Career Transitions, Loyalty and Major League Baseball

“Never bite the hand that feeds you.” This adage was offered regularly by a former colleague any time one of our team members did or said something adverse or disparaged to our company. It’s one I have lived by ever since.

I’ve made several career transitions over the years. From in-charge accountant for one company to controller for another. From chief operating officer in the tech space to CEO for a finishing company and so on. Four company transitions in a career spanning more than 30 years.

Though I often had the opportunity, I never once considered moving from my employer to one of its competitors. Something about suddenly turning on the very people that had provided a job that supported my lifestyle and my family and had trusted me with all their competitive secrets didn’t seem right to me. Non-compete or not, more money or not, no way was I going to do that.

Instead, the four times my career took me in a new direction, it was to a company that posed no adverse interest to the one from which I was departing. As I like to say to the team members of our companies, it’s our job to provide a career and culture that’s so appealing to you that you would never want to work anywhere else. If we fail to do that, while we would hate to lose you, we understand. But if you leave, just don’t go work somewhere that’s harmful to our interests.

Put another way, according to the Census Bureau, the United States is home to six million companies at which an individual can work. If you choose to work somewhere other than with us, you have plenty of choices that would never be harmful to us. Choose one of them.

The recent decision by the former Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club manager to leave the Brewers for the team’s archrival, the Chicago Cubs, illustrates my perspective.

By all accounts, Craig Counsell was a rock star in Milwaukee. Even closer to (my) home, he was revered in our small Village of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. He was raised in a home in “The Bay” and his father worked for the Brewers. That home was across the alley from the home in which we raised our family a generation later.

Counsell had a terrific baseball career. He played baseball at the local high school, college ball at Notre Dame and then for several MLB teams, including the Arizona Diamondbacks, where his team won a World Series. He finished his career playing for the Brewers and in 2015 became the Brewers’ manager.

Milwaukee was in love with him. The field where my son played Little League baseball was named in Counsell’s honor, and I once had fond memories of attending the ceremony at which “Water Tower Field” became “Craig Counsell Field”.

Counsell was our version of “hometown boy does good.” He could do no wrong in the eyes of the patient, understanding, adoring and supportive Brewers fans. Great seasons, mediocre ones, the city had his back. He was a Milwaukee legend.

Was. No more. At the risk of sounding petty and vindictive (our sports loyalties can do that sometimes) Counsell bit the hand of the city that fed him, and at the conclusion of his latest contract, he sold out (not necessarily my words, but that seems to be the consensus) Milwaukee for a lucrative contract with the Cubs, far and away the Brewers’ #1 rival. The contract makes him — by significant margin — the highest-paid manager in the history of Major League Baseball.

By all means this was his prerogative. Counsell can work for whomever he wants and he was certainly within his rights to cash in on a huge payday for himself and his family.

But at what price?

Counsell was widely rumored to have been offered by the Brewers somewhere in the range of an otherwise record-setting $5.5 million per year over 5 years. He opted for an $8.5 million annual salary, complements of the Cubs, over the same period. I’m sure he can live an amazing life after earning some $42.5 million over the next half decade. Seems one could also live a pretty amazing one after earning $27.5 million over the same period, and without biting the hand of the city that helped build him in the process.

In lamenting Counsell’s decision with others, I’ve had more than one of them ask me, “Well, wouldn’t you take a 55% pay increase to go to work for your employer’s competitor?”

Never. That would be hugely disloyal and that’s not who I am. Granted, there are orders of magnitude fewer career options for an MLB manager than for the rest of us, but Counsell had options, he just chose to move to his employer’s #1 competitor. I don’t get it.

Which brings us back to manufacturing. Very few of us stay in the same career, let alone the same company, for our entire working life. Chances are, the time will come for most of us to move to a new company for a new opportunity. When the time comes, do the right thing and seek out a new employer that doesn’t compete with the one you’re leaving. They’ll feel better about your move and you’ll feel better about it as well. In the end, it’s the right thing to do.

Remember: Never bite the hand that feeds you.