At one point when Bill Campbell was CEO of Intuit, the company was having a rough quarter and it looked like it might not make its revenue and profit objectives. When the board got together to discuss what to do about it, most of its members were willing to tolerate missing short-term financial targets, as they felt it was more important for the company to invest in the future. Short-term objectives weren’t as important as long-term growth, which might be sacrificed if spending was curtailed. Bill disagreed. He wanted to get leaner and make the numbers. That is the culture we want to have around here, he explained. It wasn’t so much about hitting those short-term numbers, but about creating a culture where anything less than operational excellence wouldn’t be tolerated. He felt it was management’s job to deliver results, not just for shareholders but for the team and customers. The board wanted to focus on the long run by investing; Bill knew that he was also investing in the long-term success of the company by instilling strong operational discipline.
This particular moment was shaping up as an unusual disagreement between a forgiving board and a disciplined former football coach turned CEO. As the conversation moved around the room, most of the board members wanted to spend their way through the crisis, to invest in the future. They disagreed with their CEO. Finally, it was John Doerr’s turn to weigh in. “You know,” he said, “I think we should back the coach.” John says that was the moment when he earned Bill Campbell’s trust. “The board may have been correct,” he says. “But isn’t the real right answer to back your CEO?” It almost didn’t matter what the debate was about; it was something that Bill felt passionate about, and John decided to bet on Bill. He trusted him.
Perhaps the most important currency in a relationship—friendship, romantic, familial, or professional—is trust. This was certainly true with Bill Campbell. If Bill didn’t trust you, you didn’t have a relationship with him. But if he did trust you, and vice versa, that trust was the basis for all other aspects of the relationship. Trust is of course important for any relationship, but in most business relationships it takes its place alongside other factors: personal agendas, mutual exchange of value. For Bill, trust was always first and foremost; it was sort of his superpower. He was great at establishing it, and once established, he was great at honoring it. In one of the last times they saw each other, Bill told Alan Eustace, “You know I would do anything for you.” He meant it, because of the trust between them.
Trust is a multifaceted concept, so what do we mean by it? One academic paper defines trust as “the willingness to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations about another’s behavior.”1 That’s a bit of an academic mouthful, but it captures the essential point that trust means people feel safe to be vulnerable. When we are referring to Bill and trust, it means a few things.
Trust means you keep your word. If you told Bill you were going to do something, you did it. And the same applied to him; his word was always good.
Trust means loyalty. To each other, to your family and friends, and to your team and company. Bill was one of the few Apple executives to fight to keep Steve Jobs when he was let go from the company in 1985. Steve never forgot that expression of loyalty, which later became the basis for their close friendship and working relationship.
Trust means integrity. Bill was always honest, and he expected the same in return. And it means ability, the trust that you actually had the talent, skills, power, and diligence to accomplish what you promised.
Trust means discretion. When Eric was CEO of Google, one of his team members was diagnosed with a serious medical condition (he later fully recovered) but chose not to share it with Eric or the rest of the team. The only person who knew was Bill, who told no one. Eric later found out, and rather than be annoyed that Bill kept the information from him, he was happy to learn that Bill was so trustworthy. Bill could keep a secret, even from Eric, and so could act as a confidant to anyone on the team. This is very valuable to a coach, who always needs to know what’s going on, but also needs to be seen by his coachees as someone who honors their privacy.
Perhaps the idea that trust is a cornerstone of business success belongs in the “well duh, Captain Obvious” bucket. But it is missing from many of today’s business books, and it never came up as a factor in Google’s success when we were researching and writing our previous book, How Google Works. So it was somewhat of a surprise to us that when we interviewed the dozens of successful businesspeople Bill had mentored, the word came up again and again. Dean Gilbert, a former executive at Google and @Home, and an accomplished management coach in his own right, notes that “Bill would build an envelope of trust very quickly. It was a natural thing for him, this ability to build rapport, a sense of comfort and protection. It’s the cornerstone of any coaching in business.” Vinod Khosla, a Sun Microsystems cofounder and head of Khosla Ventures, says that he and Bill “built a great relationship around trust, whether we agreed or disagreed.” An important point: trust doesn’t mean you always agree; in fact, it makes it easier to disagree with someone. These are just a couple of the numerous quotes we could cite from people who worked with Bill, all of them basically saying the same thing: You could trust Bill. His success stemmed from that.
