Trillion Dollar Coach by E. Schmidt, J. Rosenberg & A. Eagle
- Book Summary
This is my summary of ‘Trillion Dollar Coach’ by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle. My notes are informal and tailored to my own interests at the time of reading. They mostly contain quotes from the book as well as some of my own thoughts. I enjoyed this book and would recommend you read it yourself (check it out on Amazon).
Leadership advice
What makes a good leader:
Operational excellence
Putting people first
Being decisive
Communicating well
Knowing how to get the most out of even the most challenging people
Focusing on product excellence
Treating people well when they are let go
It’s the people. The top priority of any leader is the well-being and success of their people.
People are the foundation of any company’s 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 people’s skills. Great managers help people excel and grow.
Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way that’s 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.
It is so important for leaders to care about their people beyond the restrictive norms of the typical corporate environment.
It’s a leader’s job to push the team to be more courageous.
Courage is hard. People are naturally afraid of taking risks for fear of failure. It’s the manager’s job to push them past their reticence.
Encouragement as a coach needs to be credible. Conveying boldness is not blind cheerleading. You need the experience and a good enough eye for talent that you generally know what you are talking about. You need the credibility that if you say someone/a team can do something, they believe you, not because you are a cheerleader but because you are a coach and experienced executive.
Be the person who gives energy, not one who takes it away.
Give constant encouragement, be the person who always gives energy.
Be yourself at work.
People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identity to work.
An important aspect of team building is developing relationships within the team.
This can happen organically, but it is important enough that it should not be left to chance. Look for any opportunity to pair people up.
Take a couple of people who don’t usually work together, assign them a task, project, or decision, and let them work on it on their own. This develops trust between the two people, usually regardless of the nature of the work.
When someone new joins, you can assign them a buddy or mentor.
Example projects: preparing materials for public events like earnings calls, producing team offsites, working on compensation and promotion ladders, and developing internal tools.
You can’t talk about leading without talking about winning.
Instill a culture of winning as a team (not as individuals). It’s amazing what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.
You can’t afford to doubt (publicly).
You need to commit. You can make mistakes, but you can’t have one foot in and one foot out, because if you aren’t fully committed, then the people around you won’t be, either. If you’re in, be in.
Loyalty and commitment are easy when you are winning and much harder when you are losing. But that’s when they matter most: when things are going bad, teams are looking for even more loyalty, commitment, and decisiveness from their leaders.
Team first.
All players, from stars to scrubs, must be ready to place the needs of the team above the needs of the individual.
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Coaching
Only coach the coachable. The person you coach needs to have:
Humility. Leadership is not about you,it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Good leaders grow over time, leadership accrues to them from their teams.
Honesty and self-awareness.
The willingness to persevere and work hard.
A constant openness to learning.
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‘Trillion Dollar Coach’ also covered many more insightful topics. You’ll find them below in alphabetical order.
A tip for weekly staff meetings
When everyone had come into the room and gotten settled, he’d start by asking what people did for the weekend, or, if they had just come back from a trip, he’d ask for an informal trip report.
Goals of this:
First, for team members to get to know each other as people, with families and interesting lives outside of work.
Compensation
Compensating people well demonstrates love and respect and ties them strongly to the goals of the company.
Decision making
Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision. There’s indecision in business all the time, because there’s no perfect answer. Do something, even if it’s wrong.
Having a well-run process to get to a decision is just as important as the decision itself, because it gives the team confidence and keeps everyone moving.
The leader’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.
Feedback (giving it)
If the feedback is critical, deliver it in private.
Never embarrass someone publicly.
We often feel torn between supporting and challenging others. It’s a false dichotomy. You want to be supportive and demanding, holding high standards and expectations but giving the encouragement necessary to reach them. It’s tough love.
Firing people
Letting people go is a failure of management, not one of any of the people who are being let go.
It is important for management to let people leave with their heads held up high. Treat them well, with respect. Be generous with severance packages. Send out a note internally celebrating their accomplishments. Many of the people whom you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with the appropriate level of respect.
When you fire someone, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Firing people is tough. When you fire someone, you feel terrible for about a day, then you say to yourself that you should have done it sooner. No one ever succeeds at their third chance.
Helping
Do people favors. Be generous. Do it without hesitation.
Be generous with your time, connections, and other resources.
