Mark Shapiro has been in professional baseball for 35 years. He started in 1992 as an entry-level cubicle dweller in Cleveland with no title, pulling game reports off a fax machine and picking free agents up at the airport. He rose to become General Manager of the Cleveland Indians (now the Cleveland Guardians) during the same era that Moneyball made famous.
After Cleveland, he became President and CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays. He is now in his eleventh year running a franchise that represents not just a city but an entire country. The Blue Jays average a million viewers a night across Canada, more than double the New York Yankees’ average broadcast audience of 291,628 per game. He oversees both baseball and business operations, a structure that is genuinely rare in the industry.
Last year, the Blue Jays went to Game 7 of the World Series and lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a series decided by inches. You can do everything right and still lose. That is the reality Mark Shapiro has built his leadership philosophy around. After the loss, Shapiro told his team there was only one way forward, and that was to get back to the pursuit. He maintained: "Do not let the results define you."
I never had any firm design at any point in my career, except to lead. I love leading people, building high-performing teams, and thinking about what types of organizations outperform. When my assistant, Chris Antonetti, was offered the general manager job with the St. Louis Cardinals, I went to Paul Dolan and said there might be a way for us to keep him.
I had some interest in learning the business side, gaining exposure on the league side, sitting on committees, and contributing to the game longer term. Succession for Chris to GM made sense; he could report to me, and I could oversee both the business and baseball side. It was a win-win. Chris stays, natural succession happens, and I get a chance to continue growing. The two things that have always mattered most to me are continuing to grow and learn, and having a platform to lead. That role was an evolution of both.
At 35, when I became the leader of the baseball organization, I thought I needed to be two things: charismatic and a great decision maker. That was because the man I followed modeled both. He could walk into an elevator and lift everybody in the room. He appeared to be an elite decision maker. Twenty-four years later, I actually believe the polar opposite. Charisma is very short-lived. There's no speech I can give that will be lasting and meaningful.
What matters is how I am connected to the leaders underneath me, how they’re connected to the leaders underneath them, and whether we share a vision for the kind of organization and workplace we want to create. Less charisma and more lifting people. Less making decisions and more leading a decision-making process. I don't believe there are super decision makers. They just don't exist. System, process, and model decision-making will beat the individual decision maker every time. What we are is leaders of a decision-making process. That is a never-ending pursuit: the best process, the best variables and inputs, the best frameworks for making decisions.
It was a huge learning experience for me, and a tough transition. Going from one individual owner with whom I had a close relationship, where it was the two of us talking about decisions, to a corporation with obligations to shareholders, that's a completely different way of operating. I'll be honest, the transition brought out the worst in my personality and leadership abilities early on because I kind of viewed it as malicious or antagonistic. I thought they didn't understand my business.
But over time, I came to understand that my role is to manage stakeholders, and the most important stakeholder I can manage for this organization is our owner. The more I could educate and provide information about how we were making decisions, and show the outcomes of those decisions, starting with the player development complex in Dunedin, and ultimately what we've done on the field and at Rogers Centre with the renovation, the more credibility we built. Not for me, but for the entire organization. Now I think it's the best ownership in baseball. It's not their job to conform to me. It's my job to conform to them, to ensure everyone in our organization can get their work done and has the resources they need to do it.
I don't view my role as a decision maker. I believe my role is to create an environment that fosters meaning and genuine ties between people and the work we do. Our mission is to get better every day and bring world championships to Canada. We don't have slogans all over. We have “get better every day,” which is a learning culture focused on perpetual improvement and growth. My job is to make sure someone in the custodial area recognizes the link between their work and bringing world championships to Canada.
That connectivity starts with things like coffee chats. I just completed thirteen of them in the six weeks before spring training, three to four people at a time sitting around a table, asking questions and learning from each other. It also means meeting with every associate when they join our organization and talking about books, podcasts, career paths, and how to raise a young family in a business that demands a relentless 162-game schedule and weekend work.
Wisdom is giving people the benefit of your experience, the successes as well as the adversity, setbacks, and challenges. When I wake up every day, I'm thinking about only two things: how to make the Blue Jays the best place to play and the best place to work. And everything else cascades off those two challenges.
Stability and continuity are a competitive advantage. Setbacks, adversity, and challenges are just data, the information that will lead you to a better decision the next time. The mandate from senior leadership should be for good processes, good systems, good frameworks, the best possible information, with data-driven, informed decision-making on both the business and baseball sides. The game outcomes will be random.
As the guy who was inches away from winning a World Series in Game Seven last year, you ask yourself: Am I a better leader? Am I a better man? Am I a better person, a better father, a better partner, a better son if those inches go the other way? No. The result has no bearing on that. Our process is the same. So my message to the organization was: do not let the results define you. It's the difference between chasing results and chasing excellence. I would prefer to chase excellence and have a bunch of people in the boat with me who are aligned and chasing it together.
I didn't address our players beyond individual conversations, but I did talk to our front office. Money, fame, power, status. Those four things were not going to change anything about the way I showed up as a leader or the way I show up as a man, which are the exact same thing.
If we lost, I was not going to let it define me. I still am competitive as heck. I still want to win the last game played. But I'm not going to define my career by the outcome. So my comments to our organization were: do not let the results define you. Find meaning and purpose within the process, within the pursuit.
I got a call from Edward Rogers, our owner, the morning after. He said he didn't know how to go on. And I said there's only one way I know to move forward: to get back to the pursuit. It's not about avoidance. It's just not who I am. The joy for me is in the pursuit.
Well-run sports businesses understand that the biggest lever is still team performance. But if you set team performance aside, your job is to make sure that when the team wins, you're maximizing the business opportunity, and when it doesn't, you're softening the valleys. You're building a resilient brand. You're building a connection with your fan base. You're trying to heighten the peak and soften the valley. The best business people feel empowered beyond pure execution. And a big part of a senior leader's job is helping people feel their work is meaningful, translating for them how their work connects to winning.
The most beautiful thing about sports is that they are played by human beings, and human beings are imperfect and unquantifiable. We can never fully quantify them. What Moneyball got wrong, or at least what the way it was rolled out got wrong, was the idea that you had to be one or the other, purely analytical or purely traditional. I never understood that. Why would you not want the best information from every source? The best objective data, the best subjective evaluation, the best medical information, the best character and makeup assessments. It's always been about the relentless pursuit of the best information.
And ultimately, what makes these businesses worth working in is that the entire job is to think about what leads to teams that outperform. Those things are not necessarily quantifiable. How meaningful people find their work, how valued they feel, how invested the organization is in their growth, how clearly the values are articulated. These things matter. They are usually the backbone of organizations that do it more than once.
By Meredith Damore, SVP, Organizational Effectiveness & Managing Director, Leadership Advisory Practice, and Brendan Donohue , Managing Partner of Elevate Talent and Special Advisor to the CEO, with contributions from Caro Carmichael
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