a considerable part of my professional career trying to find out about that other half. Over time the answer came to me, but it took me years to believe; Relationships plus risk-taking yields uncommon results. Could the answer be that simple? Yes, but the journey is an entirely a different story.

Most technical disciplines did not encourage interdependency or working together. Even if we had the foresight to master that skill, venturing outside was rare because there was much to learn in our chosen areas of expertise. Yet, in most cases, solving those applied problems required a different kind of thinking from what we were accustomed to.

Over my governmental career, I saw many opportunities for people in leadership positions who simply did not lead. They had the knowledge, skills and ability to lead, but they lacked one critical need: talent. Even if they did have the talent to lead, they passed. Instead, the problem would be managed until it was the manager’s time to climb the next rung. Why take the unnecessary risk of being wrong and falling down the career ladder? There would be opportunities to lead when it was safer to do so. 

Complaints about the lack of leadership during discussions with like-minded colleagues were frequent. They attended those expensive and certificate-framing courses on leadership only to let the experience sit on a shelf somewhere. The behavior didn’t change, but they kept living the illusion of success because of the seat they occupied.

Many years ago, at the prodding of my wife, Corky, I managed my oldest son’s baseball team. They were a bunch of 7-8-year-old “major leaguers in training.” Coincidentally, at about the same time, I became a supervisor at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry housed at the Centers for Disease Control. Over the years, I came to accept that the problems working with little kids were not that different from working with the big kids downtown.

What happens to us when we become adults? We trade in our imagination and risk-taking for body armor. We lose our connection with each other and, in turn, lose respect for each other. We mistake excellence for mediocrity because we lost the lessons of childhood.  

For over 15 years, I had the opportunity to work with children who played a game. The experience I observed of their cheers, tears and fears reconnected me to my misplaced ideals. Doing for others is the key to a quality work life.

By day, I was developing high performance teams to solve complicated environmental health issues and communicating those results to a sometimes wary public. By night, I was coaching my sons’ baseball teams. Never would I have imagined that, in those 15 years of seeing what seemed to be insurmountable problems through the transparent eyes of those little kids at the ballpark would give me renewed insight into understanding and conquering the barriers to success with the big kids in the boardroom downtown.

This book was written for CEOs. It discusses solutions to problems that don’t necessarily require expensive resources but gives insight about how to harness the creative wisdom within the organization. The problems, solutions and actions in each chapter provide the compass for long-lasting success. Hopefully you will laugh, cry, and be uplifted to renew your commitment to achieve great things with your high performance teams.