Want To Flip Your Club’s Culture? Start With This One Small Change

Image credit: (Photo by Alex Trautwig/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Matthew Obernauer worked in the Colorado Rockies front office from 2013-2021. This is the second in a two-part series from him. Read his first piece here:

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In 1987, Paul O’Neill, the new CEO of the Alcoa corporation, announced an audacious goal for the aluminum company. It had nothing to do with output, earnings, or profits. Instead, in a business where factory workers worked with dangerous machines and metals heating up to 1,500 degrees, O’Neill wanted Alcoa to become the safest workplace in America, with zero injuries. 

“If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing,” O’Neill said, as recounted in Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, “you need to look at our workplace safety figures.”

Investors and analysts at the time were dumbfounded—what did worker safety have to do with Alcoa’s stock performance? Many advised their clients to dump the stock—this lunatic was going to ruin the company, they said. 

They were wrong. An investor who bought $1 million in Alcoa shares at the beginning of O’Neill’s tenure would have seen a 5x increase in value by the time O’Neill left 13 years later, and would have received an additional $1 million in dividends over that period. 

O’Neill understood that the right small changes can have cascading effects throughout an organization.

“Almost everything about the company’s rigid hierarchy had to change to accommodate O’Neill’s safety program,” Duhigg wrote, “creating cultures where new values (became) ingrained.” 

 

Around the game right now, there likely are presidents or general managers wondering if their organizational cultures have grown stale—or worse, toxic. Fortunately, for those people there is a simple way to begin a cultural reset and set up their club for future success: they should make it their stated goal to lead Major League Baseball in the number of employees who get interview requests for jobs with other clubs. 

(MLB does not keep track of which teams request interviews with whom, and it is not aware of any individual club that keeps such records.) However, clubs zealously guard anything they view as a competitive advantage, including good players, coaches, or front office staff. Some owners also don’t like the inflationary effect interview requests have on the salaries of those in demand. Setting a goal of having more clubs come after your people would flip decades of baseball culture on its head. 

However, once this goal is set, it would open the door for creativity in other aspects of the organization. If you want more clubs interviewing your people, you’d have to ask what would make your people compelling candidates and get them those resources.

For example, maybe it’s important to have a breadth of experience in different parts of the front office; you’d have to create a system where employees rotate through departments, gaining exposure while also bringing new ideas to those groups. Analysts or coaches may need experience with the latest in technology or data capture and how to implement it in player evaluation and development, so you’d have to make investments in those areas. If other clubs want creative thinkers and new ideas, you’d have to create an environment in which experimentation is celebrated even when it fails. And if you expect more people to be hired away, you’d have to build the best possible pipeline of new talent, as well as in-house training to ensure that new hires understand what is expected of them and how they can be successful. 

All of these changes wouldn’t just be good for employees; they’d bring tremendous value to the club. In short, you’d be building an organization from which other clubs want to steal. And unlike many other changes that occur within baseball departments, you can get everyone in your organization to support it. 

 

In any organization, individuals face cross-currents of “we” and “me.” Most people value a team environment and the chance to contribute to something bigger than themselves. But they also have personal ambitions and professional goals. These feelings are even stronger in a highly competitive industry like baseball, in which team success is valued above all but in which there are only 30 GM jobs and having the ear of one of those people is a currency in itself. Focus only on yourself and, no matter your individual skill, your contribution to an organization will be poisonous. But focus only on the club your whole career and you risk never reaching your personal goals if no one at the club is focused on you. This is why you sometimes see divisions within clubs between “old-school” scouts and “new-school” analysts: if a club is viewed as moving too far in one direction or another, it’s only natural for someone to view those changes in the context of his or her future employment or influence on decisions. 

But even those who don’t want to leave their jobs want to feel respected and “in demand” within their industry. So if the stated goal is to maximize interview requests and employees’ career opportunities, then you’ve outlined something that everyone can support and work together to build. Investments in “old-school” or “new-school” methods wouldn’t be viewed as part of a constant push/pull between differing philosophies; instead, they’d be a component of professional development and an effort to make the organization elite in all areas. Leaders would be elevated based on their positive impact on others, through an ability to teach, delegate and empower. Employees would be given license to work selflessly and collaboratively without worrying that they’re being left behind. 

No general manager or president of baseball operations can hit, run, field, or pitch for their club. The best way they can impact results is by creating an organizational culture and decision-making process that puts the club and its players in the best position to be successful. That begins by providing a common purpose.

“Look out for the other guy,” is a good place to start, but it can work only if it starts at the top.