Further Commanders coaching changes a cost/benefit situation

Give Coach Ron Rivera a break on this much: Managing amid job insecurity is one of the most difficult tricks in any business. A chronic state of instability was unfairly thrust on him: Dan Snyder was a wreck of an outgoing owner, and by the time his forced sale to Harris was complete, it was training camp and too late for Harris to make any kind of fresh start.

Rivera’s job was thus a set of paradoxical tensions. He was supposed to establish continuity while on a tenuous professional string. He had to foster stability yet show rapid improvement, and bring a young QB along responsibly, while chasing win-now performances. It’s hard to say exactly where Rivera bears responsibility in this mess. What can be said, though, is that he answered his quandary by making some disconnected moves that only deepened a sense of contradictions.

You trade away the heart of your defensive rush in Chase Young and Montez Sweat to build capital for the future — and then fire your defensive coordinator and defensive backs coach with five games remaining because “for whatever reason, it wasn’t coming together.” What sense does this make? Rivera’s explanation was that the play was so poor that some sort of disruption was needed. “If you don’t change things, can you expect them to change?”

But change just for the sake of change can be a managerial trap — one Harris should approach with care. There’s a tendency to confuse it with freshening — to believe that if you make an incremental change, it will somehow result in a better outlook, and therefore an upgrade. In fact, change causes anxiety in your performers, and a lot of leaders underestimate the toll it takes. You better know how to manage change and prepare others for it, because a wealth of organizational study shows that if you don’t, it can lead to further disengagement and erosion. According to Harvard Business School leadership professor John P. Kotter, change generally only works when you have convinced at least 75 percent of your people that “the status quo is more dangerous than the unknown.”

The Commanders made a change. Players aren’t sure what change will accomplish.

It remains to be seen whether it was more dangerous to keep the status quo with Jack Del Rio, a long-time trusted aide who had coached other defenses to Super Bowls, or for Rivera to fire him and take over the unit himself. But it’s likely to have a double edge with Rivera’s frustrated players, who are the ones who will actually have to effect the change. They have been seeking consistency. But change, unavoidably, by definition, creates breaks in continuity. You’re suddenly asking players to fill different roles and meet shifting standards.

As the managerial scholar Gudela Grote wrote in a paper entitled “Managing Uncertainty in Work Organizations”:

“The necessity of change needs to be irrefutable for individuals to be willing to bear it.”

Also, she adds, the necessity of that change has to seem fair, well-reasoned. “Perceived fairness helps people to cope with high levels of uncertainty and the resulting perceived lack of control,” Grote wrote.

This is the second time that Rivera has fired a key handpicked coordinator in circumstances that were by no means irrefutable. Last winter it was offensive coordinator Scott Turner who took the fall. Was the offense underperforming? Certainly. But what did anyone expect with seven QBs in four years, from the not ready Dwayne Haskins to the limping soldier Alex Smith to the undersized Taylor Heinicke — signed off the street during covid — and then Ryan Fitzpatrick’s one-game cameo before his injury, and then Carson Wentz’s fizzle, after all that planning for him? And then, in a fit of irrational exuberance, the designation of Sam Howell as the potential future of the franchise for beating the Dallas Cowboys in the final game of the 2022 regular season.

The hiring of Eric Bieniemy was without question an upgrade — he’s a tantalizing playcaller who has piled up all kinds of yards in collaboration with Howell’s slinging. But the bottom line is that those stacks of yards have not come with a lot of victories, and Howell is a work in progress who is chronically sack-prone and has thrown two pick-sixes in two weeks.

Even good change comes with disruption that has to be managed carefully.

The biggest problem with disruption is that it makes performers uncertain. But a secondary symptom is that it makes straightforward analysis difficult. What is cause, and effect? Rivera stresses “complementary football.” But too often the Commanders have seemed disconnected, lacking in larger organizational coordination — not all of which is his fault. Who knows how much the chronic uncertainty he’s worked under has exhausted him and undermined his own decisional performance?

Uncertainty — pervasive, low-lying unease about the future, about who will be the quarterback, about whether Rivera or any of his staff will have tenure beyond this year, has inarguably been a large part of the Commanders’ problem. Ultimately, the signature of this team has been a slow rolling sense of irresolution, which a couple Black Friday firings won’t rectify.