Three leadership lessons from Trillion Dollar Coach

I recently finished reading Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, a book that shares the leadership lessons of Bill Campbell. Bill was a former executive at Kodak and then Apple, and later became the CEO of Intuit. He was also an informal executive coach to many tech giant CEOs/COOs, including Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Sunder Pichai, Marissa Mayer, Dick Costolo, Dan Rosensweig, Donna Dubinsky, Sheryl Sandberg, Ben Horowitz, and many others.

Schmidt and Rosenberg packed the book with many of Bill Campbell’s leadership principles and stories, but here are three that stuck with me the most.

1. Your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.
2. It’s the people.
3. Tough love

Your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader

Sometimes people expect others to follow them because of their title. Bill Campbell believed that you need to earn the right to lead people by building trust.

“How do you bring people around and help them flourish in your environment?” Bill once asked. “It’s not by being a dictator. It’s not by telling them what the hell to do. It’s making sure that they feel valued by being in the room with you. Listen. Pay attention. This is what great managers do.”

HBS professor Linda Hill agrees, writing in 2007:

“New managers soon learn… that when direct reports are told to do something, they don’t necessarily respond. In fact, the more talented the subordinate, the less likely she is to simply follow orders.” A manager’s authority, “emerges only as the manager establishes credibility with subordinates, peers, and superiors.”

Or, as Bill Campbell said:

“If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.” He once wrote to a struggling manager: “You have demanded respect, rather than having it accrue to you. You need to project humility, a selflessness, that projects that you care about the company and about people.”

Donna Dubinsky, someone who Bill coached, summed it up this way:

“Your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.”

As leadership author John Maxwell has written, the first two levels of leadership are positional and permission-based leadership.

• Positional leaders rely on their title to tell people what to do. They value their position, not their people. They see subordinates as interchangeable cogs. They don’t believe their people can or will do good work. As a result, the followers don’t trust the leader and won’t be influenced by him or her. They put in the minimum effort instead of their best.
• Permission-based leaders like people, want to help them, focus on serving others. In doing so, they build influence through relationships and trust. “When people feel liked, cared for, included, valued, and trusted, they begin to work together with their leader and each other.”

Bill Campbell argued that we should all be permission-based leaders.

It’s the people

Bill Campbell cared deeply about the people he led, and this became the foundation of the trusted relationships he built with others. Bill cared so deeply about his teams, he wrote the “It’s the people” manifesto while he was CEO of Intuit, and he repeated it practically verbatim to multiple CEOs he coached. Here’s the manifesto:

“IT’S THE 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 that people want to do well and believing that they will.”

What does this manifesto mean in practice? It means first believing in people’s desire and ability to do great work. Then it means helping people to grow, respecting their career goals and life choices. And finally, it means giving people freedom to do their jobs.

“It’s the people” means other things as well.

• It means that leaders deeply care about the people on their team, and think through how their decisions will affect their followers. It means knowing what’s important to your people, and trying to anticipate how they will feel regarding an important event or decision.
• It means constantly keeping your people’s well-being, success, and career goals top of mind. It means focusing on what’s in it for them, and how you can make them better.

There is an interesting anecdote from when Bill Campbell handed over the CEO role to his successor at Intuit, Brad Smith.

“When Brad Smith took over as CEO of Intuit, Bill told him that he would go to bed every night thinking about those eight thousand souls who work for him. What are they thinking and feeling? How can I make them the best they can be?”

Ronnie Lott, a former San Francisco 49ers player who worked with Bill Campbell, said this about him.

“Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better… Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how they are going to make someone else better. But that’s what coaches do.”

Tough love

The final lesson I took away from Trillion Dollar Coach is the importance of tough love from the leader to his or her team. “Tough love” in the coaching context means:

• Being honest, transparent, and straightforward with your feedback of how to improve; being demanding and having high standards. (“tough”)
• Being respectful, supportive, caring (“love”)

“Bill was always 100 percent honest (he told the truth) and candid (he wasn’t afraid to offer a harsh opinion).”

“Bill was always transparent; there was no hidden agenda. There was not gap between his statements and fact.” — Google board member Ram Sriram.

“Bill’s candor worked because we always knew it was coming from a place of caring. Former Googler Kim Scott, author of the excellent book Radical Candor, says that being a great boss means ‘saying what you really think in a way that still lets people know you care.’”

Wharton professor Adam Grant described Bill Campbell’s approach as being a “disagreeable giver.”

“You want to be supportive and demand, holding high standards and expectations but giving the encouragement necessary to reach them. Basically, it’s tough love. Disagreeable givers are gruff and tough on the surface, but underneath they have others’ best interests at heart. They give the critical feedback no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.”

In this post, I have reviewed three important leadership lessons that I took away from Trillion Dollar Coach:

1. Your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.
2. It’s the people.
3. Tough love

Your people make you a leader. You can’t get people to follow you because of your title; you need to earn your followers’ trust and respect by showing them that you care for and value them.

It’s the people. You must believe in people’s desire and ability to do great work, and you should give them the freedom to do their jobs. You should constantly think about what matters to your people, how they feel about events and about your decisions, and how you can make them better. Keep your people’s well-being and success as your top priority.

Tough love. Finally, good leaders are demanding and have high standards, and give people candid and transparent feedback (“tough”). But you have to do this along with being respectful, supportive, and caring (“love”).

Bill Campbell offered many important lessons for any leader, entrepreneur, or product manager. I highly encourage you to read Trillion Dollar Coach to get many more insights and wisdom from one of the greatest coaches of all time, who has helped many tech giant C-level executives to become better leaders. Whether or not you’re a formal leader by title, the three lessons from the book that I have shared with help you to better connect with and lead teams.