Simple Solutions to Hard Decisions

A few years ago, Michael Lorenzen was a seasoned veteran of Major League Baseball and had just signed with the Phillies as their newest starting pitcher. One August afternoon, he walked onto the mound for his first start with his new team. A few innings into the game, murmurs started about how Lorenzen could potentially make history: he was on track to pitch a no-hitter. If he succeeded, it would be only the 13th time a single Phillies pitcher had done this in the team’s 140-year history. The excitement was slowly building with every strike.

Making history in professional sports is just that…it’s infrequent, it’s momentous, and it can be life-altering for a player and even his/her team. Accordingly, the pressure was on the Phillies coach to do everything he could to leave Lorenzen in the game to finish this incredible achievement. Easy decision. Leave him in to finish the game, right?

Not exactly. By the 7th inning, Lorenzen had thrown over 100 pitches and he had two full innings to go. If you don’t know, MLB starting pitchers are routinely rotated out of the game after 70 or 80 pitches as their arm strength has typically peaked and the potential shoulder damage to repeatedly throwing more than 70-80 pitches has been proven in longterm health studies. In his postgame interview, Phillies Coach Rob Thomson shared this about his thought processes and his conversation with Lorenzen during the 7th inning.

“I told him ‘I’m giving you 20 pitches and that’s it’….If he gets 115 pitches then we gotta get this guy [off the field] because we gotta keep the guy healthy.”

Coach Thomson’s remarks speak to the tough calls that a leader has to make, including sometimes looking out for the people you are tasked with leading even when they may not be looking out for themselves in the same way. In this moment, Coach Thomson had to balance 1) the emotional attachment to history-making and the positive energy that surrounds a team when a team member achieves an extraordinary feat, versus 2) the potential longterm cost of violating what his experience has told him is in the best interests of his player’s health and the team’s longterm success.

This situation is not unlike the same dilemma facing organizational leaders across all industries. It’s more than simple mathematical risk-reward analysis. It’s the conundrum of wanting to chase something extraordinary, but that achieving such a feat comes with a potential sacrifice.

I had two clients facing exactly such scenarios recently. One, a small tech company and the other a luxury real estate firm. The tech company had a superstar software engineer who saw a path to developing a groundbreaking new tech. This breakthrough could result in exceptional publicity, investors, and contracts. The downside is that none of those rewards were guaranteed, but what was mostly assured was that it would cost time, money, lost opportunities in other tech developments, and the software engineer was expected to encounter long hours, frustration, disappointment from missed expectations, and probably burnout. Similarly, my luxury real estate firm client had a high-performing sales executive on the brink of closing the biggest sale in the company's history - a deal that would no doubt elevate the firm's prestige, boost morale and attract other high-net-worth clients. However, the deal required stretching ethical boundaries - overpromising and applying pressure on a client to close on a deal when the client hinted that it might not be the right deal for their longterm investments.

If you read either of the above scenarios and saw a clear, no-questions-asked answer, that’s terrific. As a leadership consultant to them, I didn’t see it that way. I knew the challenges and the answers were multifaceted and complex. So, for everyone else - especially for organizational leaders who have faced similar circumstances where the answer is usually far from clear because of the great many competing factors, here are some very simple tips to help get clarity and confidence in your decisions:

1. Go back to your Core Values. If you’ve developed well-crafted Core Values and communicate and embody them across the organization then your people will expect you to subscribe to them in all instances. There can be no wavering from them. Ever. You can confidently tell your team member or the team why you did or didn’t pursue this opportunity based on its alignment with or contradiction to your core values. There will inevitably be some dissent with the decision, but that pales in comparison to the respect and understanding that are gained when you go after or forgo a particular opportunity based on a strict adherence to your core values.

   
   

2. Innovate. While these issues were originally presented to me by my clients as problems with only this-or-that solutions, there were in fact a variety of solutions that were palatable, but the challenge was that those solutions had never been explored. Why? Because institutional norms had crept in to stifle the creativity that is otherwise present when teams face new, never-been-done-before challenges. Institutional norms have a place in organizations for maintaining structure and keeping consistency and efficiency, however there are times when a leader must help his/her team hit the reset button to see outside what is normal. A good indicator of when you’re pushing your team out of that institutional thinking? Hearing “But we’ve always done it this way (yet no one knows why)”. Hear that and you’re on the cusp of a mental innovation reset!

And…congrats to Michael Lorenzen on his no-hitter and to Coach Thomson for having the courage to lead boldly!