A summary of the life and methods of “the greatest executive coach the world has ever seen
Bill Campbell was an American football coach turned Silicon Valley exec. He coached leaders at Google, Apple, eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Next-door, Uber and Twitter among others. But he also coached neighbours, lodgers, parents he met at the school gate, and their kids.
However, these worlds didn’t always mix – Campbell famously refused to answer Steve Jobs’ calls when coaching kids on the football field.
And it was all for free. In Campbell’s own words – “I don't take cash, I don't take stock, and I don't take ****.”
Trillion Dollar Coach TLDR - Great coaches:
Know those they are coaching on a deep, personal level, keeping work in perspective
Demonstrate tough love, giving candid feedback in the best interests of the recipient
Listen deeply, asking questions rather than telling others what to do
Focus on making sure those they are coaching have healthy peer relationships
Coach whole teams, not just individuals
Bring inter-personal tensions within a team to the surface, and get them resolved
Prioritise running great meetings, both one-to-ones and team sessions
You can find the authors’ SlideShare summary here.
On coaching individuals:
Only coach the coachable It’s important to invest coaching in the right people. Campbell’s list of qualifying characteristics was lengthy. It included:
Humility,
Servant leadership,
Self-awareness,
The ability to get up to speed quickly,
Being hardworking,
Having high integrity,
Being excited by the success of others,
Having a willingness to speak out,
The ability to be vulnerable, and
Grit.
Conversely, those who were no longer learning, had more answers than questions, or lacked the ability to be honest with themselves, didn’t make the cut.
Those he regarded as ‘aberrant geniuses’ would be tolerated, protected and coached past their problematic behaviour, under a set of strict conditions. As long as their intentions and priorities were for the team’s best interests, the value they added outweighed their impact on team, and their ethics were sound, they would be coached to mature into their full potential.
A great coaching relationship is built on trust, tough love, and candour Coaching requires the baseline safety of emotional support; it needs to create a context where vulnerability can be shown. To provide this, the coach needs to be a person of their word, keeping confidences and demonstrating loyalty. They should believe in people more than those being coached believe in themselves.
From this place of safety and genuine care, combined with an understanding of their life and career goals, the coach is able to deliver powerful, candid feedback.
Great feedback is factual, and is delivered as soon as possible (if it's critical, deliver in private, when the recipient is feeling safe). When coming from a place of truth and care, the recipient gains an incredible opportunity to improve, without feeling attacked. As well as critique, the coach brings credible encouragement, building confidence based on the subject’s existing capability and progress to date.
Don’t tell people what to do – listen, ask questions and tell stories
If someone identifies an idea for themselves, they are far more likely to act on it, compared to an instruction from someone else to do the same thing. The more talented the subordinate, the truer this becomes.
Campbell used the Socratic Method, asking open questions that got to the heart of the issues at stake, and listened actively. This approach creates a sense of competence, autonomy and belonging, as the coachee is shaping their own path forward, and being heard. The regular examination and reflection should also – crucially – raise their self-awareness.
Ultimately though, a leader has to lead. Campbell would give engineers the context of customers and their needs, rather than tell them what features to create. Instead of telling them directly ‘what’ to do, he’d tell his teams stories about ‘why’, and let them process, garnering buy-in.
In 1:1 coaching sessions, focus on prioritisation, personal connection, and peer relationships
Those coached by Bill Campbell would arrive to 1 on 1 sessions with him armed with five prioritised topics to talk to him about, knowing he’d have selected his own list. This forced regular reflection on what was important, and generated questions when the lists were different.
The session would start with deep, substantive discussion about personal life. He’d ask about family – who he’d actually know. This made sure whatever work discussion followed, it would be seen in its proper perspective. It also allowed him to ‘bring his whole self to work’, building trust.
After a candid conversation about their performance versus job requirements, the next item – counter-intuitively – would be peer relationships. Before talking about management issues, or innovation, Campbell would delve into how the person was getting on with their peers. The importance of this comes into focus when you consider the importance he placed on coaching teams, not individuals, as we’ll focus on next.
On coaching teams:
Get the foundations of a great team right
Bill Campbell saw teams, not people, as the fundamental building block of organisations.
