Let Pablo Eat! A Management Lesson in Encouraging Peak Performance at Work.

Pablo Sandoval with his MVP Trophy, Oct. 28th, 2012

Last night the San Francisco Giants won Major League Baseball’s World Series Championship. That’s two championships out of the last three years for San Francisco’s “boys of summer.” And the Most Valuable Player Award at the World Series went to SF’s Venezuelan born Pablo Sandoval. 

Sandoval, nicknamed "Kung Fu Panda," hit three homeruns in Game One of the Series joining the elite group of Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and Albert Pujols as the only players in MLB history to hit three home runs in a World Series game. 

The back story on Pablo Sandoval is that he is a very gregarious twenty-six year old who is five feet eleven inches tall and weighs anywhere from a sturdy 230 to a corpulent 270-plus pounds during the baseball season. Since coming into the majors as a Giant in 2008 Sandoval has achieved a very solid .303 career batting average. And although he is widely embraced by fans, many of whom wear "Panda hats" at Giant games, he is universally criticized for his weight which visibly increases as the baseball season wears on. Coupled with criticisms of his free swinging ways at the plate, the rap on Sandoval is that he lacks the discipline to ever become a great player.

As seen at Highway 101 and Great America
Parkway  at 9 a.m.  this morning.

Much like the Sandoval's critics, the majority of high tech managers tend to focus on employee weaknesses rather than strengths. Case in point, when was the last time you were called into your boss’s office for doing a good job? In our age of information and ideas, wouldn't it make more sense to encourage our knowledge workers to build upon their best skills and talents rather than inordinately focusing on their deficiencies? Don't we want them to occasionally make breakthroughs rather than just focusing on making baby steps forward?

Hey, I’m no Pollyanna. I am all about excellence and understand that every manager needs to identify and correct employee deficiencies if their companies and cultures are to improve. But let’s start balancing our focus on correcting employee behavior with a commensurate amount of encouragement for our people to improve upon those things that they already do well.

Often companies achieve their most outstanding results when they get out of the way of their people and encourage them to do what they do best—even as their people continue to have weaknesses in other work areas. This approach is not that different from the sentiment of many of us around the Bay Area today who, in light of the Panda's sublime athleticism and accomplishments, are finally starting to say, “Let Pablo Eat!"