Fire the Coach?

It happens all the time in sports - at the end of a losing season, the manager or head coach gets fired. Obviously, that's easier than getting rid of all the players and, more importantly. it deflects responsibility for the team's failure away from management.

This same type of thing happens in the corporate world and for the same reasons. If sales are down, more likely than not sales management will take the heat and/or get fired rather than the sales reps and rather than senior management looking looking introspectively.

A case in point, from an anonymous correspondent;
"I work for a well-known East Coast based financial services firm and 2006 was a horrible sales year for our division. In December it was announced that our Sales Manager would be leaving and that our department would be rolled into a division that sells products complementary to ours. While none of this seems bad or unreasonable to the outside world, one key element was missing - any kind of real investigation as to why sales were down. The real problems were out-of-date products and horrendous service, problems upper management refused to fix, and therefore a terribly unmotivated sales force. The new management went into the change oblivious to what the issues were and treated us as if all we needed was a lesson in sales, some new laptops and a bigger quota. We don't want to be seen as crybabies or not as "team players", but until some of the underlying problems are addressed we still won't be selling and whose fault is that? I believe it's upper management's fault."

Now, I'm not sure the "management refused to fix" part is 100% accurate as it's likely as not that they were either unaware as to the extent of the problems or were unable (for one reason or another) to remedy them, but still. Even when the ball team's manager gets fired, usually management makes other changes to ensure that the new manager and the team is successful, or at least, more successful. Marching on as if the only change required is a change in middle-management is hardly ever the right approach.

If things are bad enough that team, or executive, management feels the need to fire the manager, you can be certain that other, more serious, problems are afoot and need to be attended to.