A managerial approach for the Fed, the Nats, and you

Number 178

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has urged Washington to take leadership lessons from Davey Johnson, manager of the Washington Nationals. In an October 6-7 “Wall Street Journal” column, Bernanke said that many of us could learn from the Nationals’ twin focus on statistics and intangibles.

As an economist and “unabashed Nat’s fan,” Bernanke is intrigued by baseball managers like Johnson who take into account the “insights of sabermetrics,” drawn from data available from 130 years of Major League Baseball history. At the same time, Bernanke sees the importance of more traditional management skills like recognizing and nurturing talent.

Bernanke described Johnson as the epitome of the “head-and-heart consensus” between traditional leadership values and decision-making based on statistical analysis. He said Johnson, who holds a degree in mathematics, fully appreciates the importance of making decisions based on statistics and other factual evidence. But at the same time, Johnson “strikes the right balance between relying on the tangible (data) and the intangible (confidence and motivation).”

I am not well informed about baseball but I particularly enjoyed Bernanke’s column because Johnson’s leadership style is one reason that I, too, have fallen in love with the Nats. Whether we are organizational leaders or just trying to manage our own lives we can learn from practitioners, like Johnson, of what might be called “the Yin and Yang approach” to management.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of “Yin-Yang” describes how opposite but complementary forces can work together to create a successful whole. He did not use the words “Yin” and “Yang,” but best-selling author Jim Collins illustrated the approach in his wonderful book, “Great By Choice.”

After massive research, Collins concluded that the best leaders are more disciplined, more empirical and more vigilant than others in using data to manage risks. But at the same time, he said, the best leaders share a key trait: their ambition is for their group, their company, their work, their cause and NOT for themselves. In other words, great leaders make choices that are shaped both by their value system and by a dedicated reliance on data, standards and methods.

Daniel Pink took a Yin-Yang approach in his influential book, “A Whole New Mind,” where he said the future belongs to those who can fully employ both hemispheres of their brains. He said it used to be that lawyers, accountants and engineers were taught to rely primarily on the analytical left hemisphere of their brains. But now left-brain thinking isn’t enough to bring success. According to Pink, tomorrow’s leaders will require not only technical and analytical skills but also “emotional intelligence,” encompassing qualities like empathy, self awareness and an appreciation of the arts.

If you want to do a bit a self-coaching, bringing yourself closer to achievement of your goals, consider a Yin-Yang strategy. Sharpen your approach for the remainder of 2012 by creating a two-part plan:

• Yang initiative: look at hard data. Yang energy is tough, assertive, concrete, practical and precise, facing the sun and the light. Yang managers know that you can’t control activities that you cannot measure. Unless you measure something, you don’t know when it’s getting better or worse. And careful measurement helps you to face the facts and grapple with what needs to be done. A classic example in personal life is that dieters who keep careful track of the food they eat every day typically lose more weight than dieters who don’t keep a food log. To craft a Yang strategy, look at an area where you would like to see improvement, find a measure that would demonstrate progress, and maintain a daily log.
• Yin initiative: focus on your values. Yin energy is marked by intuition, sensitivity, thoughtfulness and acceptance of abstract and complex phenomena. A simple Yin exercise is to draft a list of the things in your work or life that matter the most. From there, a Yin strategy could be to come up with a list of 5 to 10 words that capture your most important values, look at the list every day for at least a month, and each day review your calendar to see whether the way you spend your time is consistent with your values.