Leaders Letter 48
12 Lessons From The "Trillion Dollar Coach" Bill Campbell For You To Apply This Week.
12 Lessons From The "Trillion Dollar Coach" Bill Campbell For You To Apply This Week.
Dear leaders,
I trust you had a good weekend.
In 2016 I was told about a legendary coach in Silicon Valley named Bill Campbell who had just passed away.
A TLDR backstory of Bill:
Bill was a coach of an unsuccessful sports team for Columbia, Bill then moved into the business world and had successes at Kodak and Apple before becoming the go-to c-suite coach.
Bill’s coaching roaster is a who’s who of Silicon Valley.
Bill helped the likes of:
Google's former chairman Eric Schmidt, founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and current Alphabet CEO Sindar Pichai
Apple's leaders including co-founder Steve Jobs, long-serving exec Phil Schiller and current CEO Tim Cook.
Ex CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer
The current COO at Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg
Alongside leading Intuit's Brad Smith and business hero Amazon's chairman Jeff Bezos (read business lessons from Jeff Bezos).
Bill’s life and legacy are told in a brilliant biography Trillion Dollar Coach by Former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Google’s Comms leader Alan Eagle and SVP’s of Product Jonathan Rosenberg.
I took a stack of notes and have applied a number of these lessons to a number of my coaching clients.
So, here are the 12 most applicable lessons from the biography and you can apply daily:
Don’t be the hero
Don’t be a fixer
Ask questions and push those towards the answer
Don’t assume employees respect you because of your title
Lean into the hard problems
Guide people to opportunities - many don’t see it myself
It’s not about you - it’s about the team
Listen to what people want and give them a process to an outcome
Never give people the answer
Park your ego & constantly put it in check
Treat everyone with dignity, even in failure
Get rid of people with bad attitudes. You need people that care about the outcome
I highly recommend reading the full book, if you don’t think you have the time, this video from The Tim Ferriss podcast with Eric Schmidt is worth the watch.
The message:
Don’t think you do not need help, you will benefit from a coach.
Good luck with rolling these out and remember often it’s about guiding people and offering a light at the end of the tunnel than giving the answer in success and in failure.
Thanks,
Danny Denhard - Focus Founder & Head Coach
(Get Career Focus With My Business Coaching)
PS: If you like podcasts, listen to the future state of work podcast we dive into the importance of guiding and designing the future of work