For the past several months, it feels like we’ve been living at the baseball park. Our son (14) plays at the Junior level in Little League. It’s not just about getting him to the park and having a snooze. The parent duties are extensive. My husband coaches and I split my time between keeping score, organizing team duties and coordinating the various activities like photos and fundraising. So when I found my life dominated by baseball and pinched for time to do my paying job, I started to stretch my imagination to see how baseball aligns with strategic communication in an organization.

Some may say I’ve stretched things a bit too thin, but I did make a few observations. First, every baseball game should have a strategy. Strategies vary, like how to set up the batting line up – is it all the strongest hitters at the top, or do you split them a bit to keep strength throughout. Some strategic plays focus on a short game, pushing bunts and quick feet. Others focus on dominating the field through a solid defense, including selecting who will pitch and when. But at the core, there’s always a strategy to guide the game on both sides. But you can’t win with just a strategy. The coach’s strategy needs to be played out on the field, and that takes a team effort. Everyone has a job to do, and all players are expected to pull their weight. Sometimes you have errors. Sometimes a strategy fails. But the teams that work together well and consistently pull together the strategy effectively are going to see more wins than losses – even if other teams have a few more ace players in their lineup.

So you have your strategy. And you have your team with skilled players who all contribute in different ways. But there’s still that missing ingredient, and that’s leadership. And it’s interesting that the leadership role sometimes moves around. In certain scenarios, the coaches step it up and take the lead. But at other times, it will be a player on the team. Someone everyone respects.

So how do I stretch all this baseball stuff to align with communications? The strategy is obvious. We identify our objectives, target our audiences, refine our messages and outline our tactics. Then we set things in motion with a team of skilled communicators and subject matter experts. For some organizations, there may be only one professional communicator, and the rest of the team are staff with a natural ability to deliver messages and share ideas. Regardless, it takes a team. If people drop the ball – hah, just linked it back to baseball – it hampers the roll out of the strategy. But when everyone delivers, you see results. And then there is leadership. Someone needs to call the plays – okay, I’m getting carried away – but that person won’t always be the professional communicator. Sometimes it might be the person with the most knowledge about the subject. Sometimes it may be the top executives in the organization. The strategy is the foundation, but all of these leaders can contribute to the ultimate success of the plan.

Whether we’re talking baseball or effective strategic communication, I believe these are the essential elements – strategy, team and leadership. Because when you look on the flip side, you can see how things fall apart without these three elements.

No strategy means the team doesn’t have clear objectives, doesn’t understand how to work together and there’s no clear direction for activities.

No team players means that everyone is working in silos or just not working effectively. If you don’t have the skills you need, you’re dragged down and your tactics are more likely to fail.

No leadership means that no one is keeping things on track, and any time things go a bit sideways, you’ll lose momentum or lose so much ground you can’t make it up in the end.

So you see, baseball and communications really can be linked.