The 2025 college football season has become a coaching graveyard. Brian Kelly’s firing from LSU—complete with a $53 million buyout—joined Billy Napier at Florida, James Franklin at Penn State, and Jay Norvell at Colorado State in what’s shaping up to be one of the most chaotic coaching carousels in history. Schools have already spent $169 million on coaching buyouts this season alone, all betting that a new leader will transform their struggling programs.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth backed by decades of research: firing the coach rarely fixes the underlying problem. And nowhere is this more evident than in the stark findings from Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman’s groundbreaking work on team performance—the 60-30-10 rule.
The 60-30-10 Rule: What Harvard’s Research Reveals About Team Success
Richard Hackman, the late Harvard psychologist, and Ruth Wageman spent decades studying what makes teams succeed or fail. Their research across industries, from airline cockpit crews to orchestras to corporate teams, uncovered a startling finding: the conditions set before a team ever begins working together account for 60% of the variance in team performance.
Let that sink in. Before a single play is run, before a single sales call is made, before the team even meets—60% of their eventual success or failure is already determined by the structural choices made during the design phase.
The framework breaks down like this:
60% – Team Design (Structure & Conditions)
Before the team launches, leaders must establish six critical conditions:
- Real Team: Bounded, stable membership with clear interdependence
- Compelling Purpose: A direction that’s clear, challenging, and consequential
- Right People: Members with both task skills and interpersonal capabilities
- Solid Structure: Appropriate team size, clear norms, and enabling task design
- Supportive Context: Access to rewards, information, training, and resources
- Expert Coaching: Available at the right times (but only accounts for the final 10%)
30% – Team Launch
How the team is brought together, how purpose is communicated, how norms are established. This is the critical “day one” where expectations are set and the team’s trajectory is established.
10% – Coaching
Real-time coaching and adjustments once the team is operational. Yes, you read that correctly—only 10%.
The Critical Implication
The implications are staggering. Organizations spend enormous resources on coaching, training, and leadership development—activities that fall into that final 10%. Meanwhile, they often neglect the structural conditions that account for 60% of performance outcomes.
The Coaching Change Illusion: What NCAA Football Teaches Us
The college football data validates Hackman and Wageman’s findings in brutal fashion. In a comprehensive study published in Social Science Quarterly, researchers Scott, Berry, and Doherty analyzed coaching changes across NCAA Division I football programs. Their findings shatter the conventional wisdom:
For poor-performing teams: Coaching changes had little to no effect on subsequent performance.
For mid-performing teams: Those who fired their coaches actually performed worse than comparable teams that retained their coaches.
The study concluded that “the common decision to dismiss coaches may be ill-advised” because entry conditions—the talent on the roster, the program infrastructure, the institutional support—matter far more than the coach’s identity.
The Pattern Across Sports
This pattern repeats across professional sports. Research on mid-season coaching changes in professional soccer found minimal performance improvements. In the NFL, interim coaches historically average just a .364 winning percentage—not enough to make the playoffs. The “new coach bounce” is largely a myth.
The Sales Parallel: Why Bringing In a New Sales Leader Often Backfires
The parallels to sales organizations are impossible to ignore.
When a sales team underperforms, the knee-jerk reaction is to blame the sales manager or bring in a “proven closer” to shake things up. But if we apply the 60-30-10 framework, we see why this approach so often fails:
The 60% Problem: Structural Deficiencies
Most underperforming sales teams suffer from fundamental structural problems:
- Unclear Purpose: Misalignment between what leadership says matters and what’s actually measured and rewarded
- Wrong People: Hiring for “hunger” without assessing for consultative skills or emotional intelligence
- Broken Structure: Territories that make no strategic sense, quotas divorced from reality, or compensation plans that incentivize the wrong behaviors
- Context Failures: Inadequate CRM systems, insufficient market intelligence, or a toxic culture that burns out top performers
Consider the numbers: Sales turnover is 27% higher than the overall labor force. The cost of replacing a single sales rep ranges from $115,000 to $200,000 when you factor in lost productivity, recruiting costs, and training time. Yet organizations repeatedly treat coaching and leadership changes as the solution rather than addressing the underlying structural conditions.
The 30% Overlooked: Launch Failures
When a new sales manager arrives, how often is there a true “launch”? More commonly, they inherit a demoralized team, undefined expectations, and pressure to deliver immediate results. The critical 30%—setting clear purpose, establishing norms, building trust—gets sacrificed for short-term activity.
The 10% Overemphasis: Coaching as Band-Aid
Yes, sales coaching matters. Organizations where managers spend more than 50% of their time coaching are 1.4 times more likely to outperform competitors. Coached employees retain four times more information after training. But coaching cannot compensate for broken structures, misaligned incentives, or poorly defined roles.
