Are CEOs and Basketball Coaches similar?

Speaking with some coaches last week, coaches seem very defensive about their role in a team’s success or failure. Speaking with some parents, they feel a player’s success is ultimately the player’s and parent’s responsibility because coaches are concerned with how the player can help their team win, not how they can help the player improve.

After seeing a lot of dicussion about the recent coaching hires, and reflecting on the number of NBA coaches fired this season, I still believe that we have yet to determine an accurate way to evaluate a coach and we overestimate a coach’s power to influence the organization (Now, this changes by level, as a college coach has more power to influence the organization because he recruits the players to play for him, while a high school coach coaches the players who enroll at his school and an NBA coach coaches the players that a GM acquires).

At the NBA level, players tend to get the credit for wins and coaches are blamed for losses – just look at the lack of credit that Cleveland’s Mike Brown gets for the Cavaliers’ success. At the college level, coaches get far more credit for success, while players get blamed for failure: articles during the tournament basically blamed University of Tennessee’s players for their tournament loss, rather than Pat Summit, and Duke University’s players rather than Coach K.

So, how much control does a coach have over the performance of his or her organization?

Jeff Pfeffer published a paper in 1977 in the Academy of Management Review showing that leader’s actions rarely account for more than 10% of the variation in organizational performance, and often, account for much less.

Are coaches like CEOs or do coaches exert more influence over the success of their organization? In a situation like Sacramento, are Reggie Theus and Kenny Natt to blame for the disappointing performance this season? Are Sam Mitchell and Jay Triano to blame for Toronto’s disappointing season? How different is a coach’s role at the NBA level vs. college level vs. high school level?

Bob Sutton continues:

Apparently this happens because people are brainwashed by cultural myths about the power of leaders and because it is requires less mental effort – and is more comforting – to view, say, Procter & Gamble as AG Lafley or Oracle as Larry Ellison, then to think about the long list of factors that actually cause performance.

Isn’t it the same with basketball? Isn’t it easier to credit or blame the coach rather than think about the way players fot together or to examine individual’s work ethic? Talent development (and team development) is a dynamic process; isn’t it easier just to look at the coach rather than trying to examine all the various factors?

Jeff Pfeffer emphasized that leaders have, at best, modest control because there are so many factors that are simply impossible for them to control – economic conditions, industry structure, fixed costs, what competitors do, what happened before the CEO took over, and what a nuances of what the other hundreds and thousands of people in the company do.

Basketball coaches face the same issues. Ben Howland was blamed for playing a bad non-conference schedule this season – how was he supposed to anticipate Notre Dame’s free fall or Southern Illinois’ worst season in several years or Texas’ disappointing record? How do you evaluate Reggie Theus fairly when Kevin Martin, his best player, was injured for most of his games as Head Coach this season? How do you evaluate Kenny Natt in half of a season without knowing what type of team culture he inherited? How do you evaluate a high school coach at a small school who never gets comparable talent to the other team’s in his or her league? How do you evaluate a coach on his or her role’s outside the public view: interaction with management, staff and players; use of assistant coaches; public relations events, etc?

Indeed, although CEOs can certainly make a difference, especially founders, many of the greatest companies – take Toyota or Procter & Gamble – have succeeded because they have such great systems that it makes it easy for competent people to succeed, not because of the work of leaders with magical powers.

The best coaches typically have supportive management or administration. How did the Maloof’s meddling in basketball affairs affect Theus’ ability to coach? Meanwhile, how did Larry Miller’s support enhance Jerry Sloan’s coaching over the years? The top organizations usually have the systems in place which make coaching easier. It is much easier to coach at a high school with a strong booster program that takes care of fundraising and finding volunteers when necessary and setting up the gym for games than at a high school where the head coach has to fill all the roles.

Stanford’s James March argued that nearly all people that are seriously considered for senior management positions are competent (as they are heavily screened, trained, and all have shown that they can do the work) so it doesn’t make much difference which finalist you choose. March…once wrote:

Management may be extremely difficult and important even though managers are indistinguishable. It is hard to tell the difference between two different light bulbs also; but if you take all the light bulbs away, it is difficult to read in the dark. What is hard to demonstrate is the extent to which high performing managers (or light bulbs that endure for an exceptionally long time) are something more than one extreme end of a probability distribution generated by essentially equivalent individuals.

So, is a coaching change the way to fix an organization? How can we evaluate a coach to ensure that the next hire is a great coach?

~ by Brian McCormick on April 17, 2009.