Trillion Dollar Coach (Bill Campbell)
Book Summary
Chapter 1 - The Caddie and the CEO
For company to be successful, develop great products. To develop great products, company has to attract smart creative, and build an environment where these employees can succeed at scale.
For company to be successful, you need teams that act as communities. (Integrate interests, put aside differences, collectively obsessed with what’s good for company)
To balance the tension & mold a team into a community, you need a coach (Team coaching). Tension (internal competition, the reality of business today) makes it harder to cultivate community, and community is necessary to cultivate success.
Bill mastered the art of identifying tensions among teammates & figuring out how to resolve them
The best coach for any team is the manager and leader. You cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.
✓ Communication, Respect, Feedback, Trust. ✘ Controlling, Supervising, Evaluating, Rewarding/Punishing (Traditional notion of managing)
Many of the other skills of management can be delegated, but not coaching.
The path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form a high-performing team & give them resources and freedom to do great things. To create high-performing team, you need a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.
Chapter 2 - Your Title Makes You a Manager, Your People Make You a Leader
Successful company makes sure their people are accountable, knows how to hire great people, knows how to evaluate them, give them feedback and pay them well.
Good management. ✓Team culture ✓Result-oriented management techniques. We are going to come together to have a team culture, but it’s to achieve results. Performance-oriented management techniques (monitoring, targeting, incentives)
“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 manager do.
A manager’s authority emerges only as the manager establishes credibility with subordinates, peers, and superior. People don’t just chafe against an authoritarian management style, but are also more likely to leave the team altogether.
Management: operation 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.
1. It’s The People
**The priority of any managers is the well-being and success of his 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.
Manager takes a holistic approach to their people. They try to support them in all aspects of their lives, not just their work.
Hold meetings with all of his head coaches, have an open discussion about employees.
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.
2. 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. (conversation about family and fun / getting people to share stories, to be personal with each other)
Objectives:
For team members to get to know each other as people, with families and interesting lives outside of work.
To get everyone involved in the meeting from the outset in a fun way as human beings, not just as experts and owners of their particular roles.
Fun work environment → higher performance
Allow everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area or not.
This simple communication practice was in fact a tactic to ensure better decision making & camaraderie.
Bill had us pay close attention to running meeting well. Being thoughtful about preparing for staff meetings is an important management practice.
Bill believed that communication is critical to a company’s success. He coached us(the authors) to make sure the others in the company understood what we understood. Even when you have clearly communicated sth, it may take a few times to sink in. Repetition does not spoil the prayer. Knowing what to share and communicate and with whom is an important part of a manager’s job.
Staff meetings should be a forum for the most important issues and opportunities. “Use meetings to get everyone on the same page, get to the right debate, and make decision.” Bring issues to the team meetings lets people understand what is going on in the other teams, and discuss them as a group helps develop understanding and build cross-functional strength.
Key factors to achieving engagement:
Relevance of meeting
Giving everyone a voice
Manage the clock well
3. Five Words on a Whiteboard
**Have a structure for 1:1s, and take the time to prepare for them, as they are the best way to help people be more effective and to grow.
Bill would write 5 words on a white board indicating the topics to discuss that day. The words might be about a person, a product, an operational issue, or an upcoming meeting.
Bill (as a full-time coach) varied his approach to suit the person he was coaching. Bill (as a CEO) developed a standard format: Started with a “small talk”.
After small talk, Bill moved to performance: What are you working on? How is it going? How could I help?
Then, Bill would always get to peer relationships. Bill thought you should not worry about higher-ups’ or top-down feedback; rather, you should pay attention to input from peers. What do your teammates think of you? That’s what’s important!
Then, Bill would move on to teams (management/leadership). He always wanted to know were we setting clear direction for them, and constantly reinforcing it? Did we understand what they were doing? If they were off on sth, we would discuss how we would course correct them and get them back on track. “Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids, 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?
Communication 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 business topics. Sincere. Having these sort of “substantive” conversations, as opposed to truly small talk, makes people happier.
Bill preferred face-to-face conversations or a phone call. He was also great at email.
4. The Throne behind the Round Table
**The manager’s job is to run a decision-making process that ensures all perspectives get heard and considered, and if necessary, to break ties and make the decision.
In conflict situations, Eric liked to use a management technique he called the “rule of two.” He’d get the 2 people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution. It promotes collegiality, mediation, camaraderie, better decision making.
If there is still disagreement, you say “All right, either you two break the tie, or I will.” Give the two managers another week to come to an agreement. If they fail, so you step in and make the decision.