A slew of academic research bears out what Bill intuitively knew—not just that trust is important, but that it is the first thing to create if you want a relationship to be successful. It is the foundation. For example, a highly cited 2000 study from Cornell University discusses the correlation between task conflict (disagreements about decisions) and relationship conflict (emotional friction) in teams. Task conflict is healthy and is important to get to the best decisions, but it is highly correlated with relationship conflict, which leads to poorer decisions and morale. What to do? Build trust first, the study concludes. Teams that trust each other will still have disagreements, but when they do, they will be accompanied by less emotional rancor.2
Most business people, when they meet, get right to the task at hand. There’s stuff to do! This is especially true in technology, technologists not being noted for their high EQs or social skills. In our world, the attitude is often first prove to me how smart you are, then maybe I’ll trust you, or at least your intellect. Bill took a different, more patient approach. He started relationships by getting to know the person, beyond their résumé and skill set. Shishir Mehrotra notes that Bill “walked among a set of driven technologists, but he saw the world in a completely different way . . . He saw it as a network of people, learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and learning to trust each other as a primary mechanism of achieving goals.”
Trust is also an important theme among the best sports coaches (and was the subject of Bill’s pregame talk to the Stanford football team, when he was made honorary captain for a game in 2012). Red Auerbach, who as a coach and executive led the Boston Celtics to sixteen NBA championships in thirty years (including a remarkable eight straight), had a simple way of expressing the importance of trust: “The players won’t con me because I don’t con them.”3 He believed that level of trust led to stability and to greater commitment from his players: “When players find themselves in a situation where management has a great deal of integrity and they can depend on my word or anybody else’s word in the organization, they feel secure. And if the players feel secure, they don’t want to leave here. And if they don’t want to leave here, they’re going to do everything they can on the court to stay here.”
Establishing trust is a key component to building what is now called “psychological safety” in teams. Team psychological safety, according to a 1999 Cornell study, is a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking . . . a team climate . . . in which people are comfortable being themselves.”4 This is exactly the feeling we experienced when working with Bill; he quickly established a relationship where we could be ourselves, without fear. Not surprisingly, when Google conducted a study to determine the factors behind high-performing teams, psychological safety came out at the top of the list.* The common notions that the best teams are made up of people with complementary skill sets or similar personalities were disproven; the best teams are the ones with the most psychological safety. And that starts with trust.
It’s hard to disagree with the notion that trust is essential for productive relationships. But in the high-stakes, big-ego world of business executives, it is easier said than done (especially when you remember that our protagonist, Coach Bill, had quite a healthy ego of his own and the opinions and stubbornness to match). How did Bill do it? First, he only coached the coachable. Then, if you passed that test, he listened intently, practiced complete candor, believed that his coachees could achieve remarkable things, and was intensely loyal.
ONLY COACH THE COACHABLE
On a January day in 2002, Jonathan drove over to the Google office in Mountain View, where he thought he was going to pick up a formal job offer to become head of the growing Google product team. He thought the job was a lock, but once he arrived, he was escorted to a plain conference room where a gruff, older guy greeted him. It was the first time Jonathan met Bill. He couldn’t quite remember who Bill was, and did not realize, at least at first, that this guy was the final gateway on the road to employment at the company. No problem, thought Jonathan, I’m a pretty big deal, SVP from a successful tech company, @Home. I got this!
Bill looked at Jonathan for what seemed like minutes, then told him that he had spoken with a few of the principals from @Home: its cofounder Tom Jermoluk; its first CEO, William Randolph Hearst III; and one of its investors, John Doerr, who was also on Google’s board. The consensus, Bill reported, was that Jonathan was smart and worked hard. Jonathan’s chest puffed a bit.
“But I don’t care about any of that,” Bill said. “I only have one question: Are you coachable?”
Jonathan instantly, and regrettably, replied: “It depends on the coach.”
Wrong answer.
“Smart alecks are not coachable,” Bill snapped. He stood up to leave, interview over, as it dawned on Jonathan that he had heard Eric Schmidt was getting coaching from someone and, oh my God, this must be the guy. Jonathan switched from smart-aleck mode to groveling mode, backing away from his quip (which wasn’t exactly a quip), and asked Bill to continue the conversation. After another moment that felt like minutes, Bill sat back down and talked about how he chose the people he was going to work with based on humility. Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, that leadership accrues to them from their teams. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this. There was no room in this formula for smart alecks and their hubris.
