How Good is the Second Act for a Leader?

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.  

Early Career Failures: Do They Make You Stronger?

Source: Osan Air Base

We all have heard the old adage: What doesn't kill you will make you stronger. Researchers at Kellogg School of Management have tested whether that is indeed true when it comes to early career failures. They did so by examining a very unique dataset. Dashun Wang, Benjamin Jones, and Yang Wang have examined research grants provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The paper, published recently in Nature Communications, is titled, "Early Career Setback and Future Career Impact."  The scholars compared scientists awarded grants early in their career to those who narrowly missed out on achieving a grant.  Here is what they found, as summarized by Kellogg Insight:

To figure out just how much of a difference these early successes or setbacks made to a scientific career, the researchers traced the careers of 623 near-miss and 561 narrow-win scientists.  Notably, it turned out that the two groups published at similar rates over the next 10 years—not what you’d expect, given that narrow winners got an early leg up from their NIH grant funding. Even more surprising, scientists in the near-miss group were actually more likely to have “hit” papers (that is, papers that cracked the top-five percent of citations in a particular field and year). In the five years after they applied for NIH funding, 16.1 percent of papers produced by scientists in the near-miss group were hits, compared to 13.3 percent for the narrow-win group.

The researchers went on to rule out some of the possible explanations for this finding.  For instance, they demonstrated that the finding is not attributable to attrition by the "near-miss" scientists... i.e., it is not explained by quitting on the part of some of the researchers who did not receive grants early in their career.  They conclude that the career paths of these "near-miss" scientists suggests that they indeed did become stronger through adversity.  Somehow, the early career failure inspired them to persevere, led to key learnings, and/or helped them understand their own strengths and weaknesses.   As a result, they overcame the failure and went on to achieve considerable success.  What an uplifting finding for all of us... the old adage is not just a cliche...there is real truth there apparently! 

Becoming More Resilient

Maria Konnikova wrote a terrific article for The New Yorker last year, focusing on the research on resilience over the past few decades.   Konnikova describes the research conducted by developmental psychologist Emmy Werner.  Konnikova summarizes a key finding:

Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Then Konnikova turns to the research conducted by George Bonanno, a Columbia University psychologist.  She writes: 

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience, including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

Konnikova concludes by reporting that scholars believe that people can change the way that they frame events in their lives.  They can be trained to reframe potentially traumatic events as positive ones.  If that is true, then we can actually become more resilient.  We are not destined to always act the way that we have acted in the face of potential adversity.