Could Fantasy Baseball make you a better manager of others in the workplace?

If you know me well, you understand I have a passion for baseball.  I grew up playing baseball and as a catcher I always ended up being in the middle of every pitch, if not every play.  As a math and science geek I also had a penchant for numbers and measurement.  I like to study how things work and I also enjoyed and still enjoy taking things apart to see how they function.

Many of you have heard of Fantasy Baseball (FB), but you may not know how it really functions.  FB allows you to build a team with specific players and compete against others based on the statistical success of the team based on a group of measureable statistics.  Some of the more common statistics in FB include the following:

Each of these categories are summarized for the hitters and pitchers on your team and they are ranked against the other teams in your league.

Metrics are a key to success in baseball and the father of metrics, or sabermetrics as they may be called now, is Bill James.  I will talk about Mr. James more in a future post.

If you can use metrics to predict winners and losers in baseball, could you not also do the same in business?  Of course you can!  We do it all of the time.  Some of the  more common metrics in business are as follows:

I could add a number of other metrics to the list, but you may wonder if these metrics are attributable to just one individual like their counterparts in baseball.  In some respects they are, but there are other metrics we could add that would measure more of the “humanistic” or leadership qualities of an individual in an organization:

While I fully agree that some of the leadership metrics may be a little more qualitative than the business metrics, having a way to measure success if always important.  One of my former co-workers put it best:  “What gets measured, matters!”

I would encourage you to adopt an attitude of metrics in your organization, whether it is a for profit, non profit or anything in between.  If we can engage one another and see improvement through fantasy baseball or other sports, just think what we might learn by purposefully using the same kind of thinking while working with others.

If it matters, find a way to measure it!