PDF Summary:Trillion Dollar Coach, by Bill Campbell

Are you trying to run a company, manage employees, or lead a team? Then take a lesson from ex-football coach Bill Campbell, who mentored tech giants at Apple, Google, Intuit, eBay, and Facebook. Campbell believed that teams, not individuals, are the fundamental building blocks of organizations. Leaders can help their team be more productive, more innovative, and just plain happier by leading like a coach, not just a manager.

Good coaches employ encouragement, honesty, and caring to help every team member flourish. Business leaders should do the same, infusing their workplaces with compassion and people-first values that inspire employees to do their best work—and love their jobs. To win at business, show your team members you care about them, and they'll produce extraordinary results.

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• Establish camaraderie in the workplace.
• Use staff meetings for discussing big-picture operational issues and one-on-one meetings to focus on individual performance.
• Don't make team decisions by consensus; let the team analyze every possibility until the best idea emerges.
• Encourage the big thinkers and "aberrant geniuses" to do their best work, but chastise them if they let their supersized egos get in the way of good teamwork.
• If firings or layoffs need to occur, make sure it happens with dignity and respect. Do not "ambush" people with the bad news.
• The CEO should manage the board of directors—not the other way around.

Example: Apple’s Steve Jobs, who was close friends with Campbell, serves as a great example of why operational leadership matters—and why you’re not truly a leader until your employees think you are. For all his genius and charisma, Jobs was a disorganized and often temperamental manager, and his beleaguered employees suffered from low morale. In 1985, Apple's board of directors removed him from the company and replaced him with CEO John Sculley.

Twelve years later, Jobs returned to Apple, and Campbell noted that Jobs was a changed man—or rather, a changed leader. Jobs was much more thorough and detailed in every aspect of operational leadership—sales, finances, product development, and so on. He paid close attention to what his teams were doing, and his employees came to admire him. And of course, Apple's greatest successes came during Jobs's second tenure at Apple.

Building Workplace Trust

The second theme focuses on building trust in the workplace.

• Create psychological safety in the workplace. In order for innovation to occur, leaders must make it "safe" for team members to take risks. Managers need to have their employees' backs.
• Truly listen to employees. It’s one of the best ways to build trust and show you care.
• Give tough, candid feedback when necessary, but deliver it gently. Make sure the person you're critiquing knows you have their best interests in mind.
• Don't tell people what to do; guide them toward making good decisions by asking probing questions or relating personal stories.
• Make your team more courageous by providing positive reinforcement and pushing for bolder action.
• Encourage diversity by allowing employees to be fully themselves, not forcing them to conform to the dominant culture.

Example: Campbell coached David Drummond, Alphabet's head of corporate development and legal affairs, who is Black. Drummond said that being Black in Silicon Valley made him feel uncomfortably self-conscious—he was noticeably different from most everybody else. But Campbell encouraged Drummond to be proud of his identity, to make it his source of motivation and strength rather than diminish it in an attempt to conform. He told Drummond that people would respect him for being who he was, not for trying to be someone else.

Campbell understood that encouraging people to be authentically themselves—rather than forcing them to conform to dominant norms—would create a sense of psychological safety in the workplace. When employees feel like they are accepted and supported, they automatically want to do their best work.

Building Stronger Teams

The third theme expresses the importance of building and maintaining strong teams.

• Hire employees who have a team-first attitude and strong people skills, not just great technical skills.
• When confronting a business problem, make sure you have the right team in place to solve it.
• Pair people up to work on problems together. This will help to strengthen the entire team.
• Be relentlessly positive. A big part of a leader's or manager's job is to cheerlead.
• When times get tough, dig in harder—that's when your team needs you most.

Example: Campbell paid close attention to how existing managers and employees talked and acted. Did they say “I” a lot or did they say “we”? Did they get excited about other people's successes? Were they willing to make concessions for the overall benefit of the team? Campbell championed the idea that it was a leader's job to be an enthusiastic cheerleader, and he was famous for clapping loudly when someone finished a staff meeting presentation about a new project. One of the Google executives named this behavior “BCC” for “the Bill Campbell clap.” New team members still practice it during orientation.

Leading With Love

The fourth theme focuses on bringing compassion and humanity into the workplace.

• Humanize your company by getting to know your employees as people. Learn about their families, hobbies, and interests.
• Do favors for others whenever you can. Be generous with your time, money, and connections.
• Respect and revere the company's founders.
• Practice your people skills daily with friendly interactions that help to build relationships.
• Make connections between people both inside and outside of the workplace—foster community at work and beyond.
• Support your colleagues and employees even when they decide to leave the company.

Example: Campbell was convinced that leaders should always pay close attention to an employee’s family situation. He understood that an employee’s work life was not completely separate from their family life—that one influenced the other. A good leader should be concerned about both. For example, when Ruth Porat was hired as Google's CFO, she had to commute to Silicon Valley from New York. Campbell constantly asked her how her husband was handling the arrangement. He wanted to make sure that not just his CFO was happy, but also her husband.