Here we are in late May which means that the Major League Baseball player draft is just a couple weeks away. Many years ago I spent a couple springs running around the Bay Area scouting college and high school baseball players for the Chicago White Sox. What I came to learn pretty quickly about scouting was the mix of art and science that went in to the task.
The science part was pretty straight forward. A radar gun could measure a pitcher’s fastball — 90 mph was considered Major League average, while a stopwatch could measure a player’s speed — 4.3 seconds from home plate to first base for a right handed hitter was considered Big League average.
Once I got past the scientific elements of scouting, what become most fascinating to me was how much scouting really boiled down to assessing those elements of a player’s performance without a radar gun or a stopwatch. Watching an 18-year old high school senior and having to determine how far he could go in his pursuit of becoming an MLB All-Star has to be one of the most difficult tasks in all talent scouting. How could you really determine whether these less than fully developed teenagers could hit 30 home runs or win 20 games in the Bigs?
Several years after my tenure as a White Sox scout I’ve had the luxury of comparing what goes in to selecting and drafting players for a professional baseball team to what goes in to selecting team members for a business. What’s not surprising to me now is how similar these two efforts are in three important qualitative dimensions.
First, you have to look at every player based not on the position they are playing when you see them, but based on the position that you think they will ultimately be best suited to play. In baseball terms, this may mean seeing a kid playing first base who could actually be a great catcher.
In a business setting, this may be seeing someone in a sales role who is actually better suited to be in a marketing role that actually supports the sales team. I can think of a number of cases in my managing experience in which we either miscast a team member — by asking a team member to do things that they weren’t good at or by not taking advantage of talents that a team member possessed.
So Rule #1 is: Pick players based on the position they should play, not the position they are currently playing.
The next variable in building a great team is being able to look beyond the “best athlete” syndrome to the “ability to play” quality. How many times have we seen a sports team pick the player who is the biggest, fastest and strongest athlete under the assumption that they can “teach him how to play the game” versus picking the physically under assuming athlete who seems to always be in the right place, making all the plays?
In a business setting this is hard to measure — particularly in bigger companies where politics and ego can cloud the assessment of the true players who really “make all the plays”. That said, if managers look closely enough and really spend time with their people they’ll be able to pick these key contributors out of the crowd.
So Rule #2 is: Invest heavily in people who really make things happen — even if they’re not the flashiest or most credentialed.
Finally, perhaps the most difficult element to assess for a pro baseball scout is the element that in baseball vernacular is referred to as “make up”. A player’s make up is a non-scientific mix of characteristics that include elements like leadership capabilities, mental toughness, poise, competitive drive, perserverence and other similar qualities.
In a business setting this notion of “make up” is most crucial. Who are the people on your team you can really rely on in tough times? Who are the potential people managers and leaders in your company? Who are the employees most committed to the vision and mission of what your company does every day? This goes far beyond the notion of trying to simply assess whether someone will be a good “fit” with the current team. Ultimately, this concept of “make up” is what I believe separates successful teams and businesses from their less successful competitors.
So Rule #3 is: Hire people with stellar “make up” and get rid of people with poor “make up”.
Originally published on Medium on May 24, 2009. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.