Commit to Process
I have written a lot in the past about the importance of my experience as a competitive athlete in my development as a businessman. While I think most people understand this concept on the surface, my reasoning might be a bit abstract for those who have not shared my experience.
Considering this, I am kicking off a series of essays that will dive deep into answering the question: why do lessons learned from playing sports provide such a good framework for operating in today’s business world.
To begin, I want to clarify a few definitions.
When I refer to “sports” I really mean any competitive endeavor where a person aims to achieve a specific outcome. This encapsulates a fairly wide spectrum. It could include playing competitive chess, being in a band, or acting in a musical, among others.
The concept is equally relevant for individual or team competition.
I understand there are thousands of examples of lessons that others have learned through their own competitive backgrounds that have been helpful throughout their careers, but to tackle all of them would fill the pages of this blog for the rest of my life. Like in most situations, I believe there is much to gain from the focusing on the critical few. So that will be my emphasis in this series, the critical lessons.
With this being said, if you have examples on how lessons from sports shaped you I would love to hear them and incorporate them into this series.
Now, let’s get into the first lesson…
COMMITMENT TO PROCESS
Over the past few years the idea of committing to ‘The Process’ has become a meme for sports fans around the world. The driver of this frenzy is former Philadelphia 76ers, Sam Hinkie. Hinkie is a smart guy and is polarizing in more ways than one. He is part of a new wave of basketball thinkers who are heavily influenced by data analytics. His approach to building basketball teams is similar to how a management consulting company like McKinsey would build a go-to-market strategy for a client; heavily rooted in data.
Hinkie used The Process to cultivate a sense of patience with Philadelphia sports fans. This helped curb appeal for rioting in the streets during a multi-year tanking (losing on purpose) strategy that led to the Sixers accumulating a lot of early first round draft picks, as well as losing seasons.
Hinkie ended up not surviving ‘The Process,’ but the foundation that he built allowed the Sixers to have some success over recent years. In fact, Sixers star Center, Joel Embid still discusses The Process today.
To me, it is unfortunate that many people think about Hinkie and his strategy when they hear about The Process. The way that it is used by the Sixers faithful overemphasizes the idea of patience and because it has not culminated in a championship, it has become a joke.
I believe a process oriented approach to achieving greatness very powerful.
I much prefer defining ‘The Process’ in the way Alabama Head Football coach Nick Saban does:
“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”
Saban is arguably the greatest football coach ever and attributes a lot of his success to this way of thinking.
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The Process (as defined by Saban) is a simple idea, focus on what is in front of you, control what you can, and do your best.
It is easy for me to see the applicability of Saban’s strategy in football, because as a player myself, I believe that focusing on process led my teams to our best accomplishments.
Game preparation for football is different than other sports. You actually spend very little time playing football in the classic sense of the game. Most practice time is spent working with your individual position group to fine tune micro skills like hand placement, taking the right steps, posture, and other small moves.
After a while, these drills become monotonous and even boring.
When you combine this with the film sessions and weight lifting it is a big commitment.
It was not uncommon for my teammates and I to question ‘why are we doing all of this?’ Is it really making a difference? It was easy to get trapped into big picture thinking like: how is this impacting winning more games?
It is easy for the brain to focus on a desired result, without considering all of the small steps required to achieve it.
The funny thing is, this focus on the little things, the process, never changed. Win or lose, it was the same focus on being great at the things we could control, the fundamentals, day after day.
In reflection there is no doubt that the thousands of hours of practice over the years made me a better football player and definitely equated to winning games and championships, but I think there is a more important point.
This gets to Saban’s core idea: focus on the process of being great and the things that you can control every day, not outcomes you achieve as a result.
This is a powerful idea in business as well, but for it to work you need to set the stage.
What does excellence looks like for your team? What goal are you after? Is it a sales goal? A product goal?
In football it is pretty straightforward, excellence is winning championships. But as discussed above the way to get there is focusing on being great at the fundamental things you can control. Things like practices sessions, drills, scrimmages, film sessions, and time in the weight room. There is no excuse of not doing them well and being great at them consistently adds up.
What are the things that you can control that will help your team reach its goals? Is it writing strong processes and checklists so your team knows how to operate? Building a list of good leads? Being prepared for meetings? Developing skills consistently? Most of the time these are not the sexy things you read about in popular business magazines, they are the grunt work that over time allow for the big things to happen.
The key is to commit, to get your team to buy in, and incentivize them to put in the effort.
Big wins are driven by small actions done with excellence over and over.
I am glad that Sam Hinkie made ‘The Process’ popular over the past few years, but Nick Saban’s strategy is more useful for all of us.
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