Leadership Strategy: Daily or Deep?
- danielherron
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 27
As one of the most successful coaches in college football history, Nick Saban’s trajectory to greatness was set when he adopted a lesson from psychology to motivate teams now referred to as “The Process”.
In 1998 Saban was head coach for Michigan State. As November rolled around, they were a 4-5 team and were about to play unbeaten Ohio State. The Spartans were going to get creamed. Everyone knew it. In the week leading up to the game, one of Saban’s friends, Psychiatry professor Lonny Rosen, comes to Saban’s office and basically tells him, “We’re playing the wrong game. We’re trying to win. We shouldn’t be doing that. Our process should be to focus on the details of each 7 seconds to run every play to perfection.”
To build toward success they slowed down the frenetic panic of game prep. They got to a vantage point above the execution of details to look deeply and ask hard questions of their prior approach. Then, they shaped an entirely new approach that they inserted into the practices and the motivational culture for the team— “The Process”. All in a week.
Recently, I spent some time at the office of a firm I’ve been serving as a Team Wellness Consultant and Leadership Coach. For the past year, we’d been working on this same task modeled by Saban and Rosen back in 1998, and we’d been seeing great success. That day, I was camped out in their main space so I could watch and learn from their process.
There were several associates working on various projects and one partner at her standing desk. The group would make an occasional joke or toss around friendly banter here and there, but they were all focused on detailed execution of individual tasks to provide excellent service for their clients.
As questions or needs came up the associates would toss their particular issue out to the group for assistance or to the partner for her specific engagement. They worked together like elite athletes seamlessly moving through the mechanics of a screen pass, each player fulfilling their role, and that partner served as the quarterback. She guided, resourced, and oversaw the work forward.
In a separate room there was another partner in video meetings with clients. He had another associate at his side providing support for the call while also being mentored in the white glove client service this firm is known for.
My friends were practicing the process of great daily leadership— moving the ball up the field by effectively executing the details of each play in the moment.
Yet, even when we’re excellent at executing day-to-day in-the-moment tasks, as leaders we can face a problem of neglecting the process of deep leadership.
Deep leadership has to do with addressing unasked or unanswered questions, unspoken beliefs, unacknowledged assumptions, decisions that have gone unmade or strategic options that may not have been considered. This also includes seeing problematic decisions, faulty cultural foundations, disconnected relationships, defective communications, or other potential weaknesses that need to be re-examined and corrected.
This is the sort of work Saban and Rosen did in the coach’s office as Michigan State prepped for their doomsday game against the Buckeyes.
"We were just going to focus on the process...on that particular play as if it had a history and life of its own." ~ Coach Nick Saban
Daily leadership involves in-the-moment execution of the details of the play or the immediate audible that may need to be called as a response to changing circumstances. It involves the team learning how to move together in the blocking, tackling, throwing, and running necessary to move the ball forward.
Deep leadership involves the review of game film in order to understand how well the team and each individual functions in any given situation to better optimize team performance in future scenarios. It involves taking the 40,000 foot view to see how effective the off-season trades have been in game scenarios. But, it gets deeper. It also considers how the values, philosophy, and priorities of the organization and its leaders shape the quality of the players drafted and traded for in the first place. Deep leadership is about strategy, planning, worldview consideration, and even seeking to understand and master the mechanics of flourishing relationships.
Leadership always involves negotiating the dance of processes between daily leadership and deep leadership. Each process shapes the other. The work done in the deep leadership process of reviewing game film, addressing team priorities, and shaping a philosophy of coaching gets granular in every 7-second process of running the plays. Moving through the detailed process of daily leadership on the field reveals the strengths to build upon and the weaknesses to address through the processes of deep leadership in the coach’s office.
Team success requires leaders to create and execute processes that weave both daily and deep leadership into one integrated practice.
How do you launch this into your own reflective practice?
Ask yourself:
How can I schedule intentional slow-downs of the frenetic pace of my daily game prep?
What’s the best way to get a vantage point above the daily details to look deeply and ask hard questions of my entire approach, philosophy, and team dynamics?
Do we need to shape an entirely new approach or just make some innovative adjustments?
How do we insert any innovations into the practices and the motivational culture of our team?
Look us up at Strive Performance. We’d love to serve your growth process.
Of that doomsday game in 1998, Saban recounts in Monte Burke’s book, Saban: The Making of a Coach (2016):
“We were just going to focus on the process of what it took to play the best football you could play – which was to focus on that particular play as if it had a history and life of its own.
“Don't look at the scoreboard, don't look at any external factors, just put all your focus and all your concentration, all your effort, all your toughness, all your discipline to execute that play. Regardless of what happened on that play, success or failure, you would move on to the next play and have the same focus to do that on the next play, and you'd then do that for 60 minutes in a game and then you'd be able to live with the results, regardless of what those results were.”
So, they go out to practice, and basically tell the guys, “We’re not going to pay attention to the crowd, to the scoreboard, all we’re going to do, all we expect from each player is on every play, you run the play to perfection.” End of the game, biggest upset of the year. The Spartans won 28-24, and Nick Saban’s legendary “The Process” took flight.
Daniel Herron is the founder of Strive Performance, an Indianapolis-based consulting and coaching firm specializing in organizational culture, team wellness, and whole-life integrated wellness coaching. To learn more about Strive Performance's assessment and coaching process, get in touch. We’d love to listen.
