If you know me well, you know I love my American football, played and coached it for years, still tune in every Sunday for my Eagles 🦅.

In sport, and in leadership too, "trust the process" gets said constantly. Almost nobody actually does it. Turns out very few know where it came from or what it actually requires of you.

The phrase has been said so many times it's lost its meaning. Printed on motivational posters, muttered by struggling sports fans, tattooed on people who've never read a page about where it came from. The actual origin is more specific, and more useful, than the phrase suggests.

Where "the process" actually came from

In the late 1990s, Nick Saban, then head coach at Michigan State, started working with a psychiatry professor who introduced Saban to a form of step-by-step thinking rooted in cognitive behavioural therapy. The insight: an entire football season is too large and abstract for a human brain to execute against directly. Break it down far enough to a single seven-second play, the one right in front of you, and it becomes manageable. Do that well, repeatedly, and the season takes care of itself. Saban put it simply:

So what is the process in your organisation? Not the mission statement. But the actual, specific, repeatable behaviours that done consistently produce the outcome you're chasing. Most leaders can describe their strategic goals fluently. Far fewer can describe the process, in that much detail. I'm living this right now, not looking back on it. The strategy is right, execution is working, and the only real discipline left is refusing to fiddle with it. The plan, at this point, is to stick to the plan.

Role clarity: the structural half of the same idea

Bill Belichicks "Do Your Job" is the complementary half. Saban's process manages what to focus on moment to moment. Belichick's discipline manages who is responsible for what.

Most organizational breakdowns aren't talent problems. They're role problems, people drifting outside their lane to compensate for something else that's unclear, creating overlap, gaps, and confusion about who actually owns a given outcome.

Does everyone on your team know, with total clarity, what their job actually is, and stay inside it? Not "sort of", but precisely.

I've felt this from both sides of the same split. Sales organisations run on exactly this tension — account managers and specialist sellers, both touching the same customer, both needed. I've held the account manager seat and later run the sales team responsible for it, and the lesson was identical either way. Without a clear, standing plan for where you're taking a customer's business over time, and precisely who owns which part of getting there, the roles blur and everyone starts improvising in each other's lane. A senior leader once put it to us more bluntly than I ever could: "If you want corn, plant corn." You don't get the harvest you need by hoping the field sorts itself out.

The everyday guy

Texas A&M basketball coach Buzz Williams built his entire coaching philosophy around a third piece. Consistency itself. He calls it being an "everyday guy". Showing up with the same effort, discipline, and preparation regardless of whether you won or lost yesterday. Williams frames it directly: success is a lagging indicator. What actually compounds is what you do daily, not what the scoreboard said last week.

Are you an everyday girl/guy? Same standard on the day after a big win as the day after a bad loss. That's a harder test than it sounds.

Mine is that I every morning, rain or sunshine, do my workout, no negotiation with myself about it, because the body needs to be well for the mind to be well. It's the one standard in my day where I no matter what get this done, every day.

Why this never gets old

Technology changes. Tools change. AI. Dashboards. Hybrid work. Whatever comes next, all of it is changes on the surface. What doesn't change is underneath. People still fear failure under pressure. Roles still drift without explicit clarity. Teams still fracture between the people who show up consistently and the people who don't, and mediocre performers still resent being shown up by disciplined ones. A players don't want to work with B players.

Leading is not a technology topic. It never has been. Every new tool just gives the same old human dynamics a new place to hide.

The gap almost nobody talks about

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Most people get promoted into their first leadership role because they were excellent individual contributors. Then, or before, they receive close to nothing in the way of formal leadership training.

This isn't rare. It's close to the default. First-time managers happen constantly, in every organisation, and the actual support they get is consistently far less than the size of the transition demands. Going from doing the work, and being very good at it, to being responsible for other people doing it.

I lived that gap myself, more than once, over twenty years in tech and sales. Nobody handed me the process, the role clarity, or the standard for consistency before I needed it. I mostly worked it out the slow way, after the fact. That's exactly why I started writing this: not because I have it all figured out, but because I wish someone had written it down for me earlier. If it saves someone else a few of the years it took me, that's the whole point.

If you have stories on this topic, and are comfortable to share, please send me a note at jonas@alphainsights.se

Thanks for reading!

If you liked it, forward it to someone who'd value it.

Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here to get it every week.

And if you want to browse the archive go here.

/Jonas

Everything here is built from my own ideas, drawn from my reading, and life experience. For structure, validating research, proofreading, and edits, I use AI tooling to help make it a better experience for you, the reader.

​
​