Bill believed that one of a manager’s main jobs is to facilitate decisions. ✘democracy, politics, consensus ✓ensemble, strive for the best idea
Bill believed the way to get the best idea was to get all of the opinions and ideas out in the open, and on the table for group to discuss. Air the problem honestly, and make sure people have the opportunity to provide authentic opinions, especially if they are dissenting.
To get those ideas on table, Bill would often sit down with individuals before the meeting to find out what they were thinking.
As people present and argue ideas, things may become heated. That’s to be expected and is fine. “When a leader can get people past being passive-aggressive, then heated but honest arguments can happen.” If your team is working well and thinking company-first rather than me-first, then after the fireworks subside, the best idea will likely emerge. Leader should call it a debate rather than a disagreement.
When discussing a decision with a team, leader has to be the last to speak.
When the best idea doesn’t emerge, it’s time for the manager to break ties and make the call.
Failure to make decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision. There’s indecision in business all the time, because there’s no perfect answer. Do sth, even if it’s wrong. We need well-run process (prioritize what is right thing for business), make the best decision, and move on.
5. 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.
You can argue opinion, but you generally can’t argue principles., since everyone has already agreed upon them.
When faced with tough decision, it’s the leader’s job to describe and remind everyone of those first principles.
6. Manage the Aberrant Genius
**Aberrant geniuses—high-performing but difficult members—should be tolerated and even protected, as long as their behavior isn’t unethical or abusive and their value overweighs the toll 代价 their behavior takes on management, colleagues, and teams.
Support them as they continue to perform, and minimize time spent fighting them. Coach them past their aberrant behavior.
They often focus on personal gains at the expense of peer relationships. A me-first attitude can cause resentment in others & affect their performance.
Never put up with people who cross ethical lines.
If they do not cross the line, coach them, but if there’s no change, they shouldn’t be tolerated.
If you r spending hours upon hours controlling the damage they create, that’s a good sign it’s gone too far.
Never tolerate aberrant genius who continually put him/herself above the team. Aberrant (compensation, press, promotion)
7. Money’s not about Money
**Compensating people well demonstrates love and respect and tie them strongly to the goals of the company.
Bill always advocated generosity on compensation issues.
Compensation = economic value, emotional value (recognition, respect, status)
8. Innovation is where the Crazy People have Stature
**The purpose of a company is to bring a product vision to life. All of the other components (finance, sales, marketing) are in service to product.
Bill believed that nothing was more important than an empowered engineer. His constant point: Product teams are the heart of the company. Their ultimate objective is to create great products market fit.
If you have the right product for the right market at the right time, then go full steam ahead (go as fast as you can).
Finance, sales, and marketing shouldn’t tell the product teams what to do.
Product teams need to partner with other teams from the outset. (Cross-functional group) Create new ideas, solve problems, hatch opportunities.
9. Heads Held High
**If you have to let people go, be generous, treat them well, and celebrate their accomplishments.
Treating the departing people well is important for the morale and well-being of the remaining team.
10. Bill on Boards
**It’s the CEO’s job to manage boards, not the other way around.
Bill know how to occasionally have fun with boards, but he also developed a strong set of guidelines on how CEO should work with their boards to get the most out of them.
Board meetings / agenda should always start with operational updates: financial, sales reports, product status, and operational metrics. (How the company is performing)
Material can be sent to board members ahead of time, expect them to review it, be up-to-date on most stuff when they come to meeting, and come with questions.
Operations review should include a thorough set of highlights and lowlights. Highlights = what we did well. Lowlights = what we didn’t do so well. We would not include highlights and lowlights in material that we send to board members ahead of meeting. A company that is honest with its board can be honest with itself.
Who should be on the board? Smart people with good business expertise who care deeply about the company and are genuinely interested in helping and supporting the CEO.
Chapter 3 - Build an Envelope of Trust
Create culture where anything less than operational excellence (long/short-term goals) wouldn’t be tolerated.
The most important currency in relationships is trust. Trust is the first thing to create if you want a relationship to be successful. It is the foundation. We should back our leader. In most business relationship, trust takes its place alongside other factors: personal agendas, mutual exchange of value.
Trust means people feel safe to be vulnerable. -an academic paper
Trust means you keep your word, loyalty, integrity(honest), ability, discretion. -Bill
Trust is the cornerstone of business success.
Trust doesn’t mean you always agree; in fact, it makes it easier to disagree with someone.
Task conflict (disagreements about decision) is healthy and is important to get to the best decision. But it is correlated with relationship conflict (emotional friction) which leads to poorer decisions and morale. What to do? Build trust first. Teams that trust each other will still have disagreements, but when they do, they will be accompanied by less emotional rancor.
