How Leaders Attack Failure - Part One
How Leaders Attack Failure: A Series
Part One - College Football Coach Nick Saban
Human beings deal with failure everyday. And it sucks. Failure doesn’t make you feel good. On top of that, if you fail in front of others, or a big crowd, or an entire nation…, you feel a little worse because not only do you know in your head, that you weren’t able to get it done, but the people who witnessed your performance also know that you couldn’t get it done.
But in moving forward, how do we stop failure from taking a toll on us? How do we quickly regroup and keep ourselves focused on the greater mission at hand? Well, I set up GameChangers to help teach myself and all others about the moments in everyday life that can coach us to be better leaders, to teach us how to build tribes.
Today in Part 1 of this series, we look at legendary leader, Nick Saban - head football coach of the University of Alabama - winner of six national championships, and winner of 79% of his total 314 collegiate football games.
So how does he attack failure? Well first off, winning 79% of his 314 games is already the opposite of failure enough. But let’s look to his last biggest loss, the national championship game on January 7, 2019. His Alabama football team loses to Clemson University in a lopsided 44-16 - what was his approach to attack this failure?
For the purpose of this article, we’ll take a look at his immediate postgame press conference, the moment right after he gets mollywhopped on national television. How does he handle himself? How does he attack failure? Saban primarily does two distinct things to respond: 1) he maintains the credibility of his program, and 2) presents a purpose to move forward. Instead of succumbing to the impulsive emotion of the moment, he regroups and directs his emotion deliberately.
Maintain the credibility of the program
Let’s extrapolate for a second. Immediately after any failure: losing a game, a botched presentation, a failed product lunch, not hitting sales numbers for the month or quarter - in the immediate aftermath, we’re looking at harsh critics, crazy emotions, accsuations, confusion, playing the blame game, or even someone else exploiting the moment. We can never take lightly the range of emotion some people might feel. Painting this picture of a potential postgame locker room for Saban (or in another failure example), what’s the ideal way to respond? How can we attack the failure and maintain the credibility of our program?
Let’s look at Saban’s here directly:
Saban does not attribute blame to anyone, it is not about who is at fault. Instead, Saban maintains the dignity of the program by taking blame upon himself, specifically saying it was a “reflection on the job [he] did.” What does this do? It neutralizes the blame. All of a sudden, the blame doesn’t rest on any assistant coach, star player, offensive line, athletic staff member, etc. The leader of the ship says the blame is on him, and it negates any embarrassment for the team. The buck has stopped with the leader of the program, and his or her demeanor yields how the program recovers.
We know Saban is a great coach, we know he’s won six national championships and over 75% of his games. By taking the blame upon himself, he’s saving his team, he’s saving his coaching staff. No one has to feel the blunt of public opinion upon themselves that they individually screwed up. This is what a credible organizations and credible leaders do. They keep a clean front no matter what. Keep the composure, don’t play the blame game, maintain the respect of your troops and the spectators.
Present a purpose to move forward
In the face of a loss, emotions are running high, the blame game is going around, and your reputation as a leader is at stake. By keeping up the credibility of the program, a leader is actively driving the dialogue of the situation. This was kind of like damage control.
But now that the damage control is done, there is still work to be done. And Saban reminds us of how to move forward in this clip below.
Saban begins to explain how powerful this loss is for his team. But instead of using emotion to describe what a crushing defeat it was in front of a national audience, Saban talks about how there’s a glorious lesson in “learning how to lose.” He touches on the immense work that all players on the team have in front of them because of this loss: understand the mistakes, and rectify their process so that it never happens again. Instead of dwelling on the loss, Saban is showing what lessons his team can take away, so that they can move on. More importantly, he’s re-framing the loss itself. Instead of seeing the loss as a problem (they messed up), he sees it as a solution (this game will reveal our shortcomings). The team witnesses all this. And as such, there is a greater chance they maintain credibility and trust in their coach’s program.
We don’t take on new goals and ideas with the chance that if we fail, we’ll stop trying to achieve those goals. We take on new risks for the growth and the glory that come from it. When the glory comes short, it is imperative we stick to the growth. How did we grow? How did we not? What gap led to the loss? How do we fill that gap next time? These questions excite us, and more importantly they lead our emotions of loss from dejection to curiosity and enthusiasm. Even Churchill would say “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
This was Part 1 of How Leaders Attack Failure: A Series. Thank you for reading.
More information on Saban and his leadership style here.