Bill then asked, “What do you want to get out of a coach?”
This felt like, and indeed was, a change-your-life-forever moment. And Jonathan couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally and fortunately, in what football fans might call a Hail Mary play, he remembered a quote from Tom Landry, who coached the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine years, a stint that included twenty straight winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles. “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.” That’s what I want, Jonathan told Bill.
It worked. Jonathan not only got the job, he got the coach he didn’t think he needed, but sorely did.
People who want to get the best out of a coaching relationship need to be coachable. Bill’s approach to coaching was rooted in his mind-set that almost all people have value, not based on their title or role but on who they are. His job was to make them better. But only if they were coachable. And, Jonathan’s experience notwithstanding, that was based on a lot more than the ability to pull a pithy quote out of the ether (or nether) in a pinch.
The traits of coachability Bill sought were honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning. Honesty and humility because a successful coaching relationship requires a high degree of vulnerability, much more than is typical in a business relationship. Coaches need to learn how self-aware a coachee is; they need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Where are they honest with themselves, and where are their blind spots? And then it is the coach’s job to raise that self-awareness further and to help them see the flaws they don’t see for themselves. People don’t like to talk about these flaws, which is why honesty and humility are so important. If people can’t be honest with themselves and their coach, and if they aren’t humble enough to recognize how they aren’t perfect, they won’t get far in that relationship.
Humility, because Bill believed that leadership is about service to something that is bigger than you: your company, your team. Today the concept of “servant leadership” is in vogue and has been directly linked to stronger company performance.*5 Bill believed and practiced it well before it became popular. The coachable people are the ones who can see that they are part of something bigger than themselves. You can have a considerable ego and still be part of an even bigger cause. This is one reason Bill threw himself into coaching people at Google. He foresaw that the company had the potential to have a big impact in the world, to indeed be far bigger in every way than any of its individual execs.
The flip side of the honest, humble person is the bullshitter. “Bill couldn’t stand BSers,” John Hennessy says. He’s the former president of Stanford University who worked closely with Bill on several fronts. Bill’s opposition to bullshitters wasn’t as much about their dishonesty with others as it was about their dishonesty with themselves. To be coachable, you need to be brutally honest, starting with yourself. As Hennessy says, “People who generate a lot of BS aren’t coachable. They start to believe what they are saying. They shade the truth to conform to their BS, which makes the BS even more dangerous.”
Perhaps this intolerance came from Bill’s football days. As Hennessy puts it, “There’s no room for BS on the football field!”
ONLY COACH THE COACHABLE
THE TRAITS THAT MAKE A PERSON COACHABLE INCLUDE HONESTY AND HUMILITY, THE WILLINGNESS TO PERSEVERE AND WORK HARD, AND A CONSTANT OPENNESS TO LEARNING.
PRACTICE FREE-FORM LISTENING
In a coaching session with Bill, you could expect that he would listen intently. No checking his phone for texts or email, no glancing at his watch or out the window while his mind wandered. He was always right there. Today it is popular to talk about “being present” or “in the moment.” We’re pretty sure those words never passed the coach’s lips, yet he was one of their great practitioners. Al Gore says he learned from Bill how “important it is to pay careful attention to the person you are dealing with . . . give them your full, undivided attention, really listening carefully. Only then do you go into the issue. There’s an order to it.”
Alan Eustace called Bill’s approach “free-form listening”—academics might call it “active listening,” a term first coined in 19576—and in practicing it Bill was following the advice of the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who felt that poor listening was a trait shared by many leaders: “We’d all be a lot wiser if we listened more,” Wooden said, “not just hearing the words, but listening and not thinking about what we’re going to say.”7
Bill’s listening was usually accompanied by a lot of questions, a Socratic approach. A 2016 Harvard Business Review article notes that this approach of 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.”8
“Bill would never tell me what to do,” says Ben Horowitz. “Instead he’d ask more and more questions, to get to what the real issue was.” Ben found an important lesson in Bill’s technique that he applies today when working with his fund’s CEOs. Often, when people ask for advice, all they are really asking for is approval. “CEOs always feel like they need to know the answer,” Ben says. “So when they ask me for advice, I’m always getting a prepared question. I never answer those.” Instead, like Bill, he asks more questions, trying to understand the multiple facets of a situation. This helps him get past the prepared question (and answer) and discover the heart of an issue.