Google’s Project Aristotle project identified that the highest performing teams have:
Clear goals,
Meaningful roles for each member,
Members who are reliable,
A shared belief that the team’s mission will ‘make a difference’, and, above all,
Psychological safety.
But building a ‘team of rivals’ - a mutually supportive group of talented, driven individuals who put aside their differences for the collective good - is challenging.
Campbell coached to create an environment that amplified energy, respect and trust, an environment where the individual members could get more out of themselves.
Work on the team, not the problems the team is trying to solve
Bill Campbell was a coach of teams, not merely individuals. He would focus on getting ‘the right players in right positions’. He expected everyone managing a function on behalf of the leader to be better equipped to run it than the leader themselves.
Campbell would tend to team dynamics before helping the team with the mission it was trying to deliver. He saw the coach as the glue in the team’s community, ‘filling the gaps between people’, and making introductions.
Once a high performing team was in place, it could be given resources and freedom to go and accomplish far more than the sum of its parts.
Bring inter-personal tensions within the team to the surface, and get them resolved
Bill Campbell would coach teams by finding the festering issues, often through his 1:1 interactions with the individual members. He would watch the team like a chess board, with himself as a player, not a piece.
Managing tension and conflict in a team is crucial – one study proved that task conflict within the team is linked to the emotional conflict it experiences. Another showed that having a standard conflict resolution process makes everyone happier and more effective, regardless of what the process is. Campbell’s approach was likened to the court of King Arthur – everyone at the round table got an equal voice, but when a tie needed to be broken, it was the leader who sat on the throne and made the final call.
To avoid having to get to that point, the coach’s job is to make sure the team is communicating well within itself, that there is alignment on vision and goals, and that the right information is available to make good decisions. One technique Campbell used to help make this happen was ‘the rule of two’: the two people most closely associated with a challenge go and gather information on it, work together on a solution, and present back to the group. This promotes collegiality and empowers the two people to work together to solve the problem.
Make the most of team meetings
Campbell’s team meetings were carefully thought through to allow coaching of the group:
With board meetings, materials detailing the information for discussion were sent, with a clear expectation that members would arrive with questions to ask. However the ‘highlights and low-lights’ analysis would be kept until the meeting itself, to avoid intellectual laziness and the board only focusing on the negatives
Team meetings themselves would start with sharing personal updates e.g. recent travel, so the group got to know each other, and so each member participated early on (increasing the likelihood they’d continue engaging throughout)
Everyone would be expected to contribute to debates, regardless of their functional expertise in the area under discussion. This would help the wider team understand the issues, would build cross-functional strength, and may bring fresh insight from those who didn’t share the basic assumptions of the team members closest to the problem
The coach’s role was to get the team to the right debate, keep the meeting relevant, manage time, and make sure all voices get heard
Above all, the coach’s job was to facilitate decisions:
This began by sitting down with participants beforehand to understand what they were thinking about the issues at hand, and prep them well in order to give the best voice to their point of view
When it came to the debate - called a debate, not disagreement, to encourage the sharing and reception of dissent – the key was ensuring the group was striving for the best idea, not the agenda of a participant, or the pursuit of consensus
The coach would remind those in the session of ‘first principles’ – the key tenants of what the group collectively agree on, in general and about the issue under consideration – to make decision-making easier
The most senior person spoke last, to avoid HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) dominating. While they might have the right answer, introducing it too early might rob the team of the chance to come together and draw the right conclusion themselves
Once a big decision had been made, the coach would make sure everyone was behind big decisions, whether they had agreed with them or not
Finally, Bill was also known for clapping loudly when he wanted to move things on – it showed support for the team, support for their work, was hard to disagree with, and very effectively closed a given section of the meeting down!
Closing comments
Trillion Dollar Coach makes some wider points about leadership that bear reflecting on, including ‘the danger of confusing charisma with leadership’. Excellence is required, not simply presence. Teams make a leader, not the individual themselves. Leadership accrues to leaders from their teams over time, through competence, not merely aura.
Coaches can make a massive difference in any context – private sector, government, and voluntary organisations. This book allows Bill Campbell’s remarkable legacy to live on in people who learn these coaching lessons, and apply them in the contexts in which they operate. You can buy it here.
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