Last week, I examined Mike Vrabel's path to the Super Bowl as a head coach in the National Football League. I noted that 33% of Super Bowl winning head coaches had achieved their championship after failing to win a title with their first team. The data suggest that a coach's second act can be more successful than the first, perhaps because leadership is a learned capability. All-time great coaches such as Andy Reid, Bill Belichick, Mike Shanahan, and Don Shula all seemed to have learned from their successes and failures during their first tenure as a head coach.
Today, I decided to examine whether this phenomenon was unique to the NFL. Does the same pattern apply in the other major sports in the United States? The table below shows the data for the past 50 years in each of the four major sports leagues. As it turns out, the NFL is not unique. In fact, the other sports show an even more dramatic positive effect for coaches in their second (or later) act! In Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League, more than 60% of championship coaches in the past 50 years did not win during their first tenure as a head coach. All-time great hockey coaches and baseball managers in this group include Scotty Bowman, Al Arbour, Joe Torre, Dusty Baker, Terry Francona, and Tony LaRussa.
By the way, during my original analysis of the NFL, I also noted that the sport's championship coaches demonstrated that the curse of expertise is very real. The curse of expertise means that people with specialized knowledge who have achieved remarkable success often struggle to teach others, because they cannot easily put themselves into the shoes of someone for whom results do not come as easily. In the NFL, only one Super Bowl winning head coach earned entry into the Hall of Fame as a player. Is the curse of expertise also evident in the other sports? Indeed! Few Hall of Famers won championships in the last 50 years as a head coach: NFL (1), MLB (1), NHL (2), and NBA (4).
Interestingly, second act success stories seem quite rare in business. Most CEOs seem to achieve their most prominent success during their first tenure as a leader. A few people stand out as having more successful second acts. These include Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, and Stewart Butterfield. The question that I'm not sure I can answer is: Why are there more highly successful second acts in sports than in business? Perhaps companies simply don't give many people that opportunity for a second chance if they have struggled during their first tenure as a chief executive. Others would argue that talent matters more than coaching in sports, and that coaches win championships when they find the right fit between awesome talent and their good leadership skills. Perhaps we simply attribute too much of a company's success or failure to the CEO, and therefore, we do not see through the struggles of a firm to identify the strong leadership capabilities of its top executive.