Listening well helps ensure that all ideas and perspectives get surfaced. Jerry Kaplan tells a story in Startup, his book about GO, about how the management team decided to shift the architecture of their computing system from Intel-based processors to RISC-based ones. (RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. Today, most computers are RISC-based, as are most smartphones.)
Bill was the CEO, but as Jerry tells the story, this major strategic decision emerged from a rowdy management meeting where Bill teed up the problem (they were starting to compete with Microsoft, so perhaps they should “go where they aren’t”) and let his team throw out the best ideas. They argued for a while and were initially incredulous when Mike Homer, who had worked with Bill at Apple (and became a lifelong friend), came up with the idea to shift processors, and Robert Carr, the company’s cofounder and head of software, suggested RISC. But it gradually became obvious that the new idea was the best, so that’s what they did.9
When you listen to people, they feel valued. A 2003 study from Lund University in Sweden finds that “mundane, almost trivial” things like listening and chatting with employees are important aspects of successful leadership, because “people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork.”10 And a 2016 paper finds that this form of “respectful inquiry,” where the leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective because it heightens the “follower’s” feelings of competence (feeling challenged and experiencing mastery), relatedness (feeling of belonging), and autonomy (feeling in control and having options). Those three factors are sort of the holy trinity of the self-determination theory of human motivation, originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.11
As Salar Kamangar, an early Google executive, puts it, “Bill was uplifting. No matter what we discussed, I felt heard, understood, and supported.”*
PRACTICE FREE-FORM LISTENING
LISTEN TO PEOPLE WITH YOUR FULL AND UNDIVIDED ATTENTION—DON’T THINK AHEAD TO WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO SAY NEXT—AND ASK QUESTIONS TO GET TO THE REAL ISSUE.
NO GAP BETWEEN STATEMENTS AND FACT
One day Bill dropped by Dan Rosensweig’s office at Chegg. Dan had just given an upbeat presentation at the board meeting. The company, which had been on the verge of going under, was in a much more stable position. Not growing, but at least not failing. Dan and his team were in a celebratory mood.
Bill walked into the office sporting a green eyeshade, the kind accountants used to wear in the early parts of the twentieth century to reduce eye strain. He went around the office space, greeting people at their desks before eventually arriving at Dan’s door. Congratulations, he said, you saved the company. You are now the most successful nongrowth CEO in the valley! The accountants may be happy, but that’s about it, because that’s not what you came here to do, is it? He hugged Dan, then chucked the eyeshade at him. Dan realized in that moment that he had solved only one problem, a big one, but Bill was right. Dan didn’t want to just save the company, he wanted to grow it. The truth was a bit of a slap in the face, but it was time to get back to work.
Bill was always 100 percent honest (he told the truth) and candid (he wasn’t afraid to offer a harsh opinion). A straight shooter if there ever was one. Google board member and former Amazon executive Ram Shriram: “Bill was always transparent; there was no hidden agenda. There was no gap between his statements and fact. They were always the same.” Intuit cofounder Scott Cook: “He really taught me about honesty and authenticity in giving feedback. You can keep someone’s respect and loyalty while delivering tough news about their performance.”
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.”12 In the Dan Rosensweig anecdote, for example, Bill accomplishes this with humor, delivering a tough message (nongrowth CEO) with a funny prop (green eyeshade). You’d have to care to wear that thing!
An important component of providing candid feedback is not to wait. “A coach coaches in the moment,” Scott Cook says. “It’s more real and more authentic, but so many leaders shy away from that.” Many managers wait until performance reviews to provide feedback, which is often too little, too late. Bill’s feedback was in the moment (or very close to it), task specific, and always followed by a grin and a hug, all of which helped remove the sting.
He’d also make sure that if the feedback was critical, to deliver it in private. Diane Greene, the head of Google Cloud and former VMware CEO who worked with Bill when they were on the board at Intuit, learned from Bill to never embarrass someone publicly. “When I’m really annoyed or frustrated with what someone is doing,” she says, “I step back and force myself to think about what they are doing well and what their value is. You can always find something. If we’re in public, I’ll praise them on that. I’ll give constructive feedback as soon as I can, but only when the person is feeling safe. Once they are feeling safe and supported, then I’ll say ‘by the way’ and provide the feedback. I got this from Bill. He would always do this in a supportive way.”
