Selecting a Leader: Lessons from the Patriots' Jerod Mayo Experiment

Source: Yahoo Sports

Selecting a leader can be a vexing challenge for many organizations.  As the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance reported last year, the median CEO tenure in S&P 500 companies dropped by 20% from 2013-2022.  The median tenure of a CEO was 4.8 years according to that research.   The National Football League is even more challenging when it comes to leader selection.  The average tenure of an NFL coach equals roughly 3 years.  

Here in New England, a debate has intensified in recent days about the future of Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo.   The team has fallen mightily from its two-decade run of dominance with Tom Brady as its quarterback.   The Patriots dismissed their legendary coach, Bill Belichick, last year and replaced with him with young defensive assistant Jerod Mayo.  Now, the team has only won 3 games (against 11 losses) to date this season, and the young head coach has struggled badly.  Was it a good hire, and would it be wise to move on from a new coach after just one year?  Is that fair to Mayo?

First, we have to review a few basic facts that suggest Mayo would be an outlier if he succeeds as head coach.  

• According to an ESPN study from 2009-2018, the average head coach in the league had 19.5 years of coaching at various levels before becoming an NFL head coach.  Mayo had just 5 years of experience.
• That same story concluded that "It's common for new coaching candidates to have more than one influence."  Mayo had only played and coached for one man, Bill Belichick, in his entire playing and coaching career.
• Former Belichick assistants have mostly floundered as head coaches in the league, as I documented in a 2022 blog post. At the time, I compiled the win-loss record of former Belichick assistants. I wrote: "175 wins, 252 losses, and 1 tie for a winning percentage of 40.9%. That's awful. Only one of his former assistants managed to compile a winning record (Bill O'Brien with 52 wins and 48 losses).
• Finally, in another blog post from 2021, I examined the idea of the curse of expertise among NFL coaches.  I wrote, 
• "33 coaches have won the 54 Super Bowls that have taken place. Several coaches have earned multiple championships, including Bill Belichick (6) and Chuck Noll (4). Of those coaches, only 1 man made the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a player (Mike Ditka). Only 2 men earned Pro Bowl status as players (Mike Ditka and his mentor, Tom Landry, who made it to one Pro Bowl as a punter for the New York Giants in the 1950s). None of the other Super Bowl winning coaches earned Pro Bowl status as a player." 
• I attributed this lack of championship success by star players to the curse of expertise. I described this challenge as follows: "Put simply, experts sometimes have a difficult time teaching much less experienced and accomplished people. Why? They forget what's it like to be in the novice's shoes. They can't predict the types of challenges and problems that the novice will face when mastering a new skill. In many cases, the expert may not even be fully aware of the "how" behind certain highly effective results. It comes so naturally to them that they don't have a complete understanding of the process that leads to those successful outcomes."

Now, none of these statistics suggests that Mayo has no chance at turning things around in New England.  Some great coaches have had awful starts to their career and then gone on to remarkable success (see Bill Walsh and Tom Landry, for example).  They inherited terrible teams, embarked on a lengthy turnaround process, and learned from early stumbles.   

Some news reports suggest that the Kraft family wishes to stick with Mayo despite the tough first year.  However, the Kraft family has to consider whether they might be succumbing to the sunk cost trap.  Are they reluctant to cut their losses because of how much they have invested in Mayo?  Is he truly better than other alternatives that are going to be available this offseason?

Companies face similar challenges when hiring leaders.  Sometimes, they choose to value attributes and skills, or even personality, rather than emphasizing depth of experience.  That might be the right call; experience is not the only valuable element of a person's qualifications.  However, companies should question whether they are, at times, under-rating the value of experience - both in terms of years and quality/range of past work.   Are they being wowed by charisma, or simply blown away by how well someone interviews?  Understanding the types of experiences that are most likely to help someone succeed is crucial.  Learning on the job is difficult for any leader, but particularly for those who don't have a reservoir of relevant experiences upon which they can draw in challenging situations.