I learned an incredibly important lesson,” she [Sheryl Sandberg] says. “It’s not what you used to do, it’s not what you think, it’s what you do every day.” This is perhaps the most important characteristic Bill looked for in his players: people who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day. Doers.
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Awhile back, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook spent a day shadowing me at work. She attended all of my meetings and one-onones. It’s something I do occasionally with other Silicon Valley executives, so we can learn from watching one another in action. Afterward, when Sheryl and I debriefed, she said, “The amazing thing was to sit with you all day long and see that you didn’t make one decision!
But through that coaching he also showed them how to coach their people and teams, which made them much more effective managers and leaders. Time and time again, they note that whenever they face an interesting situation, they ask themselves, what would Bill do? And we realized, we do it, too. What would Bill do? How would the coach handle this situation?
Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, that leadership accrues to them from their teams.
Bill’s perspective was that it’s a manager’s job to push the team to be more courageous. Courage is hard. People are naturally afraid of taking risks for fear of failure. It’s the manager’s job to push them past their reticence.
And while the skill of observing tension is a challenging one to develop, this idea of going around and talking to people is not. It simply takes time, and the ability to communicate well with colleagues. Bill could have noted Rachel’s frustration and simply forgotten about it; it wasn’t his job to fix her problem. But instead he made the effort to have a conversation with her. To make that short, important connection. It’s so easy to forget to have these little conversations in a busy day; Bill made it a priority.
While none of this was underhanded or secretive, it all had a behind-the-scenes quality. Bill rarely talked about these little 1:1 conversations; he would simply take you aside and have a few quiet words. This was all by design, another difference between a sports coach (who’s out in front, leading the team, highly visible) and a business coach. As Deb Biondolillo says, Bill was “the shadow behind you. You hear him, but you are the one in front. He could be less confined, more genuine if he was in the background.