Pat Gallagher was in the front office of the San Francisco Giants for many years before they moved into the beautiful AT&T Park and won three world championships. He was Bill’s neighbor and friend, but also a recipient of some of his legendary candor. You’re the marketing guy with the worst ballpark in America (the regrettable Candlestick Park, the team’s previous home) and a shitty team, Bill told Pat (we assume Pat was in a safe place at the time!). You’d better do everything you can to make the customer experience great! It’s all you’ve got.
Jesse Rogers has a similar story. He became Bill’s friend because their kids went to Sacred Heart together, but became his coachee as he was trying to decide if he should leave his job and strike out on his own. The two talked about it a lot, and Jesse decided to make the jump. A few weeks later, as he was getting set up in his new office, he sent Bill the link to the brand-new website of the firm he had cofounded, Altamont Capital. A few minutes later, Jesse’s phone rang. He expected some nice words of congratulations, a verbal pat on the back. Instead, “Your website is a piece of shit!” was how Bill said hello. Followed by a couple more minutes of ranting on how the Altamont website was not up to snuff. This was Silicon Valley; you couldn’t be a successful startup here and have a shitty website! It was a full minute or two before Jesse could say anything. “Bill’s natural state is to be oppositional and challenge you,” Jesse says. “The great thing about Bill is that he is aggressive and tenacious in giving negative feedback.”*
Bill was candid with the kids, too. Jonathan’s daughter, Hannah, grew up wanting to play big-time college soccer, which in the United States means Division I. Bill watched her play, then told her, sure, she could make a Division I college team and might even start at some programs. Or she could go to a Division III school and be a star while getting a great education. Hannah was deflated, but she knew the coach was right. She subsequently graduated with a degree in engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, helped them win an NCAA Division III championship her senior year, and earned a Scholar All-America award.
Of course, being Bill, sometimes that candor could be presented in fairly raw language. Mason Randall was a star athlete at Sacred Heart and the quarterback of the eighth-grade flag football team, which Bill coached. One day they were playing archrival Menlo. Mason threw a late interception, which helped contribute to a Sacred Heart loss. He was walking off the field, head low, dejected, when Bill came up beside him. He stuck his forefinger in his cheek, popped it out, and said, “Mason! What’s that?”
“It’s the sound of my head coming out of my ass?” the eighth grader asked, repeating an oft-heard Bill phrase.
“That’s right. Get your head up! We lost this one as a team!”
The interesting thing is—and our experience with Bill bears this out—that his candor, no matter how brutal, made you feel better. This seems counterintuitive; after all, having someone tell you how badly you screwed up should feel pretty crummy. But coming from Bill it didn’t; the formula of candor plus caring works well! We trusted that Bill was kicking our butts to help make us better. As Vinod Khosla says, “Lots of people won’t actually state their mind. Bill always stated what he was thinking. But he did it in a way that even if people were disappointed, they were charged up about it! That’s an unusual talent.”
Dave Kinser, Bill’s head of operations at Claris, recalls a time that Bill was going to chew out one of Dave’s fellow executives. Before the “ball busting,” Bill approached Dave, told him about what he was going to do, and asked him if he could talk to the exec afterward. Bill thought the guy would need some moral support. So later that day, Dave tentatively walked into the guy’s office and was surprised to see him excited and pumped up. Bill had indeed delivered the tough message, but the guy felt great about it. Dave went back to Bill’s office and took credit for rebuilding the man’s confidence, when in fact no damage had been done!
NO GAP BETWEEN STATEMENTS AND FACT
BE RELENTLESSLY HONEST AND CANDID, COUPLE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK WITH CARING, GIVE FEEDBACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, AND IF THE FEEDBACK IS NEGATIVE, DELIVER IT PRIVATELY.
DON’T STICK IT IN THEIR EAR
And when he was finished asking questions and listening, and busting your butt, he usually would not tell you what to do. He believed that managers should not walk in with an idea and “stick it in their ear.” Don’t tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it.
“I used to describe success and prescribe to everyone how we were going to do it,” says Dan Rosensweig. “Bill coached me to tell stories. When people understand the story they can connect to it and figure out what to do. You need to get people to buy in. It’s like a running back in football. You don’t tell him exactly what route to run. You tell him where the hole is and what’s the blocking scheme and let him figure it out.”
