Top highlights from Trillion Dollar Coach
Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make far analogies. The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.
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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.
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Not what happened and whos to blame, but what are we going to do about it?
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ALWAYS BUILD COMMUNITIES BUILD COMMUNITIES INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF WORK. A PLACE IS MUCH STRONGER WHEN PEOPLE ARE CONNECTED.
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Bill liked to tell a story about when he was at Intuit and they started getting into banking products. They hired some product managers with banking experience. One day, Bill was at a meeting with one of those product managers, who presented his engineers with a list of features he wanted them to build. Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, Im 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 youll ever get by telling them what to build.
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He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus (I hate consensus! he would growl), intuitively understanding what numerous academic studies have shown: that the goal of consensus leads to groupthink and inferior decisions.
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This is the power of coaching in general: the ability to offer a different perspective, one unaffected by being in the game.
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When you listen to people, they feel valued. A 2003 study from Lund University in Sweden finds that mundane, almost trivial things like listening and chatting with employees are important aspects of successful leadership, because people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork.10 And a 2016 paper finds that this form of respectful inquiry, where the leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective because it heightens the followers feelings of competence (feeling challenged and experiencing mastery), relatedness (feeling of belonging), and autonomy (feeling in control and having options). Those three factors are sort of the holy trinity of the self-determination theory of human motivation, originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.11
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There are people who are team players and really care about the company. When they speak up, it matters a lot to me because I know they are coming from the right place.
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Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone elses success. Sundar notes that sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex on those signals when people give something up.* And also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isnt related to them, but they are excited. I watch for that. Like when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team, like Steph Curry jumping up and down when Kevin Durant hits a big shot. You cant fake that.
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Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone elses success.
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Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, 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.
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PICK THE RIGHT PLAYERS THE TOP CHARACTERISTICS TO LOOK FOR ARE SMARTS AND HEARTS: THE ABILITY TO LEARN FAST, A WILLINGNESS TO WORK HARD, INTEGRITY, GRIT, EMPATHY, AND A TEAM-FIRST ATTITUDE.
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Bill didnt work the problem first, he worked the team. We didnt talk about the problem analytically. We talked about the people on the team and if they could get it done.
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There is another issue with the largely cognitive approach to management, which we had big-time at Google. Smart, analytical people, especially ones steeped in computer science and mathematics as we were, will tend to assume that data and other empirical evidence can solve all problems. Quants or techies with this worldview tend to see the inherently messy, emotional tension thats always present in teams of humans as inconvenient and irrationalan irritant that will surely be resolved in the course of a data-driven decision process. Of course, humans dont always work that way. Things come up, tensions arise, and they dont naturally go away. People do their best to avoid talking about these situations, because theyre awkward. Which makes it worse.
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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.
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People are the foundation of any companys 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 peoples skills. Great managers help people excel and grow. Respect means understanding peoples unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way thats 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.
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we are always taught the value of positive coaching, of leading with praise and then following with constructive feedback.
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PEOPLE ARE MOST EFFECTIVE WHEN THEY CAN BE COMPLETELY THEMSELVES AND BRING THEIR FULL IDENTITY TO WORK.
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Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women.
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Today you are the CEO and they are the founders, Bill said, but someday you will be the ex-CEO and theyll still be the founders. Its not you versus them; its you and them. You are here to help them.
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Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.
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STRIVE TO WIN, BUT ALWAYS WIN RIGHT, WITH COMMITMENT, TEAMWORK, AND INTEGRITY.
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BE CREATIVE. Your post-fifty years should be your most creative time. You have wisdom of experience and freedom to apply it where you want. Avoid metaphors such as you are on the back nine. This denigrates the impact you can have. DONT BE A DILETTANTE. Dont just do a portfolio of things. Whatever you get involved with, have accountability and consequence. Drive it. FIND PEOPLE WHO HAVE VITALITY. Surround yourself with them; engage with them. Often they will be younger. APPLY YOUR GIFTS. Figure out what you are uniquely good at, what sets you apart. And understand the things inside you that give you a sense of purpose. Then apply them. DONT WASTE TIME WORRYING ABOUT THE FUTURE. Allow serendipity to play a role. Most of the turning points in life cannot be predicted or controlled.
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He was also great at email. The tendency today is to have cascading emails, a senior person sending something to her staff, who write their own version to their people, and so on. Bill always counseled us to have one email, straight from the senior person, and over the years he practically perfected the art of writing those messages.
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Trust is a multifaceted concept, so what do we mean by it? One academic paper defines trust as the willingness to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations about anothers behavior.
