10 lessons from Silicon Valley's most legendary coach

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Today’s Issue

Bill Campbell helped build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies.

• Intuit

• eBay

• Apple

• Twitter

• Google

• Facebook

He did it primarily as an executive coach, working with visionaries like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

Today, we’re going to learn 10 key lessons Bill taught some of the highest-profile leaders in business.

Let’s dive in.

10 lessons from Silicon Valley’s most legendary coach

Bill Campbell was an unlikely choice.

Of all the people to shape the most iconic companies to come out of Silicon Valley, you probably wouldn’t expect one to be a former college football coach from Homestead, Pennsylvania.

But that was Bill.

He played football at Columbia, then later was Columbia's head coach from 1974-79.

After leaving football, he went into business and found himself in the CEO role at Intuit in 1994.

Bill’s career lead him back to coaching, this time in business, where he coached the titans of tech’s greatest companies.

By the time he passed away in 2016, “The Coach” was revered throughout Silicon Valley.

In the book Trillion Dollar Coach, Google execs Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle share Bill’s leadership playbook that he taught the companies he worked with.

I highly recommend you read the book — it’s a goldmine of lessons.

Here are 10 that will make you a better leader:

Lesson: No cookie-cutter leadership

Many leaders have one “style” of leadership.

They apply that style to whomever they’re leading.

Bill didn’t believe in a cookie-cutter approach to leadership.

He’d spend a Sunday afternoon walking around Palo Alto with Steve Jobs, discussing a variety of subjects.

The next day he’d be sitting in the office shoulder-to-shoulder with a manager.

Bill appreciated that each person has a different story and background. He was nuanced in how he approached growth and leadership challenges.

He always taught leaders: people are individuals. Meet them and lead them from where they are.

Lesson: Build coaching skills

Bill’s experience as a football coach gave him an unfair advantage in business.

In sports, he became a master of molding individuals into teams.

He brought the same principles to Silicon Valley.

He coached people on how to work together, and then coached them on how to coach their people to do the same.

The compounding effect through an organization like Google was immeasurable.

One thing every Google leader learned from Bill:

Great teams need coaching, and being a good coach is essential to being a good manager and leader.

Many management skills can be delegated.

Coaching cannot.

Lesson: Good managers support, respect and trust

Bill believed good management was the foundation of success.

“People who are successful run their companies well,” he said. “They have good processes. They make sure their people are accountable. They know how to hire great people, how to evaluate them and give them feedback, and they pay them well.”

Good managers support, respect and trust.

Support: give people the tools, information, training and coaching needed to be successful.

Respect: understand peoples’ unique career goals and be sensitive to their life choices.

Trust: know people want to do well, believe they will and free them to do their jobs.

These were fundamental principles Bill taught managers.

Lesson: 1:1s and staff meetings are everything

Bill believed 1:1s and staff meetings were the two most important tools available to executives in running a company.

Bill’s framework for 1:1s covered 5 topics:

• Personal: how you and the family are doing

• Peer relationships: how teams are working together

• Performance: how the business is doing (with metrics)

• Management / leadership: how you’re handling people issues

• Innovation: how you’re continuously driving the company forward

Bill’s approach to staff meetings:

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt began his weekly staff meetings with a Bill special: “Trip Reports.”

Trip Reports were personal updates on your weekend or anything interesting you recently did.

They seem informal and like “small talk,” but they were a key part of Bill’s communication approach with teams. They served two key purposes:

• Help people get to know each other

• Get everyone involved in the meeting in a fun way

Bill believed there’s a direct correlation between fun work environments and higher performance.

After the Trip Reports, the focus of staff meetings was to get the team on the same page, debate critical issues and make decisions.

1:1 and staff meetings — obsess over both.

Lesson: Coach the coachable

Bill interviewed every person before he started coaching them.

These were some of the smartest people in business, mind you.

But he didn’t care about any of that. He had only one question.

“How coachable are you?” he’d ask.

