Trillion Dollar Coach
After all, the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful. By definition, that’s what coaches do.
His failure, though, wasn’t for lack of players. It was, according to Bill, for too much compassion. “There is something that I would say is called dispassionate toughness that you need [as a football coach], and I don’t think I have it. What you need to do is not worry about feelings. You’ve got to push everybody and everything harder and be almost insensitive about feelings. You replace a kid with another kid; you take an older guy and replace him with a younger guy. That is the nature of the game. Survival of the fittest. The best players play. In my case, I worried about that. I tried to make sure the kids understood what we were doing. I just think I wasn’t hard-edged enough.”
Bill may have been correct in believing that success as a football coach depends on “dispassion,” but in business, there is growing evidence that compassion is a key factor to success. *7 And as it turned out, this notion of bringing compassion to the team worked much better for Bill in the business world than on the football field.
Best friends are the ones who you can talk to about anything and you don’t have to worry. You know they will always be there. Bill Campbell was my best friend. I know that there are only about two thousand other people who also considered Bill to be their best friend, too. But, I was okay with that because somehow Bill found the time for each one of us. He had the same twenty-four-hour days that the rest of us have, but somehow he found the time to always be there for everyone on that list. It didn’t matter to Bill where you were on the list of friends. He would always be there for you no matter what.”
And not an executive coach in the traditional mold, working solely to maximize the performance of individuals; Bill coached teams.
The smart creative is someone who combines technical depth with business savvy and creative flair.
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. Research shows that when people feel like they are part of a supportive community at work, they are more engaged with their jobs and more productive. Conversely, a lack of community is a leading factor in job burnout.
Over those years of playing and coaching, Bill learned that great teams need to work together, and he learned how to make that happen. Not just on the field, but in offices, hallways, and conference rooms. He came to master the art of identifying tensions among teammates and figuring out how to resolve them.
Your Title Makes You a Manager. Your People Make You a Leader.
In fact, academic research finds merit in both approaches. A 1991 study finds that when a company is in the implementation stage of innovation (such as when Google was developing its search engine and AdWords), they need managers to help coordinate resources and resolve conflicts. However, 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.
To Bill, being an executive of a successful company is all about management, about creating operational excellence. As a manager and CEO, Bill was very good at making sure his teams delivered. He brought people together and created a strong team culture, but never lost sight of the fact that results mattered, and that they were a direct result of good management. “You have to think about how you’re going to run a meeting,” he told a group of Googlers in a management seminar. “How you’re going to run an operations review. You’ve got to be able to look at someone in one-on-one and know how to help them course-correct. People who are successful run their companies well. They have good processes, they make sure their people are accountable, they know how to hire great people, how to evaluate them and give them feedback, and they pay them well.”
Bill felt that leadership was something that evolved as a result of management excellence. “How do you bring people around and help them flourish in your environment? It’s not by being a dictator. It’s not by telling them what the hell to do. It’s making sure that they feel valued by being in the room with you. Listen. Pay attention. This is what great managers do.”
In fact, the more talented the subordinate, the less likely she is to simply follow orders.
A manager’s authority, she concludes, “emerges only as the manager establishes credibility with subordinates, peers, and superiors.” 4 (Another study concludes that people don’t just chafe against an authoritarian management style, but are also more likely to leave the team altogether!)
If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.
You have demanded respect, rather than having it accrue to you. You need to project humility, and selflessness, that projects that you care about the company and about people.
He had always been charismatic, passionate, and brilliant. But when he returned, I watched him become a great manager. He was detailed in everything. Product of course, but also in the way he ran the finance organization, the sales organization, and what he did with operations and logistics. I learned from that. Steve couldn’t be a good leader until he became a good manager.
So when we met Bill in our weekly coaching sessions, what we discussed first and foremost was management: operations and tactics. Bill rarely weighed in on strategic issues, and if he did, it was usually to make sure that there was a strong operating plan to accompany the strategy. What were the current crises? How quickly were we going to manage our way out of them? How was hiring going? How were we developing our teams? How were our staff meetings going? Were we getting input from everyone? What was being said, what wasn’t being said? He cared that the company was well run and that we were improving as managers.
