Leadership Lessons from College Football

WHAT NICK SABAN HAS TO SAY ABOUT DOING THE LITTLE THINGS RIGHT

With football season fast approaching, my house is all-abuzz with excitement.  You would think my husband (and my dad, and my brother, and well, most of men in my life) were five year olds anxiously awaiting Santa coming down the chimney.

With the all the buzz, my husband’s inbox, twitter feed, and texts have been dinging football talk, and I get forwarded anything that he feels is a “must know” for this season.  Every good wife in the state of Alabama surely needs to know what high school standout Nick Saban has just signed, right? We also need a daily countdown of how many days (and even hours) it is until the season kicks off.

But a few weeks ago, he emailed me a story about Nick Saban, with the words “You need to use this article for a blog post.”   It was about Nick Saban speaking to a group of Mercedes Benz employees.  The Mercedes plant is just a few miles outside of the home of the Crimson Tide, and Saban was there to talk in a ceremony where the “steering wheel” of the plant was being handed over to a new Mercedes North American President.

He praised the workers of the plant for their 99.4% attendance rate, but discussed how with each success, such as 3 out 4 of the last National Championships in the highly competitive college football arena, the next success becomes harder to achieve.

Do the little things right

What struck me as the most important take-away from what he said about that nearly perfect attendance rate is that success comes from doing the little things right, like simply showing up.   Want to be a champion? You’ve got to show up before you can even begin the hard work of getting there.   Want to be a champion?  Well you’ve got to continue to show up even when you think, or even when you know through your winning record, that you’re the best in the business.    Want to be champion?  Its actually harder to do the little things right when things are going well than when they aren’t.

In working to coach individuals towards success, my focus more than anything is on helping them create habits to create success.   These aren’t ground-breaking habits, but simple ones like showing up, doing small things right consistently in order to create performance cultures.  Its not rocket science, it’s the science of habit and behavior. But like Saban, I find that the habit breaking happens more when the habits have created success and the thought process becomes, “Well I’ve gotten success, I don’t need to do this anymore.”  And then the success diminishes.

If you want to be a championship-like leader, keep your eye on the ball.  And that ball encompasses the small things, like showing up 99.4% or more of the time.

What habits do you find are the most important to your long-term success?

 

More next week on what Saban has to say about being around mediocre people.