Trillion Dollar Coach

There is another, equally critical, factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company.

A 2013 paper presents a set of “design principles” for doing this [creating a community], such as developing strong mechanisms for making decisions and resolving conflicts.

So, conversely, publicly accepting a coach can actually be a sign of confidence. And a 2010 article notes that “group coaching” is effective but generally underused as a way to improve team or group performance (which the authors call “goal-focused change”).

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?

And an essential component of high-performing teams is a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.

... a 2005 study finds that creativity flourishes in environments, such as Broadway shows, that are more network-oriented than hierarchical. So there’s always tension between creativity and operational efficiency.

Or, as Bill liked to say: “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.” He attributed this mantra to Donna Dubinsky and usually included the not-so-flattering story behind it. Donna worked with Bill at Apple and Claris, the software company that was spun out of Apple. Bill had been a big shot at Apple, VP of sales and marketing, and had been very successful at Kodak. In both companies he had been detail oriented, frequently micromanaging his team members. That worked pretty well, so when he took on the CEO role at Claris, he figured it was his job to tell everyone what to do. Which he did. Late one afternoon Donna dropped by Bill’s office and told him that if he was going to tell everyone what to do, they were all going to quit and go back to Apple. No one wanted to work for a dictator. She added a bit more wisdom for the first-time CEO: “Bill, your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.

IT’S THE PEOPLE: People are the foundation of any company’s success. The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop. We have great people who want to do well, are capable of doing great things, and come to work fired up to do them. Great people flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies that energy. Managers create this environment through support, respect, and trust.

Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coaching they need to succeed. It means continuous effort to develop people’s skills. Great managers help people excel and grow.

Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way that’s consistent with the needs of the company.

Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will. - Bill Campbell’s mantra

And a Google internal study in 2008 (one that Bill loved) proved that teams with managers who regularly practiced a set of eight behaviors had lower turnover and higher satisfaction and performance. Topping the list of behaviors: “is a good coach.

Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better. They relish creating an environment where you get more out of yourself. Coaches are like great artists getting the stroke exactly right on a painting. They are painting relationships. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how they are going to make someone else better. But that’s what coaches do. It’s what Bill Campbell did, he just did it on a different field.” - Ronnie Lott

Bill had us pay close attention to running meetings well; “get the 1:1 right” and “get the staff meeting right” are tops on the list of his most important management principles. He felt that these meetings are the most important tools available to executives in running the company, and that each one should be approached thoughtfully.

BILL’S FRAMEWORK FOR 1:1s AND REVIEWS

PERFORMANCE ON JOB REQUIREMENTS

• Could be sales figures 

• Could be product delivery or product milestones 

• Could be customer feedback or product quality

• Could be budget numbers 

RELATIONSHIP WITH PEER GROUPS (This is critical for company integration and cohesiveness)

• Product and Engineering 

• Marketing and Product 

• Sales and Engineering 

MANAGEMENT/LEADERSHIP

• Are you guiding/coaching your people? 

• Are you weeding out the bad ones? 

• Are you working hard at hiring? 

• Are you able to get your people to do heroic things? 

INNOVATION (BEST PRACTICES)

• Are you constantly moving ahead . . . thinking about how to continually get better?

• Are you constantly evaluating new technologies, new products, new practices? 

• Do you measure yourself against the best in the industry/world?

LEAD BASED ON FIRST PRINCIPLES: Define the “first principles” for the situation, the immutable truths that are the foundation for the company or product, and help guide the decision from those principles.

...Bill always reminded us that managing these people is one of the bigger challenges of the job. He called them “aberrant geniuses,” and said, “You get these quirky guys or women who are going to be great differentiators for you. It is your job to manage that person in a way that doesn’t disrupt the company. They have to be able to work with other people. If they can’t, you need to let them go. They need to work in an environment where they collaborate with other people.

MONEY’S NOT ABOUT MONEY: Compensating people well demonstrates love and respect and ties them strongly to the goals of the company.

His constant point: product teams are the heart of the company. They are the ones who create new features and new products.

This means that finance, sales, or marketing shouldn’t tell the product teams what to do. Instead, these groups can supply intelligence on what customer problems need solving, and what opportunities they see.

Here’s what we did well and what we’re proud of; here’s what we didn’t do so well. The highlights were always easy to compile; teams love dressing up their best successes and presenting them to the board. But the lowlights, not so much. It can take some prodding to make teams be completely frank about where they are falling short, and indeed, Eric often rejected an initial draft of the board lowlights for not being honest enough. He was dogged in ensuring that the lowlights were authentic, and as a result, the board would see the bad news along with the good.

When Dick Costolo took the role of CEO of Twitter, the board consisted of several venture capitalists, some members of the founding team, and Dick. Bill helped Dick change that and bring in more people with lots of expertise in actually running businesses. You need some other operators to lean on, he told Dick.

He was a superb business executive. And he did it through practicing the points covered in this chapter: operational excellence, putting people first, being decisive, communicating well, knowing how to get the most out of even the most challenging people, focusing on product excellence, and treating people well when they are let go.

