Add to all that, last night we finally watched Moneyball--the film about baseball GM Billy Beane (Chris had been wanting to for a while). I have to admit I wasn't expecting much--I was actually doing some computer work but as fate would have it the website I needed wasn't cooperating so I actuall had to watch the movie.
It's s bit hard to describe Moneyball--perhaps because my mind is swimming from the lessons and questions it brought forth for me. But if I can summarize it a bit, it tells the story of Beane and others involved in trying to figure out how to make a REALLY low-budget team competitive against teams with a seemingly bottomless back account. Do the skills, stats and qualities that everyone else was using at the time to decide who to pick up actually translate into wins. The movie suggests that no, they do not necessarily. As a Duke grad, it's long been an understanding of mine that individual performance and team success are not always independently directly related--many of the best Duke players who were national championship winners in a program that is arguably very team oriented, never quite seemed to be able to translate their success in college to comparable success in the pros.
Leadership writers have started using learnings from sports scouting to help us think through hiring decisions--we all struggle with the basic question of how to identify the drivers for success from one role or setting to another? What transfers and what does not?
Another powerful challenge in all this is what is often called the "Peter Principle"--namely, people being promoted to their level of incompetence. Now, that's not really totally fair, but it highlights what I think is a very certain truth--success at one level of an organization does not at all predict definitively success at a higher level. Leadership and management is a skill and an art, and the ability of someone to do a task well does not mean he can lead others doing that task. That doesn't make him a bad employee, it just means we are all made to do well (I think) at something, and not at everything.
Another area that Moneyball brought to mind, and which is related, is the basic question, then, of what factors actually matter--which ones are the best predictors of future success. Sports has long asked this question--and rightly concluded that simply looking at college stats, for example, certainly does not translate to success in the pros. For the rest of us, this takes the form of assessing what can realistically be determined in an interview that actually helps indicate if a person is right for a job, and what does their background tell you.
Inevitably, it's difficult to watch this process happen from the outside--and that was certainly true of many who watched what Billy Beane was doing. And it begs the question--are surprising hirings or selections a stroke of genius, or just plain, well, bad? As much as Moneyball seems a story of creative minds, it's also a story about how choosing the right person is not as subjective of an endeavor as we might like to think. And that it can be accessed whether a selection is, objectively, good or bad.
Certainly, there is more to such selections than just statistics. Even the father of sabermetrics (the methods used by Billy Beane), BIll James, cautions against overestimating the value of statistics as a predictive tool. But when we make a selection that seems so surprising to others, it must beg the question whether we've let our biases blind us.
When I met with the SPRC Monday, I began the meeting with a brief study of Luke 4:14-30, the account of Jesus returning to his hometown to preach. I explained to them the vital importance that local churches play in helping candidates discern whether they are called to ordained ministry at this time in the UMC. I suggested that this passage should bring to mind some challenges in making such an assessment:
First, we can sometimes be so focused on a person's current or former role that we cannot rightly see how that translates (or doesn't) to future service. In Jesus' case, he seems to have gotten the reaction that I sometimes get when I run into people who knew me as a child--it can be hard for them to see me as a grown up and not that little girl "THIS" tall. When that happens in hiring or selection or assessment, it can keep us from seeing skills that a person has but which are perhaps not key for them currently--and so we can underestimate their skills or fit for future success in a different role. At the same time, we can also become so enraptured with success in one setting that we can forget to fully assess how a future role might be different, and how skills that are key for their success now might not help them, and weaknesses that are not significant now could be fatal later. Add to that our own personal biases and issues affecting our judgment, and we can just plan not see what is happening. Or that promotion ought to be based on skills AND success, not just success.
Second, the Luke passage points out that sometimes promotion or advancement comes at the expense of relationships or with the derision of others. That is true, and cannot be avoided. But there are times, especially in the church, when we too readily see opposition as a spiritual battle or people's resistance to God moving and not as a true reflection of a bad choice. And we become entrenched and unwilling to admit mistake because now we're dealing with people's lives--it's our mistake so we suck it up and subject everyone else to the mistake under the guise of grace...or just generally hoping things will magically change.
We see this illustrated in Moneyball for sure. On the one hand, Beane and his assistant do well to commit to their plan--at the expense of some good players. They do so despite a rather intense resistence on many sides, and a pretty bad losing streak starting the season. They hold fast, though, and go on a record setting win streak--though still unable to win the title. On the other hand, the entire approach meant turning away from how they'd been doing things before. I meant players have to be trader or let go. There was no moving on without leaving behind. Too often, we seek to move on without being willing to leave behind--especially when that means leaving behind some of our pride and arrogance about choices we've made.
All that said, making decisions and assessing people is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. And I don't think anyone does it perfectly. I think it's a bit more objective than we'd like to admit (objective, of course, means one can objective say we've made a mistake) but is also an art. I believe that scripture gives us reason to believe that people are more than the sum of their past and that God can do great things through unexpected people. BUT...that does not relieve us at any level of the responsibility of being discerning, wise and humble about the decisions we have to make. It's hard, but it is upon these decisions that the future of our organizations and indeed our lives depend.
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