Jonathan often experienced this as a sort of test: Bill would tell a story and let Jonathan go off and think about it until their next session to see if Jonathan could process and understand the lesson it contained and its implications. Chad Hurley, YouTube cofounder, had the same experience. “It was like sitting with a friend at the Old Pro [the Palo Alto sports bar],” Chad says. “He would talk about things that had happened to him. He wasn’t trying to preach, just be present.”
Fortunately, Bill expected similar candor in return. Alan Gleicher, who worked with Bill as the head of sales and operations at Intuit, had a simple way of summing up how to be successful with him. “Don’t dance. If Bill asks a question and you don’t know the answer, don’t dance around it. Tell him you don’t know!” For Bill, honesty and integrity weren’t just about keeping your word and telling the truth; they were also about being forthright. This is critical for effective coaching; a good coach doesn’t hide the stuff that’s hard to talk about—in fact, a good coach will draw this out. He or she gets at the hard stuff.
Scholars would describe Bill’s approach—listening, providing honest feedback, demanding candor—as “relational transparency,” which is a core characteristic of “authentic leadership.”13 Wharton professor Adam Grant has another term for it: “disagreeable givers.” He notes in an email to us that “we often feel torn between supporting and challenging others. Social scientists reach the same conclusion for leadership as they do for parenting: 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. 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.”
Research on organizations shows what Bill seemed to know instinctively: that these leadership traits lead to better team performance. One study of a chain of retail stores found that when employees saw their managers as authentic (for example, agreeing that the manager “says exactly what he or she means”), the employees trusted the leaders more, and the stores had higher sales.14
DON’T STICK IT IN THEIR EAR
DON’T TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO DO; OFFER STORIES AND HELP GUIDE THEM TO THE BEST DECISIONS FOR THEM.
BE THE EVANGELIST FOR COURAGE
In 2014, Twitter was negotiating a partnership deal with Google that would allow Google to include tweets in its search results. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO at the time, was working with his team on the deal. There were a lot of concerns about the terms, so the team was advocating a smaller deal to test things out first. Dick updated Bill on the progress at his next coaching 1:1.
“This is onesy, twosy stuff,” Bill told him. Dick shouldn’t nibble around the edges; he should push for the boldest solution possible. If he was going to do something big, there was no way to anticipate all the smaller details and problems, so maybe sign a shorter-term deal. But the main point was to go big. “There’s a big idea here! Come up with a more courageous path forward.” Dick got the team to be more aggressive, and a few months later they announced a deal to give Google access to Twitter’s data stream.
Bill’s perspective was that it’s a manager’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. Shona Brown, a longtime Google executive, calls it being an “evangelist for courage.” As a coach, Bill was a never-ending evangelist for courage. As Bill Gurley notes, he “blew confidence into people.” He believed you could do things, even when you yourself weren’t so sure, always pushing you to go beyond your self-imposed limits. Danny Shader, founder and CEO of PayNearMe, who worked with Bill at GO: “The thing I got the most out of meetings with Bill is courage. I always came away thinking, I can do this. He believed you could do stuff that you didn’t believe you could do.”
Emil Michael says, “He would always convey boldness to me. It would always give me such a boost. That’s one thing I learned from Bill: be the person who gives energy, not one who takes it away.” This quality of constant encouragement, of being the person to give energy, has been shown to be one of the most important aspects of effective coaching.*15
Shishir Mehrotra started his first company, Centrata, in 2001. Not long afterward, he got a call from one of his investors. The company was struggling and needed to cut expenses. The investor had gone through the résumés of everyone in the company and chosen the people he felt should be laid off. They were mostly the more junior people in the company; the investor thought the company needed to retain its more experienced people. The problem was, most of the people the investor had selected were Shishir’s cofounders. Shishir didn’t think letting them go was a smart move, but when pressed by the investor, he did it. Then he called Bill.
Bill was furious. Where was Shishir’s courage? “His constant advice to me, even back then, was to trust my instincts,” Shishir says. “I was twenty-two years old!” Bill asked Shishir, did he think laying off all the junior staff was the right thing to do? Shishir’s answer was no, these people are the cofounders, they care more. The more senior people are more like mercenaries. They’ll leave as soon as things go south. Bill coached Shishir to have the courage to follow his instincts, so he turned around and rehired the people he had just laid off. They formed the core of the company for the next several years.
