Selfless Cultures Prevail In Leadership
The 2024 College Football Season’s Lesson On Winning
Winning without purpose isn’t really winning. Or is it?
Toward the end of the 2024 college football season, I heard ESPN’s Marty Smith discussing the state of the University of Alabama’s football team as they approached bowl season with three losses. For context, the Crimson Tide hadn’t lost three games in a regular season since 2007, so, as he pointed out, the fan base, among many others, was frustrated with the season’s outcomes. In outlining Alabama’s path forward, especially for the fans, he cleverly remarked: winning fixes everything.
But does it?
I’ll admit, winning helps. Who would argue otherwise? But be warned: depending on one’s perspective, a win might not be the ultimate prize. There’s “winning,” and then there’s winning. The very best at their craft know the difference. In other words, just because you’re winning doesn’t mean you’re truly winning. Confused? Okay, let me clarify. Sometimes, teams and organizations that aren’t expected to win under normal circumstances end up walking away with the better score. This often happens, for instance, when a marginally performing team beats an even weaker team. After all, someone has to win, right?
Right…
But here’s the problem: marginal teams and organizations may succeed today, but will they succeed tomorrow? Are they equipped to sustain success? No, they’re not. Marginally performing teams and organizations share one common issue: misalignment within their cultures. You can label it however you like, but it ultimately stems from the culture that their leadership has established (and tolerated). When it comes to cultivating cultures that foster success as opposed to those that don’t, the distinction lies further with the people. They are the ones who integrate into the culture, driven by their grit and determination to uphold it, and, more importantly, they possess a clear understanding of why they do so. This explains why countless individuals have failed to lead challenging teams and organizations. Despite their best efforts, the culture and the people were not aligned with the “why” or the greater purpose.
Consider this: have you ever wondered how a sports team or organization can perform so poorly under one leadership structure, yet thrive and achieve much more success under a different one? The most recent college football season provides examples of this dynamic. Coach Deion Sanders at the University of Colorado and Coach Curt Cignetti at Indiana University stand out as two notable figures. Both led remarkable turnaround initiatives by changing the culture to align with a vision and motivating their teams by connecting their people with the underlying purpose. Of course, they brought new members onto the team; most leaders do so for good reasons. This can ignite necessary cultural shifts and is part of the culture-development process. However, it is not the sole catalyst for optimizing cultural alignment. That responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of leadership.
Numerous behaviors contribute to aligning the culture with a vision shared by the people and the underlying “why.” The 2024 College Football Playoff Championship Game, featuring the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, prominently showcased one behavior for everyone to witness: selflessness. We’ve seen selflessness in sports time and again. U.S. service academies exemplify it annually through their various programs and competitions. However, the championship game presented selflessness to a much broader audience and on a grander stage. Let’s delve deeper. On one side, you have a team in a major conference with a student body larger than most American cities, which has not defeated its archrival in four years and missed out on its conference championship. On the other side, you have a program lacking conference identity, recruiting under strict academic standards, with a student body smaller than some junior colleges. This program abruptly changed head coaches after having been good, but not great, and earlier in the season, it suffered an inexplicable loss in a game they should have won.
By the numbers, neither team was expected to reach the sport’s pinnacle game. But they did, and the manner in which they achieved this speaks volumes. First, their leaders were fully committed. They weren’t sidetracked by the search for their next opportunity or preoccupied with their futures. Instead, they were completely focused on their team and their mission. You cannot motivate teams to act for the benefit of the team or organization when you don’t fully engage with yourself, your peers, and your people. Second, both teams showed remarkable resilience, fighting against the odds. Of course, all sports teams exhibit a certain level of resilience simply by enduring a season. However, these two teams stood out because they weren’t just going through the motions. They cared for themselves and each other, and when they made mistakes, they learned from them by enhancing their performance and avoiding repeated failures. Lastly, and most notably, they were selfless. They chose to play for one another.
It’s the last point that serves as the multiplier, and here’s what we know about it: they set aside their egos and instinctively made plays for each other on the biggest stages without hesitation because, in every prior game, they did the same. That’s the culture. Yes, great teams make great plays; that’s a given. But in this instance, look closer at how they did it — by making plays that were not necessarily in the personal best interests of the individual team members. They played to each other’s strengths, for one another, and in the process, demonstrated significant faith in each other. They chose to win for one another and, as a result, became extraordinary on the biggest platform. They chose selflessness over selfishness because it was their established and aligned culture. When a team has the right culture and leadership to inspire and drive performance, alongside the right mix of talent, personality, and effort, it will set itself apart from the rest. And that’s precisely what happened.
Winning doesn’t fix culture; culture fixes winning. While only one team clinched the national title, both teams emerged victorious in their own right. Head Coaches Ryan Day and Marcus Freeman faced their share of public criticism in 2024. Nevertheless, they adhered to their principles, trusted their processes, and allowed their cultures — rather than their egos — to guide them toward success. Both leaders have cultivated cultures that provide a blueprint for winning through selflessness. During the post-game interviews on the evening of January 20, 2025, I heard a recurring theme from players, regardless of their team: “We played for each other.”
And that’s the bottom line. Selfless cultures prevailed.