Velocity of Alignment: How to Get Year 2 Results in Year 1

Jan 27

We have a phrase for the first season of a high-stakes hire: "The Year of Learning." What we’ve done by accepting it is create an industry lag. We assume that when we hire a new Director of R&D or a Triple-A Hitting Coach, the first six to twelve months will be spent finding their feet. We expect them to spend the first season deciphering the organization’s culture and slowly building trust with the staff.

But as a baseball operations leader, you know that a 162-game season doesn't have a pause button for onboarding. If your elite hire takes a full year to become productive, you haven't just lost time. You’ve lost a massive window of competitive advantage.

To lead an elite system, you elevate the standard beyond organic growth and prioritize velocity of alignment.

The Onboarding Lag Tax

Most Major League organizations pay a heavy, hidden tax on every new hire. When a specialist enters a system as complex as an MLB team, they’re met with structural inertia. They have the technical talent to win, but they lack the systemic authority to execute.

Because they don't yet know the informal power map—who to call for a specific data set, which coach is resistant to biometric feedback, or how their director prefers to receive bad news—they default to caution.

Caution is the enemy of velocity.

A staff member who is cautious for their first 90 days is essentially dormant during the most critical alignment window of the season. By the time they feel settled enough to make bold moves, the trade deadline has passed and your departmental goals for the year are already at risk.

Getting Year 2 Results in Month 2

At How We Won, the goal of our strategic integration partnership is to collapse the ramp-up time. We move your staff from new hire to system engine by replacing the accidental learning of a typical first year with a formal, 12-month architecture.

We achieve this through three specific velocity leak interventions:

1. Architecting the Power Map

New hires waste months trying to figure out who actually makes things happen in the organization. We bypass this by conducting the Voice of the System™ audit early in an engagement. We partner with staff to build a culture map of their stakeholders' chronic needs. Instead of guessing how to land with a veteran, the staff member enters their first meeting knowing exactly what they value. They start with the trust that usually takes six months to earn.

2. Establishing the Rigor of Results

In the honeymoon phase, accountability is often soft. Senior leaders prioritize autonomy over micro-managing their elite hires, which can lead to a period of drift. Instead, we establish weekly performance rigor immediately. We co-create the picture of success in the first month, not Month 6. This ensures that every hour the staff spends is focused on the organization’s highest-leverage targets from Day 1.

3. Closing the Communication Latency

The biggest ramp-up delay happens in the handover. Getting the Analyst’s data to the Coach’s cage usually takes a full season of trial and error to get right. Our functional unit model coaches these specialists together. We accelerate the integration of the laptop and the cage during Spring Training, ensuring that by Opening Day, the communication loop, or how information travels out and feedback comes back, is already self-correcting.

The 12-Month Roadmap to Autonomy

While acceleration is a key outcome the first 90 days, sustaining that speed through the entire season is our central focus. We structure the engagement into four quarterly sprints to ensure the staff evolves with the organization:

Q1 - The Strategic Landing: Moving from technical hire to aligned partner before the first pitch is thrown.
Q2 - Rigor & Execution: Maintaining high-velocity communication through the mid-season peak and fatigue.
Q3 - Leading the System: Moving beyond the job description to identify and fix systemic value leaks for the whole organization.
Q4 - ROI & Evolution: Quantifying the year's impact and architecting next season’s plan so the staff member starts next year as a veteran, not just another second-year employee.

The Leader’s ROI: Reclaiming Your Calendar

The most valuable result of velocity of alignment is your own time.

Every hour you spend managing the landing of a new hire is an hour you aren't spending on the 30,000-foot strategy of the organization. By leveraging an external strategic partner on the integration, you are optimizing the human architecture so you can focus on the overall architecture of the organization.

You hired elite talent to make your life easier. Strategic integration ensures they do that in Month 2, not Year 2.

The Final Scorecard: Speed as a Competitive Advantage

In a game of thin margins, the organization that aligns its people the fastest is the organization that wins. Optimize the outcome of your staff's success by design, not by chance. Collapsing the ramp-up time of your strategic bench is the highest-ROI move a baseball operations leader can make.

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 quantifying their leadership ROI.

Kim Izaguirre-Merlos https://howwewon.org