Silicon Valley's Top Coach (Bill Campbell)
Learnings from the mentorship of Bill Campbell
Bill Campbell is not your average coach. He is behind at-least 2 trillion dollar worth of value created by company’s founders he coached.
He raised the bar for global leaders every single time in his lifetime, and did so successfully by coaching:
Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt,
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg,
Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer,
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
Apple’s Steve Jobs
Twitter’s Dick Costolo
Google’s Sundar Pichai
Intuit’s Brad Smith
and many more stellar individuals. Meet the man and the myth:
And before we start on his coaching techniques and guidance, here’s a little quote related to the story in which he coached Donna Debinsky to negotiate a position and his advice eventually allowed Donna to become the CEO of a tech company. I am sharing this quote because it shows Bill’s ability to grasp complex topics such as diversity in top leadership:
While the industry continues to become more friendly to the idea of women CEOs, there is still a long way to go. At the same time, women must stand up for what they want and ask for what they deserve.
Learn as much as you can so you’re competent and can answer any question. Ask for what you want and if you don’t get it, move on to a situation where your talents are appreciated.
And this was not the only time Donna (ex-CEO, Palm) learnt the art of excelling as a leader. Donna herself attributes the success in growing the company (Palm) and make it successful by heeding to multiple such advices from Bill. One of that was “don’t be a decision making bottleneck” which translates to empower the teams to make decisions - i.e push decision making downwards.
Bill Campbell was famously known as a ‘coach’ not only because he was a coach to all above highly accomplished individuals but also because he coached the Columbia University football team from 1974 and 1979. Bill has multiple stories and learnings to his name, but I chose the top five below. (All quotes are from the book: Trillion Dollar Coach)
#1 Build a personal connect
Those who had the privilege to get coached by Bill observed that he first brings a level of trust in a conversation that it then becomes comfortable to talk about your deepest hopes and fears.
Trust, for Bill, comprised of Love and Loyalty. Jonathan Rosenberg quoted that Bill was someone who pushed him to do bold things and in return Bill’s mentees agreed to push the envelope because of their trust in his judgement.
Bill made it normal/ okay to love people. This term in a workplace setting means that you genuinely care for the other person - not from a selfish reason of getting work done - but from a genuine reason that we are all in similar boats and have to figure out things together. Bill made it a point to understand personal situations, family and health for each of his team members and mentees.
Bill was always genuinely interesting in knowing people. This was also confirmed by Sundar Pichai in below quote:
“I was always busy going into these meetings, with lots of things to do, but my time with Bill always gave me a sense of perspective. That whatever I was doing was important, but he showed me that what really matters at the end of the day is how you live your life and the people in your life. It was always a lovely reset.” Bill’s small talk about families wasn’t small at all. It provided his coachees a respite in a busy day and a chance to ease their work-family conflict at least momentarily.
#2 Don’t be consensus driven
Bill always tried to reach the best decision or the outcome in any situation. He coached Eric Schmidt to be able to drive discussions in a way that it doesn’t appease everyone (i.e decision making by making majority agree) but in a way that it leads to the best decision.
He coached Eric to build a discipline at Google such that people ask the most important question in any meeting: What is the best decision we can make?
Rather, managers should create room for all perspectives to be heard, and if the best decision doesn’t emerge from that conversation, they should break the tie and expect everyone to rally behind the decision.
Marty Cagan (author of book INSPIRED) also wrote a newsletter about right way to make decisions that related to Bill’s advice:
Marty Cagan’s take on Good Decision Making:
Good decision making is not about getting everyone to agree (the consensus model), and it’s not about pleasing the most people (the voting model), and it’s also not about having one person that is expected to make all the decisions (the benevolent dictator model).
If the decision is primarily about enabling technology, if at all possible we defer to our technical lead. If the decision is primarily about the user or customer experience, if at all possible we defer to our product designer. And if the decision is primarily about business viability, we will depend on the product manager collaborating with the relevant stakeholders.
#3 Running effective meetings
Generally we tend get into 1:1s with open topics and generally go with the flow. But Bill applied another approach. He liked both the manager and team member to bring 5 topics each.
When you start the 1 on 1, first see which topics are common in both lists and high in priority and discuss them first, followed by others. If there are no topics that match, Bill took that as the red flag. This means that both the people in 1:1 meetings are not thinking about similar priorities and topics. This speaks about missing aligned goals.
Besides the list of top 5 things to discuss, Bill also then also ensured that there were topics to be discussed related to:
Performance as per job expectations
Relationships with peer teams
Leadership topics
Innovation Topics
#4 Team first
Bill consistently vouched that “Teams of people who subordinate individual performance to that of the group will generally perform better than teams that don’t.”
He emphasised that whenever you’re looking to build a team, look for individuals who have a team-first attitude. And when you’re trying to solve a big problem, ensure that the right team is in place - both in terms of skillsets as well as ownership intent.
“Excellent teams at Google had psychological safety (people know that if they took risks, their manager would have their back). The teams had clear goals, each role was meaningful, and members were reliable and confident that the team’s mission would make a difference. You’ll see that Bill was a master at establishing those conditions: he went to extraordinary lengths to build safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, and impact into each team he coached
Another aspect that Bill often emphasised is that its important to hire ‘coachable people’ and they are often characterised by humbleness and willingness to keep learning.
As per Bill, it is tougher to mold individuals who think they already know what they are doing but easier to work with people who are coachable.
Another preference of Bill was to hire creative people - i.e those who can combine their technical knowhow with ability to get creative about soltutions.
#5 The need for managers
At Google, initially Larry and Sergey were not in favor of hiring managers (which was being pushed as a proposal by Bill). Till that time, Google was running without managers, happily so. Larry and Sergey decided to check with engineers if they would like to have managers. Once the feedback came in, it was observed that engineers would like managers as long as they could learn something from their managers.
Further, Bill ensured that managers did not just come in and became authoritative. He believe that managers need to gain respect and authority by establishing credibility with their peers, superiors and subordinates.
A study conducted in 2012, which was taught in the video game industry, found a strong middle management accounted for close to 22 percent of the variance in revenue, while creative design contributed to seven percent.
"How do you bring people around and help them flourish in your environment? It is not by being a dictator or it is not by telling them what to do. It’s making sure they feel valued by being in the room with you. Listen and pay attention. This is what great managers do.”
Top 10 Billisms
Below top 10 Billisms were circulated to guests at Bill’s memorial service. Bill often said these to give point-blank feedback:
10. “You should have that shirt cleaned and burned.”
9. “You’re as dumb as a post.”
8. “He’s one of the great horse’s asses of our time.”
7. “You’re a numbnuts.”
6. “You couldn’t run a five-flat forty-yard dash off a cliff.”
5. “You’ve got hands like feet.”
4. “You’d fuck up a free lunch.”
3. “You’re so fucked up you make me look good.”
2. “Don’t fuck it up.”
1. “That’s the sound of your head coming out of your ass.”