He was looking for certain traits:

• Honesty

• Humility

• Work ethic

• Perseverance

• Openness to learning

Bill believed good leaders grow over time. They’re curious and continuously want to learn new things. They serve a mission bigger than himself.

He would never coach, in his words, “bullshitters.”

Recruit coachable people in your organization.

When you have them, develop them.

Lesson: No gap between statements and fact

Bill had a saying: “no gap between statements and facts.”

Be honest. No hidden agenda.

When Bill spoke, his statements and the facts were the same.

Bill applied this principle most often in feedback.

He’d provide tough feedback, but it was fair and fact-based. He was relentlessly honest and genuinely caring.

Bill spared nobody. Example:

He coached an eighth-grade flag football team. One game against their rival, Bill’s quarterback threw a late interception that led to a loss.

Walking off the field, Bill came up to the quarterback. Bill stuck his finger in his own cheek, popped it out and said, “Mason, what’s that?”

The eighth-grader replied: “It’s the sound of my head coming out of my ass?”, repeating a phrase Bill used with the kids.

“That’s right,” Bill responded. “Get your head up! We lost as a team.”

Relentlessly honest, genuinely caring.

Lesson: Be an evangelist for courage

Bill believed a manager’s job is to push teams to be more courageous.

Courage leads to success, but most people are risk-averse.

Google executive Shona Brown called it being an “evangelist for courage.”

Bill “blew confidence into people,” investor and entrepreneur Bill Gurley says.

He brought boldness and energy to situations.

It was a hallmark of who he was as a coach and a principle he instilled in leaders.

Lesson: Work the team, not the problem

When leadership teams faced conflict, Bill wouldn’t start by analyzing the problem.

He’d start by analyzing the dynamic of the team. Then he’d go to work on those dynamics.

At Google, one of Bill’s key roles was to ensure the management team was communicating well.

He was adept at noticing unspoken tensions and disagreements, and he didn’t let people avoid them. He forced them to the surface.

Bill knew that if he could get people to listen, observe and come together, they would solve whatever problem was at hand.

“You always had the sense he was building a team,” says Sheryl Sandberg. “With Bill, it was never just about me. It was always about the team.”

Work the team, then let the team solve the problem.

Lesson: Smarts and hearts

Bill built teams in business just like he did in football.

A team full of quarterbacks isn’t a team. There needs to be different positions, and those positions need to fit together as one.

At Google, the leadership team developed a saying for this: “smarts and hearts.”

They valued high-cognitive and technical talent (”smarts”), and Bill got them to understand the critical important of soft skills (”hearts”) in building great companies.

Bill respected experience but didn’t overvalue it.

He evaluated mindset, character and potential. He had the ability to see what someone could become, and he infused that into the management culture of companies he worked with.

Building great companies is just as much “art” as it is “science.”

Lesson: Loyalty, commitment and integrity

When Bill coached football at Columbia, his teams lost a lot.

One of the first startups he joined after football, a company called GO, lost $75 million.

So, Bill learned a bit about leading through hard times.

During hard times, leaders need to show three things:

• loyalty

• integrity

• commitment

Bill believed these to be bedrock principles all the time, but even more so when a team is “losing.”

Losing times make leaders.

Commit to the cause.

Summary

Let’s recap. The 10 lessons from Bill Campbell:

• Smarts and hearts

• Build coaching skills

• Coach the coachable

• No cookie-cutter leadership

• Be an evangelist for courage

• Work the team, not the problem

• Loyalty, commitment and integrity

• No gap between statements and fact

• 1:1s and staff meetings are everything

• Good managers support, respect and trust

I hope these lessons are impactful and make you a bit better leader.

Teddy’s Recommendations

If you want to improve your storytelling skills, you need to read Storyworthy.

I’m reading it right now, and it’s just a phenomenal book.

Storytelling is one of those skills that applies to every person, both at work and in life.

“Facts tell, stories sell” as the saying goes.

Humans have been using stories since the beginning to communicate and influence.

Matthew Dicks does a great job educating while also entertaining in Storyworthy. Can’t recommend this book enough.

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