Conveying boldness was not blind cheerleading on Bill’s part. He had the mind-set that most people have value, and he had the experience and a good enough eye for talent that he generally knew what he was talking about. He had such credibility that if he said that you could do something, you believed him, not because he was a cheerleader but because he was a coach and experienced executive. He built his message on your capabilities and progress. This is a key aspect of delivering encouragement as a coach: it needs to be credible.*16
And if you believed him, you started to believe in yourself, which of course helped you achieve whatever daunting task lay before you. “He gave me permission to go forth,” Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat says. “To have confidence in my judgment.”
This confidence is even more important when things are rough. Millard “Mickey” Drexler, the former CEO of J.Crew and Gap, who sat on the Apple board for sixteen years alongside Bill, is a firm believer in the CEO as coach model, particularly in challenging times. When things are bad, “people come into work every day getting beat up. Everyone feels awful. As a leader, you can’t fix problems on your own, and you can’t fix them when morale is down. So you need to build the confidence of the team.”
Bill set high standards for his coachees; he believed they could be great, greater than what they believed. This created an aspiration for each of us, and disappointment when we thought that we were not living up to that aspiration. Bill set the bar higher for us than we set it for ourselves, and when you approach people with that mind-set, they respond.
BE THE EVANGELIST FOR COURAGE
BELIEVE IN PEOPLE MORE THAN THEY BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES, AND PUSH THEM TO BE MORE COURAGEOUS.
FULL IDENTITY FRONT AND CENTER
David Drummond is Alphabet’s head of corporate development and legal affairs, and is an African American. “When you come from a background that is not traditional—if you’re black—you don’t typically fit in,” David says. “There is a strong pressure to conform and not show that part of yourself. In Silicon Valley, you are supposed to be either technical or from a fancy business school.” Bill Campbell was neither, but he still, as David puts it, “put his full identity front and center.”
Bill and David talked about this, with Bill counseling David that so much about him was where he came from, and that he should hang on to that as a source of motivation and strength. “He made me less self-conscious about the fact that I wasn’t the same as everyone. That I was black.”
One thing we learned from interviewing people for this book was how much Bill encouraged people to be themselves at work, well before the “bringing your whole self” meme became so popular. This isn’t something we ever heard directly from him; white heterosexual males who attended top schools (that is, us) don’t typically have issues with being themselves at their workplace. But as a guy from a working-class town, a former football coach with a nontechnical degree who parachuted into Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, Bill had some experience with feeling out of place. Yet he was always fully himself, and he expected no less than that from the people he coached. He felt that when people could be so authentic as to bring their full selves to work, they would be more respected by their colleagues, and would appreciate it more when others did the same.
Brad Smith (former Intuit CEO) and Shellye Archambeau (former CEO of MetricStream) received similar advice from Bill. Brad is from West Virginia and sports a strong accent; early in his career he was advised to get speech training to lose it. He decided not to. “I realized my accent isn’t a bug, it’s a feature,” Brad now says (perfectly mixing Silicon Valley parlance with West Virginia drawl). “People prefer leaders who are different because it makes leadership seem more attainable.” Shellye is an African American, and early in her career, when she was in sales at IBM, she tried to shed her cultural background and dress and act like everyone else. Bill helped her past that. “He encouraged me to dress however I felt most comfortable, because people can tell when you’re not being yourself,” she says. “Then they try to figure out why not, and that breeds distrust.”
FULL IDENTITY FRONT AND CENTER
PEOPLE ARE MOST EFFECTIVE WHEN THEY CAN BE COMPLETELY THEMSELVES AND BRING THEIR FULL IDENTITY TO WORK.
These are the elements that formed the foundation of Bill’s success as an executive coach—and that those who benefited from his coaching took with them when they became coaches to their own colleagues and direct reports, too. He started by building trust, which only deepened over time. He was highly selective in choosing his coachees; he would only coach the coachable, the humble, hungry lifelong learners. He listened intently, without distraction. He usually didn’t tell you what to do; rather, he shared stories and let you draw conclusions. He gave, and demanded, complete candor. And he was an evangelist for courage, by showing inordinate confidence and setting aspirations high.
All of these created a remarkable environment when you were in the room with him: it was an atmosphere dedicated to making you better. As former CEO of eBay John Donahoe says, “It wasn’t so much about the advice and insight he gave me. With Bill you close your eyes and it’s more about who he was. I felt it more than I heard it.”