The ‘Unit’ Stance: Transforming Specialists into a High-Velocity Engine
When you audit your baseball operations staff, you see a multidisciplinary machine. You’re no longer just managing "hitting coaches" and "pitching coaches." You’re presiding over an elite collection of Lead Data Scientists, Applied Biomechanists, Performance Nutritionists, and Cloud Data Engineers, all working alongside veteran field staff.
On paper, this is an elite collection of technical talent. But in the 162-game season, this complexity often creates a unique kind of organizational drag.
If these specialists operate as individual experts, they inadvertently create silos. When silos exist, the leader is forced into the role of the glue—spending their strategic capacity manually connecting the Analyst to the Hitting Coordinator, or the Biomechanist to the S&C. In this scenario, the baseball operations leader becomes the single point of failure for the department’s communication loop.
In How We Won’s Coaching for Organizations framework, we resolve this by moving away from individual management and adopting the unit stance.
The Silo Tax: Why Technical Excellence is Only the Baseline
In the current MLB landscape, technical excellence is the baseline. Every organization has a genius in R&D and a guru in the cages. The competitive advantage is no longer just having the talent. It’s the velocity of integration between that talent.
When specialists operate in silos, the organization pays a hidden silo tax:
Communication Latency: It takes too long for a biometric or analytical insight to reach the player's daily drill work.
Information Hoarding: Specialists protect their proprietary ways of working rather than sharing high-fidelity data to solve organizational problems.
The Managerial Bottleneck: Because specialists haven't been coached to partner with each other, they escalate every friction point to the leader’s desk.
When a baseball operations leader acts as the primary conduit for communication between specialists, they are stuck in a hero trap, managing a series of 1:1 relationships rather than leading an integrated system.
Defining the Functional Unit
A functional unit is a small, autonomous cell of specialists who are coached to operate as a single engine.
Consider your hitting department, specifically at the Triple-A level. In a standard model, an organization might manage the Hitting Coach and the PD Analyst as two separate employees with varying goals. In the unit model, we treat them as a single strategic asset.
The objective of the unit stance is to ensure that the laptop (data) and the cage (execution) speak a unified language, closing the communication loop and solving problems without needing constant intervention from the front office.
The Three Levers of Unit Integration
To transform individual specialists into a high-velocity cell, we focus on three systemic interventions:
The Joint Picture of Success: Most specialists operate on individual scorecards. An Analyst wants to improve a model. A Coach wants to improve a player’s OPS. In a functional unit, we co-create a single scorecard for the pair. We ask: "If this hitting system is the most efficient in the league by July, what are the three measurable results this unit delivered together?" Linking success to a shared outcome eliminates the relationship drag that occurs when results stall.
Systemic Candor - Removing the Appeasement Filter: In high-pressure clubhouse environments, staff often appease each other to avoid conflict. The coach tells the analyst the data is great (while ignoring it), and the analyst tells the coach the drills are fine (while spotting technical errors). We coach the unit to practice systemic candor, building a safe container where they can challenge each other’s work with the shared goal of protecting the organization’s ROI.
The Interaction Audit (The Handover): As a strategic partner, we don't just coach from the office. We shadow the unit in their natural work environment. We watch the analyst present a dashboard to the coach. We watch the coach translate that data to a player in the cage. We are auditing the handover—identifying where information is lost in translation or where a leadership shadow (unintended impact) is creating friction.
The Leader’s ROI: Reclaiming the Balcony
The most valuable result of the unit stance isn't just better performance metrics. It’s the reclamation of your strategic capacity. When your staff operates in high-velocity cells:
Decisions Are Made Faster: The unit solves 80% of its own problems before they ever reach you.
Value Leaks Are Plugged: Technical investments, like expensive R&D models, actually manifest in the player’s swing adjustments because the communication loop is successfully closed.
Organizational Autonomy: You move from being the chief mediator to the system builder. You can spend your energy on the 30,000-foot strategy because the engine on the ground is self-correcting.
The Final Scorecard: Speed as a Competitive Advantage
Transitioning from managing individuals to building units is a mark of an elite system. In a game of thin margins, the organization that integrates its specialists the fastest is the organization that stays in the hunt for October.
By installing a formal functional unit protocol, you ensure that your department's technical brilliance results in organizational wins.
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 high-velocity functional units.
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