Chapter 10: Monitoring and Reviving Teams--Helping Your Team Get Unstuck

Overview

Is your team winning? Is that the only statistic you are monitoring for your team? Baseball teams have traditionally posted box scores listing runs, hits, and errors. Bill James (2003), author of the best-selling book series Baseball Abstracts, has changed how teams are managed by compiling and analyzing all kinds of baseball statistics. General managers (most notably Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics, as documented in Michael Lewis's best-selling book Moneyball, 2003) have changed how they select players to build their teams, and field managers have changed how the teams play the game as a result of James's analysis. He calls his approach "sabermetrics" (after Society of American Baseball Research) and emphasizes the search for objective knowledge about baseball.

Instead of using hunches and "conventional wisdom," James has gathered data to either verify or debunk common team strategies. For example, many managers order their batters to make a sacrifice bunt (making an out in order to advance a runner from one base to another). James's research, however, shows that outs should steadfastly be avoided because more good things can happen if you have the batter hit away.

James has also shown that a statistic known as "on-base percentage" is a better measure of how valuable a player is than the traditional statistic of batting average. Batters who carefully pick which pitches to hit greatly add value to the offensive power of a baseball team. Billy Beane used this undervalued statistic to put together championship teams while reducing payroll costs considerably compared to other teams.

James suggests that managers should not believe clich s when they could be gathering measurements and applying logical analysis. He still admits that baseball is as much an art as a science but believes metrics help weed out misplaced beliefs. His dedication to eliminating biases has made a difference.

The seven key components of team excellence identified in this book separate the good teams from the excellent teams. They were compiled by gathering data on hundreds of teams in work organizations. Who is the Bill James in your organization? Who is gathering data to test the assumptions underlying your organization's approach to teams? Do you believe that team meetings should never be held on Mondays or Fridays? How do you know that? Do you believe that the responsibility for team leadership should be rotated among all members of the team? What evidence have you gathered to test the impact of this strategy? This chapter will challenge you to work with your team to identify what statistics you should be gathering on a regular basis and how you should do it.