Written by One of my favorite authors is Michael Lombardi. Lombardi has been a senior player personnel executive with several NFL teams, including a stint as GM of the Cleveland Browns. He has three Super Bowl rings from his time with Bill Walsh and the 49ers and Bill Belichick and the Patriots. His book, Gridiron Genius, serves as a text in my Collective Bargaining in Pro Sports class at Penn State’s School of Labor & Employment Relations. He is also a friend who never fails to inspire me to think and often think differently.
If you haven’t read Lombardi, do check him out. Lombardi is someone who can mix high level management philosophy, peppered with Springsteen & Soprano’s references and old fashioned common sense in a single paragraph. A lot of his work of late has been focused on how biases effect our decision making.
Which brings us to our main subject. Sunday, while congratulating Lombardi on an excellent column he had just written in The Athletic, analyzing the head coaching hires of every NFL team, I was struck by a post in response, that shamed the NFL’s failure to add to its head coaching diversity this off-season despite a large number of vacancies and the presence of the Rooney Rule. The commenter was correct, and while Lombardi’s article didn’t go there, I will now, despite the presence of a rule and focused measures to create greater opportunity for diverse candidates, those opportunities still come much too slowly.
This is because the Rooney Rule only solves one part of the challenge in hiring a coach. Hiring decisions in any field as competitive as pro sports are made generally on one of three bases: familiarity; copying a successful formula or type; or for identified competitive advantage.
The NFL is hardly alone today among American businesses in facing challenges in expanding opportunity for diverse candidates, in fact the NFL to its credit is trying to address them. But since the NFL coaching carousel is perhaps the most public hiring hall in the world its challenges can offer us some discernible lessons.
This all matters because a lack of diversity isn’t just maddening, it is a strategic and practical disadvantage in 2021. For the NFL, the most powerful, profitable, viewed, valued, and influential sports league in North America and most likely the world, the last few years have been far from smooth for the league and that was before Covid. Moms, concussions, violence against women, player health, misbehaving owners, even the National Anthem, have all bedeviled the league. The news on the business side has been one of increasing revenues but these issues have taken their toll on the soul of the sport. So many of these problems have been made worse because of who has been at the table, or more critically who has not been at the table, when the solutions are crafted. Diversity in thought and background provide clear and tangible advantages across a variety of measurements in modern business and this diversity is usually achieved by bringing together people with different backgrounds and perspectives. Diversity works because, if done correctly, it offers competitive advantages.
Hiring based strictly on familiarity can be oppositional to diversity, that’s easy enough to see. If we only hire those we already know, then systematic exclusion is a logical outcome. It is also the reason why having a comprehensive two-way interviewing process is critical. Interviewing for just to find fit and to fill a vacancy is not enough.
This is the precise gap that the Rooney Rule is intended to bridge mandating the number of diverse candidates, that they are from outside the organization, and stipulating the franchise personnel involved in one interview be involved in all of them. Ideally, the Rooney Rule exposes new, diverse candidates to owners via interviews, but again only if the interviews are meaningful.
Copying a successful formula speaks for itself. But in many cases it also serves to limit perspective. The success of any single characteristic is too easily misjudged or misconstrued. The NFL has been on a binge of elevating young, hip offensive minds, with similar haircuts and stubble.
This is reminiscent of the NBA in the 1980s & 1990s were franchises copying Pat Riley’s sartorial meticulousness and slicked back hair, found a long line of clones, right down to their Italian loafers and suits and shirt collars. The copycats mistook that Riley’s meticulousness preparation was the key to his success, not just his style. Most of these clones are forgotten, now. But if an organization wants to hire a clone, they will.
But the issue of competitive advantage demands far greater attention than it gets. Before you shout ‘doesn’t every team hire for competitive advantage?‘ it may be worth pointing out that is far rarer than we think. A true competitive advantage hire comes only when a team looks outside the box and toward constructing a potential advantage. That could mean looking to a diverse candidate or embracing a diversity of thought or both. But sadly no rule makes any organization do the deep analysis that it takes to make such a step.