What March Madness Can Teach Us About Leadership
It’s that time of year again. Millions of people will fill out March Madness brackets, each with a different method for picking winners. Some rely on advanced statistics. Others go with mascots, gut instinct, or school loyalty. At some point, though, broadcasters almost always mention head coach experience. The assumption seems obvious: more experienced coaches should be more likely to win.
The data tells a more complex story.
Looking at NCAA tournament games over the last five years, coaches with more overall career experience have won 57% of their matchups. That’s an advantage, but not a very large one. In the Championship Game, the less experienced coach has won three of the last five games.
Maybe total career experience isn’t the right measure. Perhaps we should look at how long a coach has been at their current university. That idea certainly seems reasonable. A coach who has spent more time at a particular university should know the program better, understand the roster more deeply, and have a clearer sense of the team’s strengths and weaknesses. Yet that pattern is no stronger. Coaches with more experience at their current university have won 54.1% of tournament games, and in the Championship Game, the coach with more current-university experience has won only once in the last five years.
These findings may seem surprising, but academic researchers have documented this pattern for decades. In 1970, leadership scholar Fred Fiedler studied the connection between leader experience and leader performance across five different organizations and found the relationship so weak that he titled his publication “Leader experience and leader performance – Another hypothesis shot to hell”. More recently, a review of 75 studies reached a similar conclusion: across a wide range of jobs, years of experience is a very weak predictor of how well someone will perform.
So, before you automatically back the veteran coach, you might want to ask yourself what the experience advantage is actually worth. These results may not do much to improve our brackets, but they do point to something worth thinking about beyond March Madness. First, common sense is not always supported by evidence. It seems intuitive that more experienced leaders should have a substantial advantage, yet the advantage here is fairly small.
Second, we often assume that leaders naturally learn from experience. In reality, learning from experience is much harder than it sounds. Experience does not speak for itself; leaders have to interpret it, and they may interpret it incorrectly. An abusive coach or abrasive CEO shows why. When an intimidating leader gets good results, it is easy to conclude that fear, harshness, or cruelty produced the success. But the real cause may be team talent, favorable conditions, or employee effort in spite of the leader rather than because of the leader. When that happens, success teaches the wrong lesson. Instead of becoming wiser, the leader becomes more confident in bad behavior, while fear and intimidation make honest feedback less likely. As a result, experience can just as easily reinforce error as produce wisdom.
So fill out your bracket and enjoy the tournament. But these patterns are worth keeping in mind well beyond March. Experience matters. But experience alone does not make leaders better. The leaders who improve are the ones who question their own assumptions, seek honest feedback, and keep learning even when success tempts them to think they already have the answers.
Fiedler, F. E. (1970). Leadership experience and leader performance—Another hypothesis shot to hell. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 5(1), 1-14.
Van Iddekinge, Chad H., John D. Arnold, Rachel E. Frieder, and Philip L. Roth. (2019) A meta‐analysis of the criterion‐related validity of prehire work experience. Personnel Psychology, 72(4), 571-598.
Dr. Tom Timmerman is a professor of business management and serves as the Mayberry Chair of Excellence.