The Lead Stance: Commanding the System Beyond the Uniform

Feb 23

In the MLB, we talk a lot about presence. We look for it in our top-of-the-rotation starters and our cleanup hitters. It’s that unmistakable aura of authority that changes the energy of the game before a single pitch is thrown.

But as a baseball operations leader, your presence isn't about how you stand in a dugout. It’s about your lead stance.

Your lead stance is the internal architecture of how you show up to your department. It is the baseline from which you make every high-stakes decision, hire every member of your staff, and manage every crisis. If your stance is reactive, your organization stays in firefighting mode. If your stance is strategic, you build a self-correcting engine.

To lead an elite system, you have to move past role play and into the real play of leadership.

Role Play vs. Real Play: The High-Status Trap

Most leaders in this game are incredibly skilled at role play. You’ve spent your career learning what a Director or a GM is supposed to look like. You know the language, the dress code, and the rest of the optics. You wear the uniform of authority, but often, underneath that uniform, you are white-knuckling the grind.

Role play is exhausting. It’s a persona you put on to meet the expectations of the system. When you lead from a role, you are constantly scanning for approval or trying to avoid being found out. This is a massive value leak. You are spending your strategic capacity on maintaining an image rather than building a legacy.

Real play is different. Real play is leading from your actual character, values, and professional maturity. It is the move from surviving the system to designing it. When you lead from real play, you don't need to act like a leader. You simply are one.

The Reactive Stance: The Hero’s Tax

The most common lead stance I see in baseball ops is the reactive hero. You know the feeling. You are the smartest person in the room, so you solve every problem. You spend 14 hours a day mediating between your staff. You are the glue holding the department together.

But there is a heavy tax for being the hero. Every hour you spend solving a problem for your staff is an hour you aren't spending on the 30,000-foot strategy of the organization. Your hero stance actually keeps your team immature. The don't have to grow because they know you’ll swoop in to fix the friction.

The Strategic Stance: From Technician to Builder

In our framework, I partner with you to shift your stance from the technician (doing the work) to the architect (building the system that does the work).

This shift requires a visceral commitment to your own growth. You have to move up the degrees of choice (DOC):

DOC 1 (Reactive): You feel like a victim of the 162-game grind. Things are happening to you.
DOC 3 (Strategic): You are the designer. You stop reacting to friction and start building communication loops that prevent it.

When you change your stance, the organization feels it immediately. You stop being the bottleneck and start being the catalyst. Your people stop looking to you for answers and start looking to you for vision.

Your ROI: The Reclamation of Capacity

The ultimate goal of optimizing your lead stance is to reclaim your strategic capacity. When you operate from a high-status, strategic stance:

You Work Less, But Impact More: You stop doing busy work and focus on the high-leverage pivots that move the organizational needle.
You Attract Elite Talent: High-performers don't want a boss who micro-manages. They want a builder who provides the authority for them to win.
You Build a Self-Correcting System: Your department begins to solve its own problems because you’ve built the unit stance and co-created the picture of success.

The Final Scorecard: Command the Room

The score doesn't lie in this industry. Neither does your lead stance. You didn't reach this level of the game to just get through the season. You came here to win and to build something that outlasts your tenure.

Optimizing how you show up is the highest ROI move you can make. When you master your lead stance, you aren't just managing a baseball department. You’re leading an high-performing organization by design.

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 the strategic lead stance of the front office.

Kim Izaguirre-Merlos https://howwewon.org