Dean Gilbert, a former executive at Google and @Home, and an accomplished management coach in his own right, notes that “Bill would build an envelope of trust very quickly. It was a natural thing for him, this ability to build rapport, a sense of comfort and protection. It’s the cornerstone of any coaching in business.

...a highly cited 2000 study from Cornell University discusses the correlation between task conflict (disagreements about decisions) and relationship conflict (emotional friction) in teams. Task conflict is healthy and is important to get to the best decisions, but it is highly correlated with relationship conflict, which leads to poorer decisions and morale. What to do? Build trust first, the study concludes. Teams that trust each other will still have disagreements, but when they do, they will be accompanied by less emotional rancor.

Not surprisingly, when Google conducted a study to determine the factors behind high-performing teams, psychological safety came out at the top of the list. (More details about the study can be found in James Graham, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times, February 25, 2016.)

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.

A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” - Tom Landry

People perceive the best listeners to be those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.” - from a 2016 Harvard Business Review article

A coach coaches in the moment,” Scott Cook says. “It’s more real and more authentic, but so many leaders shy away from that.

This is critical for effective coaching; a good coach doesn’t hide the stuff that’s hard to talk about—in fact, a good coach will draw this out. He or she gets at the hard stuff.

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.

This quality of constant encouragement, of being the person to give energy, has been shown to be one of the most important aspects of effective coaching.

He built his message on your capabilities and progress. This is a key aspect of delivering encouragement as a coach: it needs to be credible.

People prefer leaders who are different because it makes leadership seem more attainable.” - Brad Smith

Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed? “When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.

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.

If you are creating a high-performing team and building for the future, you need to hire for potential as well as experience.

CORE ATTRIBUTES

For the past 12 months, to what extent do you agree/disagree that each person:

• Displayed extraordinary in-role performance. 

• Exemplified world-class leadership. 

• Achieved outcomes that were in the best interest of both Google as a whole and his/her organization. 

• Expanded the boundaries of what is possible for Google through innovation and/or application of best practices. 

• Collaborated effectively with peers (for example, worked well together, resolved barriers/issues with others) and championed the same in his/her team. 

• Contributed effectively during senior team meetings (for example, was prepared, participated actively, listened well, was open and respectful to others, disagreed constructively). 

For the past 12 months, to what extent do you agree/disagree that each person demonstrated exemplary leadership in the following areas:

• Product Vision 

• Product Quality 

• Product Execution 

• What differentiates each SVP and makes him/her effective today? 

• What advice would you give each SVP to be more effective and/or have greater impact?

We learned early on from Bill that when it came to creating teams, you have to put your bias blinders on (and that we all have biases). To him it was simple. Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women. A pair of 2010 studies bear Bill out on this point. They examined collective intelligence in teams: why are some teams “smarter” than the sum of their individual IQs? The answer is threefold: on the most effective teams everyone contributes rather than one or two people dominating discussions, people on those teams are better at reading complex emotional states, and...the teams have more women. This can be partly explained by the fact that women tend to be better at reading emotional states than men. So Bill always pushed us to consider women for any senior positions; he believed “you can always find a woman for a job, it may just take a little longer.” He helped recruit them when he could, such as when he got Ruth Porat to come on board as Google’s CFO in 2015.

Psychologists would call this approach “problem-focused coping,” in contrast to “emotion-focused coping.” The latter may be more appropriate when facing a problem that can’t be solved, but in a business context focusing on and venting emotions needs to happen quickly, so more energy is directed to solutions.

As Bill described it, his job as our coach was to “see little flaws in the organization that with a little massage we can make better. I listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.

This is one example of the power of observation at work; listening, looking for patterns, assessing strengths and weaknesses.

Then he would talk to people. As Bill explained it one time at a Google management seminar: “I have a little more time than Larry does to do some of that stuff. I have a little more time than Sundar does to do some of that stuff, so, you know, I’ll say to Sundar, Do you want me to meet with so-and-so? Sure. And here’s what I’m going to tell ’em. You okay with that? Yeah. Great. Perfect, and, you know, that helps a little bit in moving the thing along. Let’s get it moving.

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.

This touchy-feely stuff isn’t in the manual,” Bradley says. “It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the work of what we’re producing, and not how we’re doing it. But leading teams becomes a lot more joyful when you know and care about people. It’s freeing.

Get the team right and you’ll get the issue right.

Academic studies point out that there is a “compensation effect” between warmth and competence: people tend to assume that people who are warm are incompetent and those who are cold, competent.

Which means that you should lead with warmth, but know that you might have to work just a bit harder to build your reputation for competency.

Academic research, as usual, bears this out, showing that an organization full of the type of “companionate love” that Bill demonstrated (caring, affectionate) will have higher employee satisfaction and teamwork, lower absenteeism, and better team performance.

To care about people you have to care about people... These aren’t necessarily empty words; most companies and executives truly do care about their people. Perhaps just not the whole person.

Vision is an important role. Heart and soul matter. Often that is embodied in the founder, but many other people may also embody what the company stands for, its mission and spirit. They don’t show up on a balance sheet, income statement, or org chart, but they are very valuable.

Being a good coach is essential to being a good manager and leader. Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach. The path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things. And an essential component of high-performing teams is a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.