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 make decisions. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will.
Bill told him that he would go to bed every night thinking about those eight thousand souls who work for him. What are they thinking and feeling? How can I make them the best they can be? Ronnie Lott says when talking about two coaches he worked closely with, Bill Walsh and Bill Campbell: “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.”
“What keeps you up at night?” is a traditional question asked of executives. For Bill, the answer was always the same: the well-being and success of his people.
Bill and Eric understood that there’s a direct correlation between fun work environments and higher performance, with a conversation about family and fun (what academics might call “socioemotional communication”) being an easy way to achieve the former.
Later in the meeting, when business decisions were being discussed, Eric wanted everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area or not. The simple communications practice—getting people to share stories, to be personal with each other—was in fact a tactic to ensure better decision-making and camaraderie.
Knowing what to share and communicate and with whom is an important part of a manager’s job.
Most important issues cut across functions, but, more importantly, bringing them to the table in team meetings lets people understand what is going on in the other teams, and discussing them as a group helps develop understanding and build cross-functional strength.
Research confirms that team meetings are a terrific opportunity to engage people, with one 2013 study concluding that the relevance of the meeting, giving everyone a voice, and managing the clock well are key factors to achieving that engagement.
It demonstrates that being thoughtful about preparing for staff meetings is an important management practice.
START WITH TRIP REPORTS
TO BUILD RAPPORT AND BETTER RELATIONSHIPS AMONG TEAM MEMBERS, START TEAM MEETINGS WITH TRIP REPORTS, OR OTHER TYPES OF MORE PERSONAL, NON-BUSINESS TOPICS.
He believed the most important thing a manager does is to help people be more effective and to grow and develop, and 1:1 is the best opportunity to accomplish that.
Oftentimes, small talk in a work environment is cursory: a quick “how are the kids?” or chatter about the morning commute before moving on to the business stuff. Conversations with Bill were more meaningful and layered; you sometimes got the feeling that the conversation about life was more the point of the meeting than the business topics. In fact, while his interest in people’s lives was quite sincere, it had a powerful benefit: a 2010 study concludes that having these sort of “substantive” conversations, as opposed to truly small talk, makes people happier.
From the (not so) small talk, Bill moved to performance: What are you working on? How is it going? How could he help? Then, we would always get to peer relationships, which Bill thought were more important than relationships with your manager and other higher-ups.
One day, Jonathan spent part of his 1:1 with Bill talking about how he wasn’t getting any feedback from the founders on his work. What do they want? he wondered. Bill’s response was that Jonathan should not worry about top-down feedback; rather, he should pay attention to input from his peers. What do your teammates think of you? That’s what’s important! They proceeded to talk about Jonathan’s peers, how they generally appreciated the work he was doing, and what he could do better.
From peer relationships, Bill would move on to teams. He always wanted to know, were we setting a clear direction for them, and constantly reinforcing it? Did we understand what they were doing? If they were off on something, we would discuss how we could course correct them and get them back on track. “Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids,” Bill once said. “Help them course correct, make them better.”
Then he’d want to talk about innovation. Were we making space for it on our teams? How were we balancing the inherent tension between innovation and execution? Either alone wasn’t good; striking that balance was critical.
Besides having a detailed communications approach, Bill had strong opinions about being good at communicating. He was mostly old-school about it, preferring face-to-face conversations, or a phone call if that wasn’t possible. (“You shouldn’t wait four weeks to schedule a meeting,” he said. “Just get on the phone.”) In his CEO days at GO, if you got an email from Bill it was a big deal. Later, when he was coach to people all over the valley, he spent evenings returning the calls of people who had left messages throughout the day. When you left Bill a voice mail, you always got a call back.
