They Still Call Him

Part One of a series on transformational and servant leadership

Transformational leadership is the mode. Servant leadership is the account it draws on.

Five posts make this argument in full. Here we start with the method, and what has to sit underneath it for the method to mean anything. Next comes the operating system most organizations are actually running, the one that takes a good set of habits and points them at the wrong thing. After that, what it looks like when a high-demand team holds a real standard and keeps its people safe at the same time. Then the account gets tested under fire, in the one setting where nobody has time to explain anything and trust is the only thing that moves people. And last, your Tuesday. Almost nobody reading this coaches football, at least not on Saturday in front of 100,000 people. On Tuesday you lead your own team, and you've been the underdog for years.

In 1998 Nick Saban was the head coach at Michigan State and his team was headed to Columbus to play the number one team in the country. Ohio State was undefeated and had been dismantling people. Nobody outside that locker room gave Michigan State a chance.

Saban did not give them one either. He has said so himself. That was the real problem. He did not know how to coach a team without making the win the point, and it had nothing to do with the players in that locker room.

He was a transactional coach at that point in his career. Do the work, get the result, answer for it when you miss. That system had carried him from a small town in West Virginia to a Big Ten head coaching job, and it failed him in the week he needed it most. A coach cannot sell a win he does not believe in. Players read their coach faster than they read a game plan, and they were going to hear what he actually thought no matter what came out of his mouth on Thursday.

So he picked up the phone and called a psychiatrist named Lonny Rosen who taught at Michigan State.

I want to step back here, because this next part teaches something different than the rest of the story. A man near the top of his profession, days out from the biggest game of his career, called a stranger and admitted he did not know how to lead the team in front of him. Most leaders in that position give a speech instead. It costs nothing. It also fixes nothing, and everyone in the room can tell.

Rosen did not offer motivation. He came at it from performance psychology, where the central finding is unglamorous. Focusing on an outcome you cannot control produces anxiety, and anxiety degrades the execution that would have produced the outcome. Wanting it more makes it worse.

A football play lasts about four to six seconds. A game holds sixty or seventy of them. Rosen told him to stop coaching the game and coach the play. Line up, execute your assignment at the highest level you are capable of, let it go, and do it again.

Michigan State won 28 to 24.

Forget the score. A team full of nineteen year olds walked into the most hostile building in the country against the best team in the country and did not fold, because somebody had finally given them a way to succeed that had nothing to do with the scoreboard. Do this one assignment right, for four to six seconds, and you have already won, whatever the drive does next. Stack enough of those up and you might just beat the number one team in the country.

What The Process actually is

That week became the seed. Over the next twenty five years Saban built it into something he eventually called The Process, and it went well past a mental trick. It has three parts and they hold each other up.

The first is definition. Every task has a correct way to perform it, and that way gets written down and taught. Not the goal. The method. Where the eyes go on the snap. What the hands do. What the first step looks like. A standard nobody can picture is not a standard, it is a wish, and most organizations are full of them.

The second is invariance. The standard does not move for the opponent, the score, the weather, or the week. A player who goes all out against a ranked team and coasts against a weak one has not met the standard. He has met the situation. Saban calls situational effort the primary disease in talented people. It wins often enough to feel like success. Underneath, it teaches an entire team that effort is negotiable, and once that lesson lands you cannot unteach it with a speech.

The third is grading. Every attempt gets measured against the definition instead of against whether it worked. A play can gain fifteen yards and grade out as a failure, because the assignment was blown and the result was luck. A play can lose four yards and grade out clean. Across a season that separates execution from fortune, and separating those two is the only way anyone learns anything from a result.

Here is the gift buried in that third part, and it is not a secret worth hiding. Outcome-based measurement guarantees that most people fail most of the time no matter what they do, because outcomes are contaminated by things nobody controls. The economy. The competitor. The client who reorganized. Execution-based measurement means effort always converts. Saban gave those kids a definition of success they could hit one hundred percent of the time, on the worst day, in a game they were going to lose.

Four years of that changes a person. He learns that his effort is real currency. He learns that the standard is not a lottery. He learns that showing up fully is never wasted, even when the scoreboard says otherwise. Then he graduates and carries it into a marriage, a business, a diagnosis, a bad year.

That is not a football lesson.

A method is not a purpose

This is what I mean by method, and it is what I will mean every time I use the word from here forward. A method answers how. How do we practice, how do we measure, how do we hold a line. The Process, with its three parts, is a method. A purpose answers what for, and underneath that, what we owe the people doing the work. A method can be attached to any purpose you want, good or bad, because a method by itself has no opinion about what it is for.

That is not a criticism of it. Methods are supposed to be silent about purpose. The trouble starts when a leader mistakes his method for his ethic and decides that because his system is rigorous, his intentions must be sound. Rigor is not evidence of anything except rigor.

Any organization can install The Process tomorrow. Define every task. Hold the standard in every condition. Grade every attempt. Plenty of companies already run a version of this on their own people, keystroke tracking, call-time quotas, activity dashboards that log every minute of a workday. Definition, invariance, and grading, aimed at a person instead of a task. If the organization already treats people as inputs, none of that corrects anything. It makes the extraction more precise, better documented, and much harder to argue with.