As one sales leadership expert put it: “Great sales managers are not always great coaches” and even great coaches can’t overcome fundamentally flawed team design.
Revisiting the 60%: The Better Levers When Teams Aren’t Performing
So, if firing the coach is rarely the answer, what should leaders do when teams underperform?
Return to the six conditions and honestly assess each one:
1. Real Team
Is this actually a team, or a collection of individuals with “team” in their title? Real teams have:
- Bounded membership: Everyone knows who’s on the team and who isn’t
- Stability: Members work together long enough to learn each other’s strengths
- Interdependence: Success requires genuine collaboration, not just parallel individual efforts
Action: If your “team” is really individuals competing for the same resources, restructure around genuinely interdependent work.
2. Compelling Purpose
Does the team have a direction that is simultaneously clear, challenging, and consequential?
Not: “Increase sales by 10%”
But: “Become the partner of choice for mid-market manufacturers navigating digital transformation”
Action: Engage the team in co-creating purpose. Research shows teams that help craft their own direction show higher engagement and performance.
3. Right People
Do team members have both the task expertise AND the interpersonal skills needed?
Hackman’s research found that the “right people” condition breaks down into three skill categories:
- Technical/functional expertise
- Problem-solving and decision-making ability
- Interpersonal skills for collaboration
Action: Stop hiring solely for technical skills or past results. Assess for learning agility and emotional intelligence.
4. Solid Structure
Is the team the right size? (Hackman famously advocated for smaller teams—his ideal was 4.6 members)
Are roles clear? Do team norms support productive work or create friction?
Action: If the team is larger than 10 people, consider restructuring into smaller pods with clear accountability.
5. Supportive Context
Does the team have the information, resources, training, and reward systems they need?
This is where many underperforming teams really struggle. They’re asked to deliver results without:
- Adequate budget or tools
- Access to critical market intelligence
- Training in new methodologies or technologies
- Compensation systems that reward the desired behaviors
Action: Conduct a resource audit. What does the team need to succeed that they don’t currently have? Provide it or reset expectations accordingly.
6. Team Coaching (But at the Right Time)
Hackman and Wageman were explicit: coaching effectiveness depends on timing:
- Motivational coaching works best at the beginning of a task cycle
- Consultative coaching (about strategy and approach) works best at the midpoint
- Educational coaching (skills development) works best after task completion
Action: Stop the “drive-by coaching” where managers give feedback whenever it occurs to them. Time coaching interventions strategically.
The Hard Truth: Structure Beats Charisma Every Time
The coaching carousel—whether in college football or corporate sales—persists because it offers the illusion of decisive action. Firing someone is visible. It sends a message. It satisfies stakeholders demanding accountability.
But as Hackman’s research demonstrates, leadership impact is largely contingent on the conditions in which leaders operate. The most charismatic coach or sales leader in the world will struggle with a poorly designed team in an unsupportive context.
Conversely, well-designed teams with adequate structural support often succeed despite mediocre leadership.
What This Means for Your Organization
If your team is underperforming, resist the urge to immediately blame the leader. Instead:
1. Audit the six conditions systematically
Where are the structural weaknesses?
2. Invest in design and launch
The 60% and 30% get far less attention than they deserve. If you’re creating a new team or reorganizing an existing one, dedicate serious time and resources to getting structure and launch right.
3. Time your coaching interventions
Random coaching is often ineffective or counterproductive. Strategic coaching at the right moments in a task cycle multiplies impact.
4. Measure what matters
Stop tracking only outcomes. Assess the quality of the six enabling conditions. Ruth Wageman’s Team Diagnostic Survey provides a validated tool for exactly this purpose.
5. Be patient with new leaders
Research shows the “year-two effect” in college football—new coaches often perform better in their second season once they’ve had time to reshape structures and culture. Your sales leader deserves the same runway, provided they’re addressing the structural issues.
The Bottom Line
LSU’s $53 million bet on a coaching change exemplifies how organizations throw money at the 10% while ignoring the 60%. It’s a pattern that plays out every day in corporate America—struggling sales teams get new leadership while fundamental structural problems go unaddressed.
The research is clear: If you want different results, change the conditions, not just the coach.
Team performance is not primarily about individual leadership genius. It’s about deliberately designing conditions that enable any competent leader to succeed. It’s about establishing compelling purpose, assembling the right people, creating solid structure, and providing genuine support.
The most effective intervention when teams underperform isn’t a coaching change. It’s a hard look in the mirror at the conditions you’ve created—or failed to create—for success.
Because in the end, great coaches don’t overcome broken systems. Great systems make good coaches great.