Systemic Candor: Optimizing the Feedback Loop on Your Strategic Bench

Jan 27

As a baseball operations leader, you prioritize the integrity of your data. You seek precision in your pitching models and accuracy in your swing-path analytics because you know that a decision is only as good as the information behind it.

Yet, when it comes to the most expensive and complex part of your department—the human capital of your strategic leadership bench—you may be operating on filtered data.

You might ask a Hitting Coach how the new Triple-A hitting plan is landing, and hear, "It’s going great, boss." You might even ask an Analyst if the coaches are using the new dashboards, and get back, "Absolutely, everyone is on board." But often, behind the scenes, the staff is frustrated by the data, and some coaches are ignoring the dashboards entirely.

At How We Won, we call this the appeasement loop. The unspoken or unaddressed friction is a significant threat to your departmental velocity. In an elite system, high-level talent is the baseline for success, but systemic candor is the accelerator.

The Appeasement Loop: The Tax on Your Authority

Appeasement hinges and thrives on professional preservation.

In a Major League system, the stakes are highest when you hold the power of the contract and the promotion. Staff will instinctively protect themselves by filtering the truth. They will mask the friction, hide the failures, and echo your vision back to you to avoid any perceived conflict.

This creates an unproductive echo chamber where you primarily see the leadership shadow and light your staff wants you to see. Meanwhile, the chronic needs of the system (broken communication loops, silos, and cultural friction) remain unmet.

By the time the critical information reaches your desk, it arrives as a crisis: a key hire quits, a top prospect stalls out, or the GM asks why the hitting metrics are down. You are paying a latency tax because the system (your staff) was apprehensive about telling you the truth when it mattered most.

Defining Systemic Candor

In How We Won’s Coaching for Organizations framework, we distinguish between being nice and systemic candor.

Niceness prioritizes the comfort of the moment or feeling of the relationship, which leads to appeasement or avoiding conflict.
Systemic Candor prioritizes the ROI of the organization. It’s a commitment to courage when sharing the unfiltered truth about what is working and what isn't, especially in the face of hierarchy.

Systemic candor is the lubricant that allows a specialized machine of people to pivot quickly. Without it, your department is like a team where the coaches in the press box see the leak but are hesitant to communicate it to the dugout.

The Strategic Partner as a Neutral Resource

This is where an external strategic partner becomes a vital asset for a baseball operations leader. As a partner leveraging executive coaching, we don’t have evaluation power over your staff. Instead, we provide a safe container for them to surface and share the unfiltered truth that they feel hesitant to share directly with a supervisor.

Our process maximizes systemic candor and breaks through the appeasement loop in three ways:

1. The "Voice of the System™" Audit

We conduct confidential stakeholder interviews that bypass the formal hierarchy. We ask the hard questions a boss can't ask: "What’s the one thing no one is telling the Director about this department?" This surfaces systemic friction while it’s still manageable, allowing us to work together to fix value leaks before they impact the organization.

**2. Partnering on the Stance of Candor**

Many staff members want to be honest but aren’t sure how to do it productively (without being perceived as difficult or not trustworthy). We partner with them on how to package the truth as a strategic asset. We move the conversation from complaining to contributing.

3. The Three-Way Alignment Meeting

We normalize the truth in a high-trust environment. In these meetings between the leader, executive coach, and staff member, we bridge the gap between functions like the laptop and the cage without fear of judgment. You get the real-time data you need to lead more effectively, and your staff gets the relief and clarity of being seen and heard.

The ROI of the High-Fidelity Data

Your reputation as a baseball operations leader is built on your ability to make the right call at the right time. Systemic candor ensures you’re making those moves based on reality, not appeasement.

When you install a culture of systemic candor, your organization wins because:

Pivots Happen Faster: You identify failing projects in Week 4 instead of Month 6.
Silos are Integrated: You discover which specialists are holding onto high-fidelity data or resisting integration and bring them back into the communication loop.
Reputations are Protected: You build a department known for its courage and transparency, which attracts and retains the highest-level talent in the game.

The Final Scorecard: Transparency as a Peak Performance Tool

Prioritize high-fidelity data on your department’s dashboard. When you encourage your leadership bench and staff to speak the truth early and often, you aren’t just managing a team, you’re leading an elite, self-correcting organization.

Strategic integration ensures that the voice of the system reaches you in time to capture the greatest wins and dominate this season.

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 fostering systemic candor within high-velocity systems.

Kim Izaguirre-Merlos https://howwewon.org