Too present to advance

My favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, just hired a man with zero professional baseball experience as their new manager. Tony Vitello didn’t play in the major leagues, he didn’t play in the minor leagues, he hasn’t even coached professional baseball before. He played baseball in college, then started coaching in college. For the last eight years, he’s been coaching at a college called the University of Tennessee, and everybody there loves him. 

Every article I read about Vitello tells me how incredible he is at his job, though. How good he is with people, how energetic he is, and how well he leads a dugout. Maybe Tony Vitello will bring “the idiot’s advantage” to Major League Baseball? It’s a risk for the Giants to hire him, no doubt. But is it insane?

Ever since this hiring, I’ve been thinking: some people just don’t progress in their careers. Not because they aren’t talented, and not because they don’t care. They don’t progress because they’re too present. They care too much. Their connections go too deep. They’re too service-minded. They’re too focused on their present reality to have time for all this ladder-climbing. They’d rather make something great where they are. 

Instead of trying to convince someone on your team to stay, what if you found someone who’s fully present with their work somewhere else? Someone who turned a business around? Somebody who everyone respects? What if you convinced them to join you? They might not even be thinking about it. 

P.S. Go Giants, I hope the Dodgers lose this World Series never make the playoffs again.