Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell

I re-read this on a Christmas family trip to Nashville. (Everyone else was a late riser, so I always had a couple of hours to myself in the mornings.)

The book has a series of “commandments” through the core chapters. Each one is a section which anecdotes, examples, and explanation.

Here they are, with some comments from me in the blockquoted passages.

Chapter 2: Your Title Makes You a Manager. Your People Make You a Leader.

This chapter was general management advice.

• It’s the people: The top priority of any manager is the well-being and success of their people.

  I remember this same sentiment from a 25-year-old book called Love is the Killer App by Tim Sanders. I need to re-read that.

• Start with trip reports: To build rapport and better relationships among the team members start team meetings with reports or other types of more personal non-business topics.

  This practice is also popular in EOS.

• 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.

  1:1s are rarely structured, and they’re usually a huge wasted opportunity. Both sides dread them, and it really shouldn’t be this way. The problem is that to have a good 1:1, you have to have done all the foundation work to build trust and the expectation that you’re going to build on more strategic issues. You have to “set the scene” long in advance.

• 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.

• 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.

• Manage the aberrant genius: Aberrant geniuses high-performing, but difficult, team members, should be tolerated and even protected as long as their behavior isn’t unethical or abusive, and their value outweighs the toll their behavior takes on management, colleagues, and teams

  You need to find the working and project style that fits someone’s strengths. There are people who genuinely need to be isolated from others, for the benefit of both sides.

• Money’s not about money: Compensating people well demonstrates love and respect and ties them strongly to the goals of the company.

• Innovation is where the crazy people have stature: The purpose of a company is to bring a product vision to life. All the other components are in service to the product.

• Heads held high: If you have to let people go, be generous, treat them well, and celebrate their accomplishments.

• Bill on Boards: It’s the CEO’s job to manage Boards not the other way around.

  I didn’t quite get this one. If the CEO is “managing” the Board, then why even have a Board? The purpose of the Board is oversight of the CEO.

Chapter 3: Build an Envelope of Trust

This chapter was about how to get your coachees to trust you.

• 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.

  We always tried to hire for this at Blend. We could smell problems in this area a mile away.

• Practice free-form listening: Listen to people with your full and undivided attention – don’t think ahead to what you’re going to say next – and ask questions to get to the real issue.

• No gap between statements in fact: Be relentlessly honest and candid. Couple negative feedback with caring. Give feedback as soon as possible, and if the feedback is negative, deliver it privately.

• Don’t stick it in their ear: Don’t tell people what to do. Offer stories and help guide them to the best decision for them.

  There needs to be some nuance here. Sometimes the best decision “for them” is not the right one for the organization or team. And, honestly, some people just can’t figure stuff out.

• Be the evangelist for courage: Believe in people more than they believe in themselves and push them to be more courageous.

• Full identity, front and center: People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identity to work.

Chapter 4: Team First

This chapter was about how to get people to work together.

• 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.

• Pick the right players: The top characteristics to look for are smarts and hearts: the ability to learn fast and willingness to work hard, integrity, grit, empathy, and a team-first attitude.

• Pair people: Peer relationships are critical and often overlooked so seek opportunities to pair people up on projects or decisions.

• Get to the table: Winning depends on having the best team and the best teams have more women.

  You always need to work on the male style as well. It’s easy to get a room full of “alphas” who don’t shut up, and limit the contributions of everyone – male and female. It took a lot for me to learn that the best, strongest position in the room was the person who hadn’t said anything yet. Sometimes it’s kind of fun to watch people hang themselves because they can’t stop running their mouths.

• Solve the biggest problem: Identify the biggest problem, the “elephant in the room,” bring it front and center and tackle it first.

  The trouble with this, is where do you stop? You can keep “walking problems backward” forever. Eventually you have to put a stake in the ground and say, “This is the point where we’ll try to solve the problem.”

  A lot of elephants in the room are not solvable by your team – they are constraints you simply have to work under. Indeed, sometimes you’re being asked to figure out how to live with the elephant in the room, not actually remove it from the room, which would be the “correct” solution.

• Don’t let the bitch sessions last: Get all the negative issues out, but don’t dwell on them. Move on as fast as possible.

• Winning right: Strive to win, but always win right with commitment, teamwork, and integrity.

• Leaders lead: When things are going, bad teams are looking for even more loyalty, commitment, and decisiveness from their leaders.

• Fill the gaps between people: Listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.

• Permission to be empathetic: Leading teams becomes a lot more joyful in the team is more effective when you know and care about the people.

Chapter 5: The Power of Love

This chapter was about how to bring concepts of “love” into the workplace.

• 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.

  I love the sentiment, and I’m curious how much it can be followed. To what extent can I actually, truly care about a person over the organization?

  For example, is a manager allowed to help an employee get a job with a competitor that would clearly be a great more for that employee and their family, but bad for the organization?

  In a lot of organizations, I think the model is, “Care for the employee only so far as you keep the organization first.” Caring for the employee is a means to an end – if it makes them happier and more effective for the organization, then it’s an acceptable management strategy, but it’s not done for any other reason.

  I’m suddenly thinking about forests and capitalism. A forest full of plants and animals and life is an amazing thing…but from a purely capitalistic lens, it’s a waste until it’s cut down and turned into lumber. Pure, unadulterated capitalism doesn’t understand that the forest is the point, not just a means to an end, just like a company doesn’t understand that the humans are the point.

• The percussive clap: Cheer demonstrably for people in their successes.

• Always build communities: Build communities inside and outside of work. A place is much stronger when people are connected.

  I will always remember a team-building event at a house outside of Stockholm where a team cooked a dinner together. I’ve rarely felt closer to colleagues. That relationships made and strengthened at that dinner reverberated for decades after the actual event.

• Help people: Be generous with your time, connections and other resources.

• Love the founders: Hold a special reverence for and protect the people with the most vision and passion for the company.

  I worry about founders sometimes, because once they take investor money, their passion often transfers to paying back their investors, not for the original vision that drove them to start the company in the first place.

  Mixing money and passion is always problematic. I would love to find a founder that still cared about the original challenge as much as the business that inevitably grew around it.

• The elevator chat: Loving colleagues in the workplace may be challenging, so practice it until it becomes more natural.

Lots of things in this chapter reminded of an older book called Love is the Killer App by Tim Sanders.