The Global Leadership Summit 2025

Who hasn’t heard of Nick Saban? Oh geeze, should I even say it? Me. Yep. It’s me. I’m so embarrassed. In my defense, I don’t watch football and am clueless when it comes to sports media — not the easiest thing to admit when surrounded by big sports fans.

So when our very own Digital Media quarterback, Michelle Drewek, tossed out an opportunity to watch the Global Leadership Summit interview with a “football guy,” I hesitated. But I gave it a shot — and wow, I was blown away. Turns out, Nick Saban is a legendary American football coach, best known for leading the University of Alabama to six national championships and becoming one of the most successful coaches in college football history.

Watching Saban with interviewer Paula Faris was like drinking from a firehose of wisdom. Discipline, self-awareness, guarding against complacency, perseverance — his answers were out of this world. You don’t need football knowledge to take something from this. The following are highlights from their conversation.

Let’s huddle.

The Value of Discipline

Saban is a man of routine, still eating Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies for breakfast every day and the same turkey, lettuce and tomato sandwich for lunch. And while he says routine is good, he also says you need to be flexible. “You have to have a system where you can evaluate what you’re doing and then have the opportunity to adapt and grow so that you continue to improve and progress,” Saban says. He went on to detail how he’d sit down with each player to define exactly what they had to do to succeed in school and on the field. Then throughout the season he would check in on how they were doing. That specificity builds in discipline to execute each day. You have to have both to stay on the path of accomplishing your goals.

The Process for Development

Saban describes “the process” as the clear definition of what must be done to reach a goal and focusing on the steps, not just the outcome. His approach always began with developing individuals first. Each new player was brought in and asked, “What do you want to accomplish here? What are your goals?” He followed that with, “Do you know what that entails?” Most answers, he notes, were incomplete. Together, they would define what it would take to succeed academically, athletically and, ultimately, to reach the next level. “I’m going to ask you periodically how are you doing ... because you’re never going to improve unless you have the ability to self-assess,” Saban says.

Combatting Complacency

Saban believes success can be more difficult to manage than failure. “Success is not a continuum; it’s momentary,” he explains. “You’re infected with success if you think anything you’ve done in the past is going to impact the outcome of what happens in the future. Complacency creates a blatant disregard for doing what’s right.”

When people get complacent, they “lose respect for what it takes to win ... you don’t practice as well, you create bad habits, you don’t prepare right. It starts affecting performance and shows up in the game.” He recalls winning 19 straight games at Alabama before losing to a lower ranked team in the 20th. “After we got beat everybody was asking, ‘What time are we practicing today, Coach?’ Where, when we won 19 games in a row, they were asking, ‘Why are we practicing on Monday? Why don’t we get 2 days off?’” You need the hunger to improve whether you are succeeding or not.

Never Waste a Failing

Saban says failures and setbacks are critical opportunities for growth. “When you don’t have success, you can take advantage of that because people are willing to learn,” he says. “You can’t get frustrated. The coach shows frustration because he made a mistake instead of teaching.” Without teaching, he says, “a negative experience ... really kills the morale in your organization.” Reflecting on a tough loss to Clemson, he told his team, “You guys, we cannot waste this failing.”

Overcoming Adversity

Mental toughness, Saban says, is essential for overcoming adversity because “things are not always going to go the way you expect them to or the way you want them to.” The challenge, he emphasizes, is whether “everybody can be the best that they can be.”

Each season, he drew inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “street sweeper” sermon. “If you’re going to be a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper ever. Sweep the streets like Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, like Shakespeare wrote literature. Let him put a sign up that says the best street sweeper in the world lives right here.” That sense of pride in performance, he says, is what defines true excellence.

Dealing with Criticism

Saban advises leaders to tune out external noise. “You’ve got to stay focused on the things that you can control and not the things that you can’t control,” he says. He referred to that noise as “rat poison” — outside opinions that can distract or inflate ego. “I never ever read the newspaper, I never was on social media ... I really didn’t listen to the noise because I wanted to stay focused on what was in front of me.”

He expected the same from his players, often reminding them not to waste energy on critics. “Why do you guys care what some fat guy in his underwear running around living in his mother’s basement thinks about what kind of player you are?”

Saban credits his wife, Ms. Terry, with shaping his perspective and leadership over the years. Some say that she’s the mastermind behind it all, and Saban has said that she has contributed more to his success than people actually realize. When asked what he has learned about leadership from Ms. Terry, he joked, “If you ask Ms. Terry, she would say, ‘Everything.’” He went on to describe how she helped him reflect on his early experiences with the media and facing tough critiques. Not every opinion is noise, and it’s important to know when to tune out and when to dial in.

Teamwork is the Foundation

His teams never hung banners about championships. Instead, they had one simple message: Be a champion. “We had a ladder of what you had to do to be a champion. First thing you had to do is be a team,” he explains.

Every player had to buy into shared principles and values, trusting that they would lead to success both individually and collectively. “Mediocre people don’t like high achievers and high achievers don’t like mediocre people. If you let those two coexist in your organization, you’re never going to have togetherness and teamwork.”

How Mindset Shapes Perseverance

Positive energy and attitude, Saban believes, are important parts of leadership. He recalls walking past Derrick Henry during brutal summer practices and hearing him say, “I’m glad to be here.” That simple phrase, Saban says, captures the mindset needed to handle difficulty with gratitude and focus.

Reflecting on the book The Road Less Traveled, he shares the lesson that “Life is difficult” (the first line in the book) — a truth that helps keep perspective and positivity realistic. “If you think things are going to be difficult rather than thinking things are going to go well every day, it’s much more tolerable to stay positive.” He also emphasized passion and perseverance. “If you have passion, you’re going to be willing to have the work ethic to invest your time, and it’s going to take a great amount of perseverance to overcome adversity because every negative thing creates an opportunity.”

Transformational Leadership

Saban admits he wasn’t always a transformational leader. Early in his career, he focused on the winning and losing outcome rather than development. A conversation with a psychiatrist changed that. “He said, ‘You need to break it down and get the players just to focus on one play at a time like it has a history and a life of its own. Don’t worry about the last play, don’t worry about the scoreboard, just have fun playing with one play at a time.’”

That shift redefined his leadership approach. “It was all about being somebody that somebody could emulate; setting good examples, caring enough for other people to help them for their benefit. Not my benefit — that’s manipulation — their benefit.” He built relationships, inspired vision and grounded his program in values. “Players don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”

Faith & Character

Faith, for Saban, is about purpose and humility. “How do you pray? Do you pray to be blessed or do you pray to be a blessing?” he asks. “Somebody else has to bless you, but you can be a blessing to everyone that you meet.” That belief, he said, keeps him grounded. “It’s not what you get, it’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have.”

Touchdown!

Yeah, so now you get my embarrassment. How had I not heard of Nick Saban before? This conversation left me with more than a few plays to run in my own life — discipline, perseverance and a reminder that leadership is about lifting others up.

Which was your favorite nugget from Nick Saban? Leave your comments below.

And with that… 42, 18 — hut, hut… hike! (End blog before I fumble this metaphor.)