The Night Nick Saban Stopped Keeping Score

The 1998 season looked bleak for Saban.

He was in his fourth season at Michigan State. His team was 4-5. Next up was undefeated, top-ranked Ohio State, on the road in Columbus.

Saban has admitted he didn’t believe his team could win. So, he called his friend Dr. Lonny Rosen, a sports psychiatrist, with a simple question: how do I approach this team? Rosen didn’t give him a better game plan. Instead, he suggested a different way to lead. Stop talking about the scoreboard. Coach your players to focus on one play at a time, as if each play has a life of its own. Control what you can control, and the score will take care of itself.

The result? Michigan State won, 28-24.

Saban calls it the dawn of a new Nick. It was the beginning of what became “The Process,” the philosophy behind everything he built at LSU and Alabama, including seven national championships.

Saban on his own transactional years

Saban is brutally honest about who he was before that week. He has said a leader has “a greater chance of losing your team when you are transactional,” and he admits that’s exactly how he led. Everything was about winning or losing.

A transactional leader reduces relationships to an exchange. You perform, you get rewarded. You fall short, you pay for it. The relationship lasts only as long as each side holds up its end of the bargain.

A transformational leader sees people through a different lens. Saban describes this kind of leadership as setting an example worth following and caring about people for their benefit, not yours. The goal isn’t this week’s result. It’s who your people become.

His advice to business leaders is the same advice he gives coaches: get out of the mindset where everything is about the bottom line and focus instead on what it takes to get there.

Why transactional relationships kill trust

Transactional leadership fails for one reason. It makes trust conditional on the last result.

When every conversation is about the scoreboard, people learn to protect themselves. They hide mistakes. They avoid risk. They do what’s required and nothing more. The leader reads that as a motivation problem and tightens the screws. Trust drops further, and the cycle feeds itself.

People can stay engaged in a transactional relationship. They show up and do good work. But what's missing is ownership. They stop stepping up because they’re too worried about being judged.

Transformational trust is a shift in how leaders see and respond when people fall short. Saban’s 1998 team wasn’t short on talent. It was short on trust. When he stopped grading every outcome and started coaching every play, it created the conditions for his players to take ownership.

Making the shift

You don’t need a 4-5 record and a trip to Columbus to make this change. Start with these three moves.

• Coach the play, not the score. Change your mindset and focus on growth. When someone falls short, ask what they learned and what they’ll do differently. A miss without coaching just teaches people to hide the next one.

• Make ownership the goal. Define the outcome, then give people space to figure out how to get there. Ownership won't grow when every decision runs through you.

• Start with yourself. At Team Trek, everything starts with 100% Responsibility: I take 100% responsibility for how I choose to respond to the people and circumstances in my life. Saban could have blamed his roster in 1998. He didn't. He looked in the mirror instead.

Transactional leadership can win games in the short term. However, it rarely builds teams that keep winning. Saban’s career is the proof.

Where Trust Leads, Results Follow.

Source: ESPN docuseries, Saban