I have spent a couple of years researching and writing about that failure mode. I call it Scoreboard Leadership, a term I coined and own the domain for, and it is the subject of the next post in this series. For now it is enough to say that it is transactional at the foundation, that the number becomes the mission, and that handing it a method as good as Saban's makes it sharper rather than better.

So The Process by itself never explains Saban. Definition, invariance, and grading run inside plenty of organizations that produce nothing but throughput and turnover. Something else was underneath his, something no method, by itself, can supply.

What Burns had and Bass removed

The words we use for what Saban did come from two men, and the gap between them is the argument.

James MacGregor Burns was a political scientist and a presidential historian. In 1978 he published a book called Leadership, and in it he drew a line between transactional leadership, which runs on exchange, and what he called transforming leadership, where leader and follower raise each other to higher levels of motivation and morality.

Burns built morality into the definition itself. In his framing, you could not be a transforming leader while degrading the people you led. It did not matter what they achieved. Achievement was not the test.

Bernard Bass was an organizational psychologist at Binghamton. In 1985 he moved the idea out of politics and into companies, and he built an instrument to measure it. He named four components. Model something worth following. Articulate a vision that lifts people. Challenge them to think. Attend to each person individually. The instrument made the concept usable, and it is the only reason the term exists in business at all.

To make it measurable, he took the morality out. Bass argued that a leader could be transformational regardless of the ends being served. For years that was the accepted position, and business kept producing the cases that proved it couldn't hold. Elizabeth Holmes built Theranos on a real vision, real charisma, and total devotion from employees who believed they were about to change medicine. The technology never worked, and people got hurt trusting it. Adam Neumann built WeWork on the same fuel, a mission bigger than a real estate company, employees who would have followed him anywhere, and it ended in a collapse that cost thousands of them their jobs and their equity. Both men were transformational by Bass's 1985 definition. Neither one had the morality Burns had built in seven years earlier. By 1999 Bass was bolting a distinction back on, separating authentic transformational leaders from what he called pseudo-transformational ones. The difference in his own definition came down to intent and ethical impact. A pseudo-transformational leader shows every behavior on the checklist and still leaves people worse off, because none of it was ever in service of them. That is a careful way of admitting the original definition had been right and the measurable version had a hole in it.

Put the morality back and the two descriptions collapse into one. A leader who raises people to higher levels of motivation and morality, and who will not degrade them on the way, is a servant leader operating under high demand.

So when I say transformational leadership and servant leadership are closer than anyone gives them credit for, I am not proposing something new. I am pointing at what got removed so the idea would fit on a questionnaire.

They knew what they signed up for

Saban's players opted into hard. Every one of them had spent ten years becoming the kind of athlete a program like that would take. They had already lined up against the kids who ended up at Ohio State. Nobody arrived in Tuscaloosa confused about what the standard would be. That was the whole appeal of the place.

When Saban demanded more than they thought they had in them, he was not imposing a cost on them. He was delivering the thing they came for.

Servant leadership was never about comfort. Lowering the bar for someone who came to be forged is not kindness. It is a betrayal with better manners. Good players get cut every year for missing an agreed upon mark, and that is not a failure of service. It is the agreement working.

But an agreement is not a slogan on a wall. A real one has three parts. Everyone knows what the standard is. Everyone knows why it exists and what it protects. And everyone had a genuine choice about whether to be there. Take away any one of those three and what is left is not an agreement. It is a demand dressed up to look like one.

The high performance environment is not where servant leadership gets diluted. It is the only place you can actually see it. In a low demand room, a servant leader is indistinguishable from a merely pleasant one. Turn the pressure up and the difference becomes the only thing that matters.

The leader you actually had

Somewhere behind you is the most demanding person you ever worked for. The one with the impossible standard. The one who made you redo it. The one whose approval you can still feel the shape of, years later.

If you had a problem tomorrow that person could help with, would you still call them?

Hold that question, because the answer depends on which of three people you actually had.

One ran you on a trade. Show up, produce, collect the paycheck. His approval was never really available. What you got was the appearance of it, and only for as long as the numbers held.

One pushed you further than you thought you had in you and got the result, whatever it cost you to give it to him. He was not lying to you. He also was not thinking about you once he had what he needed.

And one did both at the same time. Same demand, same standard, same redo. Underneath all of it, he was for you.

The demand looked identical in all three. The hours were identical. The standard was identical. From the outside, on any given Tuesday, you could not have told them apart.

The difference was never the intensity. It was the care. That is servant leadership showing up inside transformational leadership, which is exactly how Burns mapped it in 1978 before Bass took the morality out to make it measurable. Take the care out and you still get results. You just don't get someone you would call ten years later with a problem that has nothing to do with what he once demanded of you.

That is the gap between a method and a purpose, and you have been carrying the evidence for it your entire working life.

