I mentioned in the November newsletter that I was thinking about the value of being able to prove yourself wrong. This was a thought I had as I watched helmet football this past fall. The more I thought about it, the more there seemed to be two types of head coaches – those who were constantly trying to prove themselves wrong and those who were constantly trying to prove themselves right.
What do I mean by a head coach trying to prove himself right? In helmet football, a coach is always making decisions about which players to use during a game. These decisions reveal not just what the coach thinks about what will happen next but also serve as mini-retrospectives on what a coach thinks about his past decisions regarding who should be on the field. In other words, a coach who makes a change sometimes is doing more than just optimizing for the future – the change could also be an admission that he might have made a mistaken decision in the past.
A good way to notice these moments is to track how a player’s reputation relates to a coach’s decisions. Let’s define a player’s reputation as a sum of his accomplishments, salary, and draft position. Initially, players with better reputations should play ahead of those with lesser reputations. However, if a coach never removes poorly performing high-reputation players in favor of those with low reputations, it suggests that a coach is trying to prove himself right, at least in the sense of the initial decision to sign and play the player. On the other hand, a coach who makes such changes suggests he is trying to prove himself wrong, or perhaps allowing the players to do so, because these changes suggest he uses recent performance ahead of reputation to make decisions.
In any field where performance matters, I think a leader willing to be proven wrong is always my preference. Reputation is important, especially early on when there is little performance data, but over time a leader should know who is performing well and who is performing poorly. The leader who gives more responsibility to the highest performer regardless of reputation (which in the real world includes but is not limited to advanced degrees, prior work history, tenure, age, or appearance) should always do better than a leader who makes decisions based on reputation. The worst leaders of all make decisions based on reputation then stick with those decisions regardless of what happens next.
The challenge involved in this task is significant – how many leaders really want to step up and say ‘I got it wrong initially, but now we are making a change’? The answer is not many, but I think that’s the point, because great leaders are rare and would therefore be defined by unusual characteristics.
