Five Tool Players

In baseball the scouts and coaches look for five tool players. A five tool player in baseball can hit for average, hit for power, has speed, throwing ability and fielding ability.

What are the five tools in business?
Education?
Sales?
People skills?
Communication?
Decision making skills?
Ability to meet deadlines or quotas?
Work ethic?
Experience?
Product knowledge?

I am not sure if anyone has published an authoritative list of the five tools all businessman and businesswomen need to succeed in business but for for the sake of this post lets say that there is a definitive list of five tools in business. Obviously, you would like to hire the five tool business person. But as in sports there is only a limited number of five tool athletes. So after they are gone you have to go after the four tool players and so on until you are after the one or two tool athletes.

In sports and more specifically in basketball each player has a role. You have rebounders, scorers, three point specialists, defensive specialists, energy guys, glue guys, and more. On the most efficient teams the players on the team understand their given roles. The defensive specialist understands when he needs to go in, he needs to shut down the opponents best player. If he then decides to shoot every time he gets the ball he will soon find himself on the bench. He is not playing to his strengths or his role on the team.

What about business management? How many of the managers in your company have all five tools? How many of them only have a few of the tools? Now there are a few options you have if you have a manager with less than five tools. You can replace them with a five tool manager, or you can play to their strengths and define their role for them. What if you have a manager that is not a people person but the were promoted because they are good at what they do? You do not want to lose out on his or her abilities but a manger needs to be able to deal with people effectively. What ways are there around this problem without replacing this manager? What if a co-manager was hired or another person with a different skill set was promoted to assist with the people side of the job? Another option you have is do nothing and settle for mediocrity. Without risk there is no reward!

In my past experience I was managing 80 people all by myself. I needed help desperately. Another Supervisor was assigned to take half of my employees. There was a learning curve and and this new Supervisor and I decided that she would take care of the human resource issues, payroll, documentation and things like that while I dealt with the product knowledge, the agents, the Supervisor calls, coaching and what not. This seemed to be a great fit for not only the company but for myself and the other Supervisor. We were enjoying our roles. However, when we asked for this to be our roles moving forward on a permanent basis we were denied as we needed to be more well rounded. I understand the answer we got and might have even given the same answer if this question were brought to me. However, what if you have two managers who are doing their strengths? How much more efficient would your business be if you had a manager of people, a manager of products, a manager of human resources, and a manager processes? So unless you have a five tool manager who can excel in all of these areas what options do you have?

You do not ask your shot block shot specialist on your basketball team to start getting four assists a game. You do not ask your point guard to lead your team in rebounding. While you may ask these players to get better in other areas you still need them to get even better at their given role so they and the team will get even better. Managers can be asked to do other things and work on being more well rounded. However, why don't we ask them to keep doing what they do well and get another manager to help with a role that they themselves excel at to help the team and company win?