How National Champions Kirby Smart and Nick Saban Use Process Goals as Their Competitive Edge

Kirby Smart and the Georgia Bulldogs just wrapped up uncontested back-to-back college football championships, something only seven teams in college football history can claim. Who was the last one to do it? Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide.

What do they have in common? The Process. If you are an entrepreneur pursuing a monumental goal, then pay attention because The Process is something your organization can use to reach its goals.

Right before the National Championship game kicked off on Monday night, Holly Rowe, an ESPN sports reporter, asked Coach Kirby Smart, “What do you need to see from your team early, particularly as you start on defense?” Coach Smart’s response was a classic process-related goal, “Aggression. That’s what we want to do. We’re going hunting tonight.”

Notice Coach Smart didn’t focus on the outcome but on The Process required to achieve the result everyone desired. This is not an isolated incident. In 2021, Coach Smart outlined what it takes to be a sustainable winner. Everything he mentioned was about The Process – staff infrastructure, player development, recruiting, and the discipline of doing the day-to-day things with extreme focus.

Kirby Smart learned the value of a process mindset from Nick Saban. Coach Saban is one of the winningest coaches in college football history. He’s won 280 games and seven national championships, and his success and his teams’ success are rooted in a process that focuses on controllables versus outcomes.

In his own words, Saban recounts when The Process was born:

“There’s probably one really memorable game that changed the whole dynamics of the psychological approach we use to motivate teams, and it happened when we played at Ohio State in 1998. They had been number one all the way through, and we were 4-5 and not a very good team. We decided to use the approach that we are not going to focus on the outcome. We were just going to focus on the Process of what it took to play the best football you could play — which was to focus on that particular play as if it had a history and life of its own.”

Coach Saban recalibrated his team’s mental approach to winning. He focused their attention on the here and now, executing one play at a time, and letting the scoreboard take care of itself.

Recent studies have found that process goals are more effective than outcome goals when it comes to enhancing performance, improving self-efficacy, and increasing overall success in goal pursuit. Process goals focus on the “how” rather than the “what” — how you go about attaining a result rather than focusing solely on the result.

According to Dr. Alex Auerbach a performance psychologist and Senior Director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors, process goals are more effective for a few reasons:

1. Process Goals Provide Clear Action. They focus you on actions you can control, and this improves self-efficacy.
2. Process Goals Anchor You to the Present. This is critical for performance. Dr. Auerbach states, “You can only act in the here and now. Worrying about future outcomes leads to cognitive distraction and consequently more mistakes and less effective action.”
3. Process Goals Allow for Quick Wins. The Winner Effect is the idea that small, quick wins change our confidence about what we can achieve as we continue toward our outcome goal.

Here’s how you use a process mindset to achieve your organizational goals.

Step 1: Identify the Outcome Goal

A famous Japanese proverb states that “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” Start by identifying the annual goal or quarterly goal you are working towards. It could be improved revenue, customer experience, or expanding your team. The key is to be explicit about what you want to accomplish.

Step 2: Create Process Goals that Drive Action

Now create smaller, more manageable goals that your team believes will lead to the outcome you desire. For instance, if revenue is the outcome goal, a process goal could be reducing churn. The corresponding action would be one-to-one outreach to customers from your customer success team to identify problems before they occur and proactively address customer needs. Shift your team’s attention to what they can control now that will lead to your outcome goals.

Step 3: Measure Success Against Your Process

The final step is to evaluate if your process goals/actions lead to winning results. Examine if your team was consistent with your process, and if so, are your actions contributing to success? If not, iterate and move forward. Eventually, you’ll find your winning formula.