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When asked about his 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. p193
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rule of two. He would get the two people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution, and usually they would come back a week or two later having decided together on the best course of action. The team almost always agreed with their recommendation, because it was usually quite obvious that it was the best idea. The rule of two not only generates the best solution in most cases, it also promotes collegiality. It empowers the two people who are working on the issue to figure out ways to solve the problem, a fundamental principle of successful mediation.13 And it forms a habit of working together to resolve conflict that pays off with better camaraderie and decision making for years afterward.*14
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He looked for commitment, to the cause and not just to their own success. Team First! You need to find... people who put the company first...But how do you know when you have found such a person? Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else's success. Sundar notes that "sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex [pay a lot of attention to] on those signals when people give something up. Also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn't related to them but they are excited. I watch for that. Like when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team p117-18
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company is to take the vision you have of the product and bring it to life, he said once at a conference. Then you put all the other components around itfinance, sales, marketingto get the product out the door and make sure its successful.
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would be a fascinating character to profile. But how do you profile someone who shuns public attention? I started by cobbling together everything I could find about him online. I learned that what Bill lacked in physical strength, he made up for in heart. He was the MVP of his high school football team despite standing five feet ten and weighing 165 pounds. When the track coach was short on hurdlers, Bill volunteered. Since
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The traits of coachability Bill sought were honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning.
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People dont like to talk about these flaws, which is why honesty and humility are so important. If people cant be honest with themselves and their coach, and if they arent humble enough to recognize how they arent perfect, they wont get far in that relationship.
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When it gets to the negative, get it out, get to the issues, but dont let the damn meeting dwell on that. Dont let bitch sessions last for very long. 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 cant be solved, but in a business context focusing on and venting emotions needs to happen quickly, so more energy is directed to solutions.
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He had a generous spirit, which anyone can afford. For example, he was a very busy man, but he was generous with his time. Sometimes it took a couple of months to get on his calendar, but if you truly needed him, that phone call would come right away. Most of the time, these little gifts were what Adam Grant, crediting businessman Adam Rifkin in his book Give and Take, calls five-minute favors. They are easy for the person doing the favor, requiring minimal personal cost, but mean a lot to the recipient.7 Grant also notes, in a 2017 article written with Reb Rebele, that being an effective giver isnt about dropping everything every time for every person. Its 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 generosityand enjoy it along the way.
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Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids, Bill once said. Help them course correct, make them better.
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Studies show that positive leadership makes it easier to solve problems, so Bill would praise teams and people, give them a hug, and clap them on the shoulder to boost their confidence and comfort. Then, when he asked the tough questions, everyone understood that he was on their side, and that he was pushing on things because he wanted them to be better, to be successful. He would always get to the heart of a problem, but in a positive way.
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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.
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In August 2008, the website Gawker published an article titled The 10 Most Terrible Tyrants of Tech.
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Because the best person to be the teams coach is the teams manager. 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.
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You cant talk about coachingor leading a companywithout talking about winning. Thats what the good coaches do. Thats what great leaders do.
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its a managers job to push the team to be more courageous. Courage is hard. People are naturally afraid of taking risks for fear of failure. Its the managers job to push them past their reticence.
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Bill grasped that there are things we all care about as peoplelove, family, money, attention, power, meaning, purposethat are factors in any business situation. That to create effective teams, you need to understand and pay attention to these human values. They are part of who we all are, regardless of our age, level, or status. Bill would get to know people as people, and by doing so he could motivate them to perform as businesspeople. He understood that positive human values generate positive business outcomes. This is a connection that too many business leaders ignore. Which is why we think it is so important that we all learn to do it now. It is counterintuitive in the business world, but essential to success.
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Failure is a good teacher, and Bill learned from these experiences that loyalty and commitment are easy when you are winning and much harder when you are losing. But thats, as Dans story highlights, when loyalty, commitment, and integrity are even more important. When things are going badly, teams need even more of those characteristics from their leaders.
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the world faces many challenges, and they can only be solved by teams. Those teams need coaches.
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How do you bring people around and help them flourish in your environment? Its not by being a dictator. Its not by telling them what the hell to do. Its making sure that they feel valued by being in the room with you. Listen. Pay attention. This is what great managers do.
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People are the foundation of any companys 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.
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To be successful, companies need to have teams that work together as communities, where individuals integrate their interests and put aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with whats good and right for the company.
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ABERRANT GENIUSESHIGH-PERFORMING BUT DIFFICULT TEAM MEMBERSSHOULD BE TOLERATED AND EVEN PROTECTED, AS LONG AS THEIR BEHAVIOR ISNT UNETHICAL OR ABUSIVE AND THEIR VALUE OUTWEIGHS THE TOLL THEIR BEHAVIOR TAKES ON MANAGEMENT, COLLEAGUES, AND TEAMS.
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BILLS 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?
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Bill believed that one of a managers main jobs is to facilitate decisions,
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Many times operating people come in, and though they may run the company better, they lose the heart and soul of the company, the vision that is going to take it forward.
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Bill hated that. He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus
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ITS THE PEOPLE People are the foundation of any companys 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 peoples skills. Great managers help people excel and grow. Respect means understanding peoples unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way thats 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.
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ITS THE PEOPLE THE TOP PRIORITY OF ANY MANAGER IS THE WELL-BEING AND SUCCESS OF HER PEOPLE.
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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 PRODUCT.
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People perceive the best listeners to be those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.8
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