He left because he cared

That gap is what makes sense of Saban walking away, and it is worth saying plainly before the story runs. He left because the thing he cared about most had been taken out of the job. Not the winning. The other thing.

In January 2024 he walked away from Alabama at seventy-two, coming off a season where he believed the next team was going to be very good. He was not fired. He was not losing. He left.

Speaking on Capitol Hill that March, he said that everything he had believed in across fifty years of coaching no longer existed in college athletics, and that it had always been about developing players and helping people become more successful in life.

He told ESPN that seventy or eighty percent of the players he talked to in those final weeks wanted to know two things. Whether they were guaranteed to play, and how much he would pay them. He said the program had always been built on how much value it could create for a young man's future, through personal development, academic success, and preparation for a career. He was careful to add that he did not think the players were wrong to want what they wanted. Only that it had never been what his program was about, and never why it had worked.

Miss Terry probably knew it before he did. That is what everyone calls Nick's wife of more than fifty years, and she has never been a coach's wife standing off to the side. Every account of their life together describes the same thing from a different angle: she was the one who noticed what a player needed before he asked, who built relationships behind the ones Nick got credit for, who understood the players were never just athletes to either of them. She helped build the heart of that program as much as he did.

Whatever the two of them worked out between themselves in those final months, the deal on the table had changed. These players were not signing up to be developed into men anymore. Most of them were signing up to get paid to play college football for a year, then leave for a bigger number somewhere else. The relationship an eighteen year old walked into ten years earlier was not the relationship walking through the door now, no matter how badly Nick and Miss Terry wanted it to be.

His age was part of it too, and he has said so. Hiring the staff he needed and holding the standard at the level he was used to had both gotten harder. That is real, and it does not compete with the other reason. It sits beside it.

He could still recruit a roster. He could still win with it. What he could no longer do was spend four years turning a young man into someone who would still be that person twenty years later. That was gone before he ever decided to leave. Retiring was him admitting it out loud.

What was left was paying for wins.

That is a transaction. Nothing more. And it is exactly what he had walked away from in 1998, when he called a stranger and admitted the transactional version of himself could not get his team through Saturday.

Twenty six years later the transaction came back and took the job. So he left it.

Proof, not performance

Saban did not have to prove any of this. He is one of the winningest coaches who has ever lived, financially secure, retired, and he owes nothing else to anyone. There was no audience left for him to perform for. Which is exactly why what comes next is the real evidence, not a reason to doubt what already happened.

Anyone can look caring while people are still deciding whether to work for him. The only place a leader cannot fake it is after he no longer needs anything from the people in question.

They still call him.

Twenty years out. Careers over. Rings in a drawer somewhere. Nothing left for either party to gain. Saban is documented checking on former players long after they left Tuscaloosa, walking them through personal trouble and connecting them to work.

He also rebuilt coaching careers nobody else would touch. Steve Sarkisian came to him after a public collapse. Mike Locksley came to him after a run at New Mexico that should have ended him. Neither man could do a thing for Saban at the moment he took him on. Sarkisian has since described a person the public never sees and called him one of the most compassionate people he has been around, and then pointed out that this is not how anybody describes him.

The test is simple and almost nobody passes it. What does a leader do for a person who can no longer produce?

The extractive version reallocates. There is nothing personal in it. The math simply stops working and the resources go elsewhere. The servant keeps investing in someone who is now pure cost, and gets nothing measurable back for it. That does not mean the investment is endless or unconditional. It means it is not billed by the hour, and it does not stop the day the usefulness does.

On the practice field those two men are identical. Same standard, same intensity, same conversation with the same kid about the same missed assignment. You cannot tell them apart while it is happening.

Ten years later they are not remotely the same, and by then everybody knows which one they had.

Nick Saban cared about those men more than he cared about winning. Not instead of winning. He is the most relentless winner the sport has produced and he never pretended otherwise. More than. And the one time the two came apart, when the system finally made him choose between developing people and collecting trophies, he put down the best job in college football and walked out of the building.

Where this series goes

Transformational leadership is the mode. Servant leadership is the account it draws on.

The Process is a method, and a good one, and it explains none of what made Nick Saban the greatest builder of men college football has produced. What explains it is that he cared about those players as students and as men before he cared about what they did on Saturday. They knew it. And they gave him everything on the strength of it.

Not because caring is the nicer road to the same destination. Because anyone can extract for four years. Sustaining excellence for twenty five requires discretionary effort, the effort nobody can compel or measure or write into a contract, and discretionary effort only ever flows toward earned authority.

Scoreboard Leadership comes next, and it does not stay inside the office. It follows people home, into marriages, friendships, and the way a father talks to a son.

After that, what a high-demand team looks like when the standard is real and the people are safe at the same time, and what it costs a leader to build one.

The account gets tested under fire in the post after that. The one condition where nobody has time to explain anything and trust is the only thing that moves people.

And last, your Tuesday. Almost nobody reading this coaches football. At least not on Saturday, in front of 100,000 people. On Tuesday you lead your team, and you have been twenty-point underdogs for years.

If you grow people, you grow the organization. If you use people, you lose it.

Roll Tide.