Trust is a key component to building “team psychological safety” (People are comfortable being themselves, without fear). Management has integrity → people can depend on everybody else’s word in the organization → they feel secure → they don’t want to leave. The best teams are the ones with the most psychological safety.
1. Only Coach the Coachable
**The traits that make a person coachable include honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning.
Honesty and humility. Coaches need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his/her own strengths and weaknesses (Self-aware). It’s the coach’s job to raise awareness further and to help them see their flaws/blind spots. If people can’t be honest with themselves and their coach, if they aren’t humble enough to recognize their flaws, they won’t get far in that relationship. Bill believed that leadership is about service to sth that is bigger than you: your company, your team.
To be coachable, you need to be brutally honest, starting with yourself.
Honesty/Integrity = Keep your word, tell the truth, be forthright. “Don’t dance. If Bill asked question and you don’t know the answer, don’t dance around it. Tell him you don’t know!”
2. Practice Free-form Listening
**Listen to people with your full and undivided attention—Don’t think ahead to what you are going to say next—and ask questions to get to the real issue.
People perceive the best listeners to be those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.
Bill never tell Ben what to do, instead, he’d asked more and more questions to get to what the real issue was.
When people ask for advice, all they are really asking for is approval. Ask questions back instead of answer it.
Listening, and chatting with employees are important aspects of successful leadership. Leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective. It heightens the follower’s feelings of competence有能力, relatedness (feeling of belonging), and autonomy(feeling in control & having options)
3. No Gap between Statements & Fact
**Be relentlessly honest and candid(candor), couple negative feedback with caring, give feedback as soon as possible, and if the feedback is negative, deliver it privately.
Bill told the truth and wasn’t afraid to offer a harsh opinion. Bill’s feedback was always followed by a grin or a hug to remove the sting. People felt great after received tough feedbacks from Bill.
When employees saw their managers as authentic, they trusted the leaders more and the stores had higher sales.
Never embarrass someone publicly
Praise (Let them feel safe) → constructive/negative feedback
Coach needs to be supportive(encouragement) and demanding(high standards / expectations)
4. Don’t Stick it in their Ear
**Don’t tell people what to do; offer stories and help guide them to the best decisions for them.
It’s like running back in football, you don’t tell him exactly what route to run, you tell him where the hole is and what’s the blocking scheme, and let him figure it out.
5. Be the Evangelist for Courage
**Believe in people more than they believe in themselves, and push them to be more courageous.
Bill blew confidence into people(their judgement). Bill pushed you to go beyond your self-imposed limits.
Be the person who gives energy, not one who takes it away. (encouragement) Not blind cheerleading, it needs to be credible.
As a leader, you can’t fix problems on your own, you can’t fix them when the morale is down. So, you need to build confidence of the team.
6. Full Identity Front & Center
**People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identity to work.
People prefer leaders who are different because it makes leadership more attainable.
Chapter 4 - Team First
“You can’t get anything done without a team.”
✔loyalty, patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, sympathy
✔ready to aid one another, sacrifice for the common good / subjugate their personal agenda to that of the team.
“What was very special about Google was the community aspect of senior team(Team Building). Bill(coach) was the glue in that process.”
1. Work the Team, Then the Problem
**When faced with a problem or opportunity, the first step is to ensure the right team is in place and working on it.
Team building, Assess people’s talents, find the doers.
Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed?
Bill wanted someone who cared about the company & its people. Bill fill the gap between people, listening, observing, and then seeking people out in behind-the-scene conversations that brought teams together.
Run toward the biggest problems: The stinkers that fester and cause tension
2. Pick the Right Players
**The top characteristics to look for are smarts and hearts: The ability to learn fast, willingness to work hard, integrity, grit, empathy, and a team-first attitude.
How to find people who put company first?
When Bill interviewed job candidates, he wouldn’t just ask about what a person did, he’d ask how they did it. Were they hands-on? Were they doers? Did they build the team? He’d listen for the pronouns: Does the person say “I” (signify a me-first mentality) or “we” (a potential indicator of a team player)?
If they were no longer learning, do they have more questions than answers?
Keep note of the times when they give up things & when they are excited for someone else’s success.
Someone who is willing to stand up for what’s right for the team.
When change happens, the priority has to be what is best for the team.
Bill was attracted to people who were “difficult” (more outspoken in their opinions, occasionally abrasive, not afraid to buck trends or the crowd) / like “diamonds that are somehow misshapen.” Outstanding performers are often “difficult.”