“Back then, I was ninety percent style, ten percent substance,” Nirav remembers. “Bill was one hundred percent substance.”
Bill believed that one of a manager’s main jobs is to facilitate decisions, and he had a particular framework for doing so. He didn’t encourage democracy. (Before he arrived at Intuit, they took votes in meetings. Bill stopped that practice.) Rather, he favored an approach not unlike that used in improv comedy. In improv, the entire cast is at risk and needs to work together to continue a conversation, to put off the finality of a scene until the last possible moment. Bill encouraged ensembles and always strived for a politics-free environment. A place where the top manager makes all decisions leads to just the opposite, because people will spend their time trying to convince the manager that their idea is the best. In that scenario, it’s not about the best idea carrying the day, it’s about who does the best job of lobbying the top dog. In other words, politics.
Then one day Bill gave her a new rule: when she was discussing a decision with her team, she always had to be the last person to speak. You may know the answer and you may be right, he said, but when you just blurt it out, you have robbed the team of the chance to come together. Getting to the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is just as important. So Marissa sat, uncharacteristically quiet, while her team debated issues. She didn’t like it, but it worked. She gained new respect for her team and their ability to handle problems.
Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision. There’s indecision in business all the time, because there’s no perfect answer. Do something, even if it’s wrong, Bill counseled. Having a well-run process to get to a decision is just as important as the decision itself, because it gives the team confidence and keeps everyone moving.
If you have the right conversation, Bill counseled, then eight out of ten times people will reach the best conclusion on their own. But the other two times you need to make the hard decision and expect that everyone will rally around it.
There isn’t a head of that table, but there is a throne behind it.
So how do you make that hard decision? When you are a manager trying to move your team toward making a decision, the room will be rife with opinions. Bill always counseled us to try to cut through those opinions and get to the heart of the matter. In any situation there are certain immutable truths upon which everyone can agree. These are the “first principles,” a popular phrase and concept around Silicon Valley. Every company and every situation has its set of them. You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone has already agreed upon them. As Bill would point out, it’s the leader’s job, when faced with a tough decision, to describe and remind everyone of those first principles. As a result, the decision often becomes much easier to make.
“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.”
If you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can. There are minor things that will go wrong and you have to fix them quickly, but speed is essential.
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. *20 They describe the market part of “product-market fit.” Then they stand by, let the product teams work, and clear the way of things that might slow them down. As Bill often commented, “Why is marketing losing its clout? Because it forgot its first name: product.”
If you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has. You give them context on who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features. They will provide you with a far better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them what to build.
THE PURPOSE OF A COMPANY IS TO BRING A PRODUCT VISION TO LIFE. ALL THE OTHER COMPONENTS ARE IN SERVICE TO THE PRODUCT.
“Ben, you cannot let him keep his job, but you absolutely can let him keep his respect.”
The CEO manages the board and board meetings, not the other way around.
He was also quite clear about what a bad board member looks like: “Someone who just walks in and wants to be the smartest guy in the room and talks too much.”
Perhaps the most important currency in a relationship—friendship, romantic, familial, or professional—is trust.
Trust means people feel safe to be vulnerable.
When Google conducted a study to determine the factors behind high-performing teams, psychological safety came out at the top of the list.
The common notions that the best teams are made up of people with complementary skill sets or similar personalities were disproven; the best teams are the ones with the most psychological safety. And that starts with trust.
Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, and that leadership accrues to them from their teams. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this. There was no room in this formula for smart alecks and their hubris.
“Bill was uplifting. No matter what we discussed, I felt heard, understood, and supported.”
“When I’m really annoyed or frustrated with what someone is doing,” she says, “I step back and force myself to think about what they are doing well and what their value is. You can always find something. If we’re in public, I’ll praise them on that. I’ll give constructive feedback as soon as I can, but only when the person is feeling safe. Once they are feeling safe and supported, then I’ll say ‘by the way’ and provide feedback. I got this from Bill. He would always do this in a supportive way.”