Know your limits. Instead of saying yes to every request for help, look for high-impact, low-cost ways of giving so that you can sustain your generosity and enjoy it along the way. Do ‘five-minute-favors’. They are easy for the person doing the favor, require minimal personal cost, but mean a lot for the recipient. (check out Adam Rifkin, Give and Take).
Example: Bill got to know one of Jonathan’s admins, a young woman named Chade. One day Bill asked Chade what she was up to, and she mentioned that she was considering studying for the LSAT and that she wanted to go to law school. Chase was worried about how Jonathan would feel about the timing of her possible departure and struggling with when to apply and what and when to tell her boss. When Bill saw Jonathan after meeting Chade that day and told him about their conversation, Jonathan admitted that he didn’t know his admin had her sights set on a number of top schools. “You should get to know your people better!” Bill told him. “Go out there and tell Chade you’ll survive no matter when she goes to school. And since you’re her boss, make time and write her a recommendation. It’s your job.”
Hiring
What to look for in the people you hire:
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.
Hard-working. People who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day. Doers.
High integrity.
Grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and do it again.
Team player. They have to think ‘team first’ and ‘company first’. Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else’s success. Example: when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team, like Stephen Curry jumping up and down when Kevin Durant hits a big shot. You can’t fake that.
Constant learner. Make sure they are always learning. Do they have more answers than questions?
Courage. The willingness to take risks and the willingness to stand up for what’s right for the team, which may entail taking a personal risk.
Soft skills. For example empathy.
Integrity
They loved Bill Campbell in that store. Bill learned the names of the salespeople, always greeted them warmly, and treated everyone with respect, as equals. He acted the same way with the store associates as he did with the people on the Apple board.
When you have a friend who is injured or ill or needs you in some way, you drop everything and just go. That’s what you do, that’s how you really show up.
Listening
Listen intently. Be present.
Pay careful attention to the person you are dealing with… give them your full, undivided attention, really listening carefully.
Don’t check your phone for texts or email.
Don’t glance at your watch or out the window while your mind wanders.
Asking questions is essential to being a great listener.
People perceive the best listeners to be those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.
Often, when people ask for advice, all they are really asking for is approval. (cc book on helping by schein).
Ben Horowitz: Bill would never tell me what to do. Instead he’d ask more and more questions, to get to what the real issue was.
Managing crises
Always be level-headed and constructive.
Lean forward: not what happened and who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it. Immediately focus on what we are going to do about it.
Stay relentlessly positive. Negative situations can be infectious, people get cynical, optimism fades. Get to the heart of the problem, but in a positive way.
Networking
How to introduce people:
When someone new showed up, Bill introduced them around with a generous spirit: he picked your feature or accomplishment and highlighted it.
Many of the people we talked to commented on Bill’s penchant for connecting them to others; he was extraordinary at that. You would be talking to him about something and he would say, you should talk to so-and-so, I’ll put you in touch. Minutes later the email would be on its way. He didn’t do this randomly or for the sake of it; he made a quick calculation that the connection would be beneficial for both people.
Bars seem to be a theme in Bill community-building stories.
Over-communicate
Even when you have clearly communicated something, it may take a few times to sink in. Repetition doesn’t spoil the prayer.
Trust
Trust is the first thing to create if you want a relationship to be successful.
Perhaps the most important currency in a relationship - friendship, romantic, familial, or professional - is trust. Trust is the foundation.
Establishing trust is a key component to building what is now called “psychological safety” in teams.
Definition of trust:
One academic paper defines trust as “the willingness to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations about another’s behavior.”
Trillion dollar coach book: Trust means people feel safe to be vulnerable.
Components of trust:
Trust means you keep your word. If you told Bill you were going to do something, you did it.
Trust means loyalty. To each other, to your family and friends, and to your team and company.
Trust means integrity. One part is to be honest. The other is ability, the trust that you actually have the talent, skills, power, and diligence to accomplish what you promised.
Trust means discretion. Keep secrets for yourself if asked to do so.
Trust doesn’t mean you always agree; in fact, it makes it easier to disagree with someone.
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And a few quotes I found inspiring:
The higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful.
As Peter Drucker astutely pointed out, the greatest manager of all time was probably “the fellow who managed the building of the first pyramid in Egypt some 4,500 years ago.”
You need to learn how to manage people who are short on time and long on ego
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