Have a diverse set of different talents smartly woven together (Team composition). All people have their limitations.
Understand them individually
Identify what makes them different
See how you can help them mesh with the rest of the team
If you are creating high-performing team and building for the future, you need to hire for potential (skills & mindset) as well as experience.
Bill did not overemphasize experience. He look at skills and mindset. He could project what you could become ( the ability to see player’s potential—coach’s talent).
3. Pair People
**Peer relationships are critical and often overlooked, so seek opportunities to pair people up on projects or decisions.
Take a couple of people who don’t usually work together, assign them task, project or decision, and let them work on it on their own. This develops trust, usually regardless of the nature of the work.
Result: better decisions, stronger team
Bill helped design a peer feedback survey (which used for years at Google)
Here is the complete survey:
*Job performance, relationship with peer groups, management & leadership, innovation, behavior in meetings
4. Get to the Table (Women)
**Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams have more women.
Why are some teams “smarter” than the sum of their individual IQs?
Everyone contributes rather than one or two people dominating discussions
They are better at reading complex emotional states
The teams have more women
Bill had zero tolerance for any gender bias in business conversations.
5. Solve the Biggest Problem
**Identify the biggest problem, the “elephant in the room”, bring it front and center, and tackle it first.
Problems/conflict → legitimately argue/technical discussion (data & logic) → If it can’t be solved (which could lead to tensions/politics) → Issues lurk like elephants in the corner / people avoid talking it → to solve it, there has to be a difficult meeting where one would win & the other would lose.
6. Don’t let the Bitch Sessions Last
**Air all the negative issues, but don’t dwell on them, move on as fast as possible.
✔Problem-focused coping ❌Emotion-focused coping
Venting emotions needs to happen quickly, so more energy is directed to solutions.
“Not what happened, not who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it”
Bill’s trick: Stay relentlessly positive. Bill praised teams and people, give them a hug, clap them on the shoulder. ↑ confidence, comfort
Positive leadership makes it easier to solve problems.
7. Winning Right
**Strive to win, but always win right, with commitment, teamwork, and integrity.
You can’t talk about coaching or leading a company without talking about winning.
8. Leaders Lead
**When things are going bad, teams are looking for even more loyalty, commitment, and decisiveness from their leaders.
You can’t afford to doubt. You can’t have one foot in but one foot out. If you aren’t fully committed then people around you won’t be, either. If you’re in, be in.
Leaders need to rally the team, show loyalty, make decisions.
9. Fill the Gaps between People
**Listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.
Listen intently, observe the body language of attendees, sense mood shifts / tensions. Then he’d work behind the scenes (talk to people), draw out people’s point of view, fix miscommunications, close communication gaps. So, when the time came to discuss things in the meeting and make the decision, everyone was prepared.
10. Permission to be Empathetic
**Leading teams becomes a lot more joyful, and the teams more effective, when you know and care about the people.
Bill made human connection first, then approach the work with that understanding.
Chapter 5 - The Power of Love
You should lead with warmth, but know that you might have to work just a bit harder to build your reputation for competency. (People tend to assume that people who are warm are incompetent and those who are cold, competent—“compensation effect” between warmth and competence)
We’ve all been conditioned and trained to separate our personal emotions from the business environment. But not Bill. He didn’t separate the human selves and working selves. “When Bill walked into the office, he’d walk around greeting people by name, hugging them, he then would talk about families, trips, friends.
When he is yelling at you, it’s because he loves you and cares and wants you to succeed. “He had a way of communicating that he loved you. And that gave him license to tell you that you are full of shit and you can do it better . . . It was never about him. Coming from him, it didn’t hurt when he told you the truth.”
Bill made it okay to bring love to the workplace. It’s okay to love, the whole team will become stronger.
Bill’s unique way of telling you that he loved you. “Billisms”
“That’s the sound of your head coming out of your ass.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
“You’re so fucked up you make me look good.”
“You’d fuck up a free lunch.”
“You’ve got hands like feet.”
“You couldn’t run a five-flat forty-yard dash off a cliff.”
“You’re a numb nuts.”
“He’s one of the great horse’s asses of our time.”
“You’re as dumb as a post.”
“You should have that shirt cleaned and burned.”
1. The Lovely Reset
**To care about people you have to care about people: Ask about their lives outside of work, understand their families, and when things get rough, show up.
Most companies and executives truly do care about their people. Perhaps just not the whole person.
Bill cared about the whole you. He treated everyone with respect, give you a hug, he learned their names, he gave them a warm greeting. Bill would ask about their families and weekend, and talking about his own.
