One of the arguments that is sometimes made in the literature on leadership is about whether it is a generic skill that can be applied in any setting, or if having deep past experience — and success –at doing the work of organization is required to be a successful leader. We talk about this quite a bit in The Knowing-Doing Gap. We argue that leaders aren't as easily fooled by hollow smart talk, and are more likely to talk in ways that help their followers succeed (rather than simply sound impressive), when they have past deep experience in the industry along with years of experience doing, managing, and succeeding at the kind of work their people do.
I talked about this in my recent post on managers vs. leaders too, and argued that the most successful leaders either understand the work they work that they are leading (think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Lasseter of Pixar, or George Zimmer of the Men's Warehouse) or they take the time to understand the work they lead (I used the example of Bill George at Medtronic). My arguments on this point were questioned, and rightly so, by a commenter who pointed out that I needed to be careful about just using success stories to "prove" my point — as it is possible that just as many or more people who have little or no experience succeed at the same or higher rate. Or it is even possible that, if I looked at the population of leaders who have experience doing the work and doing it well, that they would actually perform worse than people who simply had generic leadership skills but did not understand the work that their people do.
This "success bias" is, in fact. a big methodological problem with Good to Great. Collins talks about 11 Level 5 leaders out of a sample of 1435 companies. He argues that this difference in leadership is one of the main reasons that these 11 companies made the leap from good to great. But he considers no data on Level 5 leaders who led merely good — or downright lousy — companies. It is entirely possible that, if someone carefully examined the full population that Level 5 leaders actually do worse on average. I don't believe that this would happen, but I don't have the evidence to support this hunch (nor does Collins). Rather, I see this critique (and others, see The Halo Effect) as a reason to see Good to Great as a book with some interesting but untested hypothesis rather than rigorous research. And, as this commenter pointed out after my post, I made pretty much the same error that Collins does in my earlier post — so to come clean, I think that my assertions about experience are best viewed as hunches or hypothesis that require additional research.
I can report, however, that I ran into a story in the Atlantic last night about research on basketball teams that is consistent with this hypothesis. You can find the story here (scroll down a bit). In short, three researchers — Amanda Goodall, Lawrence Kahn, and Andrew Oswald — from Cornell did a study of 15,000 National Basketball Association games between 1996 and 2004. They found that coaches who had played in the NBA won a lot more games than those who hadn't played, and that teams who had former coaches who not only played, but who had also been NBA all-stars too, did even better. As The Atlantic summarized:
"On average, teams with former all-stars as coaches placed six spots
higher in league rankings than teams with coaches who had never played
in the NBA, a huge bump-up in a league with only 29 total teams during
the years studied."
This research is interesting for two reasons. The first is that is does bolster the hypothesis that, when people have deep understanding of the work they are managing, and have a history of success, they are more likely to be successful leaders (assuming all other things being equal.. I am not sure that Dennis Rodman has the other qualities to be a good coach). The second is that it shows the dangers of placing too much weight on a single vivid case. Phil Jackson has the highest percentage of any NBA coach, winning multiple championships at Chicago and Los Angeles. Jackson played in the NBA, but was a bench-warmer rather than a superstar.
If you are curious about this paper and want to dig into deeper, you can download a pdf of "Why Do Leaders Matter? The Role of Expert Knowledge."
P.S. Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame did an analysis of Collins' "Great companies" over the summer, and found that most now have ordinary or poor performance — and if you had bought a portfolio of these companies at the time the book had come out, and held it, Levitt concludes it would have performed worse than the S&P 500. Of the "Greats," two that have fallen most include Circuit City and — I had forgot this — Fannie Mae. Check out the article. As Levitt points out, predicting the future is a tough thing to do.
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