Beyond the Job Description: Why Your Strategic Bench Needs a ‘Picture of Success’ to Win
Major League Baseball is a high-stakes world obsessed with precision metrics. We track exit velocity, spin rates, and defensive range with clinical accuracy. We know exactly what a win looks like for a prospect in rookie ball and a veteran big leaguer.
Yet, when it comes to your most critical assets—the specialists who make up the engine of your Baseball Operations—I see you falling back on an outdated tool: The job description.
The JD is a compliance document. It’s a safety net built by HR to ensure a baseline of activity. It lists responsibilities and required skills, but in an elite system, doing the job is only the baseline. Our goal isn’t activity. It’s the resulting state of the organization.
To bridge the gap between technical tasks and systemic results, we have to move beyond the JD and toward a co-created picture of success.
The Compliance Trap: The Tax of Vague Expectations
A JD is designed for the average. But when you hire high-ceiling talent—a hitting coach from a rival system or a lead analyst with a proprietary model—the JD often becomes a set of invisible handcuffs.
If you let your talent manage their tenure by the JD, they focus on compliance. They check boxes, attend meetings, and stay within their silo. They’re safe, but they aren't strategic. In this league, the most common symptom of a JD-focused culture is the hectic hero. This is the staff member who works 80 hours a week and hits every task on their list, yet your department’s needle isn't moving.
They’re paying an alignment tax. Because they haven't been given a clear target of what success actually looks like in your eyes for this specific season, they default to activity or volume rather than impact.
The Picture of Success Defined: What vs. So What?
In our Coaching For Organizations framework, a picture of success is a visceral, co-created vision of the future. It isn't a list of tasks. It is a description of a resulting state.
If a JD is the what, the picture of success is the so what?
The Difference in Action: The Analyst Context
The JD says: "Research, develop, and test mathematical, statistical, and predictive models to support player evaluation."
The Picture of Success says: "By Opening Day, our hitting coaches are proactively utilizing your new predictive dashboards to prep for daily hitters' meetings, resulting in a measurable increase in data-informed swing adjustments during the first 30 days of the season."
One describes a technical function. The other describes a transformed system. It facilitates your analyst’s shift from coding to integrating.
The Three Milestones of Strategic Alignment
Moving your staff from a JD to a picture of success requires a formal, three-part alignment process during the first 90 days of their landing:
The Leader’s Definition: Success begins with you, their direct manager. I ask you: "If it’s October and we’re celebrating this staff member’s first year, what are the three non-negotiable things they delivered that made your job easier?" This identifies the high-leverage wins that move your organizational needle.
The Systemic Audit (The Voice of the System™): I don't just ask the boss. I interview the peers and stakeholders your hire serves. I ask them what they need from this staff member to win. This reveals the chronic needs of your system—the communication gaps and technical bottlenecks that a standard JD could never capture.
The Alignment Meeting: This is the baton handover. Your staff member, you and I sit down together to finalize the synthesized goals. Once you sign off on this vision, your staff member is no longer trying to find their way. They have a verified scorecard for the season and know exactly where to shine their leadership light.
The Leader’s ROI: Strategic Autonomy
The ultimate value of architecting a picture of success is the reclamation of your strategic capacity. When your bench is 100% calibrated on what success looks like, your people require less oversight and firefighting.
By installing a picture of success protocol, you ensure that:
Energy is Targeted: Staff aren't spinning on projects that don't align with your top priorities.
Silos are Shattered: The picture requires cross-functional wins, like the communication loop between the laptop and the field.
Accountability is Objective: When it comes time for the growth assessment, there are no surprises. Both you and your staff are looking at the same scoreboard.
The Final Scorecard: Leadership by Design
Elite talent doesn't want a job description. They want a mission. They want to know how to move the needle with you. Avoiding the weeds of doing things and providing the authority and clarity of a picture of success is the fastest way to turn your high-stakes hires into a departmental engine.
In this industry, we don't leave the score to chance. We design and build every inning. Applying that same level of precision to your leadership bench ensures your human capital is as optimized as your data models.
Kim Izaguirre-Merlos is the Founder of How We Won and a Strategic Partner to Major League Baseball’s elite leaders. She specializes in coaching for high-stakes organizations and building total alignment on the strategic leadership bench.
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