Bill didn’t reserve his care just for executives. “He acted the same way with the store associates as he did with the people on the Apple board.”
eg. With Jonathan, it wasn’t just how was the family, it was how did Hannah do at her latest soccer game? Which evolved into where was she thinking about college? Which evolved into some detailed advice about where she would fit best. Then, when he’d see the family at various events, they’d get the same hug as anyone else.
Bill hadn’t just asked people about their family; he talked to them(their family).
When the situation was more dire, Bill always made himself available to the families.
If you don’t naturally have as big a heart as Bill’s, faking it won’t work. Repeat: don’t fake it!
2. The Percussive Clap
**Cheer demonstrably for people and their successes.
Don’t just sit your butt in the seat. Get up and support the teams, show the love for the work they are doing. Bill would clap (just five loud claps) , cheer, and give them all a big pat on the back (after sb presenting a new product). When someone announces something good in a meeting, someone else erupts with five loud claps.
The effect of this wasn’t so much about the approval of the product. It was about approval of the team. It generated momentum among the entire group in the room & moved things along.
3. Always Build Communities
**Build communities inside and outside of work. A place is much stronger when people are connected.
Bill cared so much about community that he invested in a place for people to gather. eg. baseball trip, golf trip, sports bar gathering. He wanted to make sure nobody skipped an event due to financial constraints, so he always picked up the tab.
(Sports bar) Different people gathered there, always with plenty of food and beer, and when someone new showed up, Bill introduced him or her around with a generous spirit: he picked your best feature or accomplishment and highlighted it. The only rule was that you couldn’t come there with an agenda. Bill liked the bar for its casual atmosphere, where formalities could drop by the wayside and people could just be themselves, whether laughing at old stories or talking business.
Community building doesn’t have to be expensive. Invest in creating real, emotional bonds between people.
It was all about making enduring connections between people, generating what sociologists call “social capital.” The connection would be beneficial for both people.
4. Help People
**Be generous with your time, connections, and other resources.
“Being an effective giver isn’t about dropping everything every time for every person. It’s about making sure that the benefits of helping others outweigh the costs to you.” People who do this well are “self-protective givers.” They are “generous, but they know their limits. Instead of saying yes to every request for help, they look for high-impact, low-cost ways of giving so that they can sustain their generosity—and enjoy it along the way.” —Adam Grant
Apply judgment in making sure that they are the right thing to do, and ensure that everyone will be better off as a result.
5. Love the Founders
**Hold a special reverence for —and protect— the people with the most vision and passion for the company.
Bill held a very special place in his heart for the people who have the guts and skills to start companies. They are sane enough to know that every day is a fight for survival against daunting odds and crazy enough to think they can succeed anyway.
Bill loved founders, not just for the chutzpah they possess to try entrepreneurship in the first place, but for the vision they have for the company, and the love they have for it. He understood their limitations, but he usually felt that their value outweighed the shortcomings.
Vision is an important role. Heart and soul matter.
Bill’s principle every time: love the founders, and ensure they stay engaged in a meaningful way regardless of their operating role. (eg. When Dick Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter, Bill counseled him to work well with the company’s founders, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams. Today you are the CEO and they are the founders, Bill said, but someday you will be the ex-CEO and they’ll still be the founders. It’s not you versus them; it’s you and them. You are here to help them.)
6. The Elevator Chat
**Loving colleagues in the workplace may be challenging, so practice it until it becomes more natural.
When you’re in that elevator, passing someone in the hallway, or seeing a group from your team in the cafeteria, take a moment to stop and chat. Bruce’s lines are as good a starter as any: “How’s it going? What are you working on?” In time, it becomes natural. Try to remember people’s names. “Trying to develop that personal connection didn’t come that easily for me, but I worked at it,” Bruce says. “Fortunately, it gets easier.”
Chapter 6 - The Yardstick
Why does a successful executive need emotional support? In fact, it is often the highest-performing people who feel the most alone. Their powerful egos and confidence help drive their success but may be paired with insecurities and uncertainty. They often have people who want to be their friends for personal gain rather than for friendship.
A leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach → teams that work together as communities → high-performing teams → face challenges
Bill grasped that there are things we all care about as people—love, family, money, attention, power, meaning, purpose—that are factors in any business situation. That to create effective teams, you need to understand and pay attention to these human values. Positive human values generate positive business outcomes.
When asked about Bill’s habit of eschewing compensation, Bill would say that he had a different way of measuring his impact, his own kind of yardstick. I look at all the people who’ve worked for me or who I’ve helped in some way, he would say, and I count up how many are great leaders now. That’s how I measure success.