Coaching Trees, Corruption Trees, and the People Debt You Can't See on a Dashboard

There's a concept in football called the coaching tree.

A legendary coach builds a staff. Those assistants go on to become head coaches themselves. Their teams win. Their assistants become head coaches. And so on. Nick Saban's tree covers half of college football. Bill Walsh's and Marty Schottenheimer's branches touch almost every NFL sideline. It's not accidental. These coaches figured something out — not just about plays and schemes, but about how to develop people who develop people.

It made us wonder: what does a coaching tree look like inside a company? And more importantly — what does the opposite look like?

What a coaching tree actually passes down

When we talk about coaching trees, it's tempting to reduce it to skills transfer. But that misses the point. What great coaches pass down isn't a playbook. It's a way of moving through the work — a standard, a culture, a set of instincts about what matters.

In business terms, Jack Welch is the obvious example. Brilliant at managing finances. Generated a cult of leadership development at GE. And yet — GE's eventual collapse is a reminder that even legendary coaches have blind spots. Welch's tree passed down financial discipline, but somewhere the client got lost. You can build a great coaching tree around the wrong things.

The question isn't just did someone develop great people. It's what did those people internalize?

The corruption tree

Here's the uncomfortable flip side: every organization also has corruption trees.

They're just harder to name. It's the executive whose direct reports consistently quit within 18 months. The middle manager who hires "their people" and runs a little fiefdom. The senior leader who gets results — on paper — while leaving a trail of burned-out teams and deferred problems.

These aren't just bad managers. They're anti-coaches. And just like a coaching tree, their influence compounds. Low standards become permission structures. Shortcuts become norms. The people who survive under them either leave, adapt, or become the next generation of the problem.

From a process debt perspective, this is debt you can't see on a dashboard. The employee satisfaction survey might hint at it. The turnover numbers eventually tell the story. But by the time it's obvious, the interest has been compounding for years.

The arsonist problem

Most organizations don't promote great coaches. They promote fire starters.

You know the type. Something breaks, they swoop in, take responsibility, put out the fire — and get visibility for it. What the org chart doesn't capture is that they started the fire in the first place. And because they never actually fixed the underlying problem, the fire comes back. A little smaller each time, just enough to stay below the threshold where someone asks harder questions.

The best managers? You rarely hear about them. They're just quietly getting things done. Their teams are stable. Their people get promoted. There are no heroics because there are no disasters.

But "no disasters" is invisible on a performance review. It doesn't get the budget. It doesn't get the promotion. And so the org keeps rewarding the arsonists, and the quiet builders either leave or get ignored until someone finally notices that the group they came from keeps producing exceptional people.

The three-year lag problem

Here's what makes this especially hard: you often can't see a coaching tree until three years after someone started building it.

A great manager's impact shows up when their team members get promoted, when their direct reports develop their own management styles, when the people who sat in their 1:1s start making better decisions independently. None of that is measurable in a quarter. Almost none of it shows up in a sprint review.

This is the same challenge we face with process debt more broadly. The debt accumulates slowly, often invisibly, and the interest payments show up long after the original decision. A bad manager is process debt in human form. Every shortcut they encourage, every standard they fail to hold, every person they develop poorly — it all compounds.

What this means for hiring and career decisions

Here's a question we don't ask enough, on either side of the table:

Who have you developed?

Not: what metrics did you hit. Not: what's on your LinkedIn. But — can you name three people who worked for you and are now doing exceptional things? Can I talk to them?

For anyone thinking about their next role: the $5,000 salary bump might matter less than who you're going to spend 40 hours a week learning from. Opportunities aren't equal. The person you apprentice under shapes what you internalize, what standards feel normal, what shortcuts feel acceptable, what excellence looks like.

And a related question worth asking yourself: Am I building a coaching tree, or am I just managing a headcount?

The process connection

There's a quote on our website: bad process kills good people.

The reverse is also true. Good process — and good people leading that process — can turn an average contributor into a rockstar. Not because the process is magic, but because it gives people the structure to do their best work, the psychological safety to fail and learn, and the clarity to know what "done well" actually looks like.

The Navy SEALs don't get to be the best by selecting the best and then leaving them alone. The selection process is brutal. But once you're in, the culture shifts entirely — it becomes about how do we get better, how do we protect each other, how do we create enough safety that we can actually learn from our mistakes. Because when the stakes are high enough, you need people who have your back, not people who are trying not to get caught.

That's what the best coaching trees build, whether in football or business: not just performers, but people with the instincts to build the next generation of performers.

The questions worth asking

If you're thinking about this from a process debt lens, here are the things we'd be paying attention to:

• Where in your organization do exceptional people seem to keep coming from? Who's upstream of that?

• Where do people consistently burn out, leave, or stagnate? Who's managing that team?

• What are you measuring that might be selecting for fire starters over builders?

• Who in your org has developed people who are now developing people?

The scoreboard matters. But the people building the scoreboard — and what they're passing down — matters more than most orgs ever stop to measure.

Process Debt is a podcast about why your rollout failed, why the reports don't match, and what to actually do about it. New episodes weekly.