Do coaches matter?

The NFL regular season officially ended yesterday, which means that today is what has become unofficially known as "Black Monday".  I recently posted about "Black Monday" (see "Black Monday is coming soon...") and focused particularly on the situation with the New England Patriots and their now former head coach, Jerod Mayo.  At least at the time of this writing, five NFL teams have cut ties with their head coaches.  Jerod Mayo was one of those coaches who lost his job, and there will likely be more to come, if not today then later in the week.  

There's at least some evidence to suggest that better coaches and managers help sports team perform at their best, at least when it comes to wins and losses.  For example, one study using data collected from the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, and college football and basketball suggested that coaching explains somewhere between 20-30 percent of the variation in a team's success.  So, I guess it makes sense for some of the low-performing teams to move on and try to change coaches.  But let's also be realistic - it's not easy to lead any sports team or organization through a turn-around situation, nor is the new coach, manager, or leader always successful.

At least one of the arguments is that the best coaches get the most production and performance out of each individual player on the team.  Is that true though?  Does better coaching lead to better individual performance?  If you were a professional athlete, would you take a small pay-cut to go play for a legendary head coach or manager? 

Interestingly enough, Lawrence Kahn published a study several years ago that looked at individual players performed under successful managers.  Kahn used a manager's salary as a measure of "manager quality", which makes some intuitive sense, as the more successful a manager is in terms of wins and losses, the higher he is likely to be paid.  Kahn found that (1) higher quality managers lead to higher team winning percentages and (2) players tend to perform better, relative to their prior years of performance, under better managers.  Kahn wrote that "when a high-quality new manager takes over a team, the average starting player's performance relative to his lifetime statistics (accumulated under other managers) is greater than when a low-quality manager takes over the team."  

I will be the first to admit that what happens in the sporting world doesn't always transfer over to the non-sports world.  However, I do think that the best leaders often get the most out of their teams.  As John Quincy Adams once said, "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."  At the end of the day, regardless of the organizational context (sports, military, politics, business, health care), it pays to invest in hiring and developing great leaders.