When Google went public, in August 2004, it created two classes of stock. Class A shares were the ones sold to the public, each share coming with traditional voting rights: one share equals one vote. But class B shares were different: each share came with ten votes. Class B shares were not sold publicly and were held by Google insiders, such as cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric. This “dual class” structure ensured that Google’s founders and executive team retained control of the company. This structure was unusual at the time and highly controversial, stirring public debate in the months leading up to the IPO.*
To Larry and Sergey, the structure was a critical element of their vision for the company. They admired Warren Buffett and had become knowledgeable about the dual class stock structure that his company Berkshire Hathaway employed. They had always considered Google as much an institution as a business. They fervently believed in thinking long term, making big bets and big investments in those bets, without having to consider the quarterly ups and downs of public markets. They were concerned that Google would lose this “think big” propensity once it was a public company, and they saw the dual class stock structure as a way to guard against that happening. Their interests would always be aligned with that of shareholders, they reasoned, because long-term thinking and investing was the best way to maximize value for everyone.
Eric found himself at the center of this debate. After many hours talking with the founders, he became convinced that theirs was the best approach. He believed it would keep Google on track not just in its current businesses but in its broader mission of organizing the world’s information, and it would actually lead to the creation of greater shareholder value than the traditional structure. He made this case to the board, but there was still a lot of open discussion.
At the same time, some board members had been mulling over the idea of bringing in a new chairman of the board, someone who was more independent of the company, and the discussion on the dual stock classes pushed them even further in that direction. They asked Eric if he would step aside as chairman. He would remain as CEO.
Eric was hurt by this stance. He felt he had done a good job in his three years as chairman and CEO, and, as far as he knew, the board agreed. He had earned the trust of the founders and employees, the company had performed very well, and they were about to go public. And for that they wanted to remove him as chairman? He got on a call with Bill and gave his perspective on the situation.
“What are you going to do?” Bill asked.
In a moment full of pride and hurt, Eric said, “I’m going to quit Google.”
“Okay,” Bill said. “When?”
At that moment, as the coach of Google’s executive team, Bill became a critical player in the future of the company. The greatest team in technology was about to break up. Bill couldn’t let it happen. The meeting with the board where all this would be decided—where Eric was going to step down not just as chairman, but maybe as CEO, too—was on Thursday, a couple of days hence. Bill got to work.
Bill Campbell was a coach of teams. He built them, shaped them, put the right players in the right positions (and removed the wrong players from the wrong positions), cheered them on, and kicked them in their collective butt when they were underperforming. He knew, as he often said, that “you can’t get anything done without a team.” This is an obvious point in the realm of sports, but it’s often underappreciated in business. “You can only really succeed and accomplish things through the collective, the common purpose,” Lee C. Bollinger says. “There are so many ways in which people don’t understand this, and even when they do understand it, they don’t know how to do it. That’s where Bill’s genius was.”
Bill’s guiding principle was that the team is paramount, and the most important thing he looked for and expected in people was a “team-first” attitude. Teams are not successful unless every member is loyal and will, when necessary, subjugate their personal agenda to that of the team. That the team wins has to be the most important thing. Perhaps Charles Darwin said it best in his book The Descent of Man: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”1
Back in 2004, Bill correctly assessed that feelings were rubbed raw over the pending IPO, the discussions on how to structure the company, and the idea that Eric step down as chairman. He understood that Eric was hurt, but he also knew that the team needed him to stay. He also felt that Eric was the best person to be the company’s chairman, at that point and for the foreseeable future. So he thought about the situation and called Eric back the next day. You can’t leave, the team needs you, he stated. How about if you step down as chairman for now, and remain as CEO? And then at some point, not too far from now, Bill would see to it that Eric got reinstated as chairman.
He’d offered a reasonable compromise and appealed to Eric’s loyalty to Google. This was not a fight to have today, he told Eric. Your pride is getting in the way of what’s best for the company, and for you.
Eric saw that Bill was right, and he had no doubt that Bill could implement what he was proposing, so Eric agreed. Together they talked through how the board meeting the next day would go, and by the time Thursday rolled around, Eric was well prepared. He stepped down as chairman and stayed on as CEO. Later, in 2007, he was reinstated as chairman, a role he held until April 2011. He was executive chairman from that date until January 2018.
Many people might look at Eric’s short-lived decision to leave Google as completely crazy. Look how much stock he would be leaving behind! But in teams, and particularly high-performing teams, other things matter, too. It’s not just about money! Purpose, pride, ambition, ego: these are vital motivators as well and must be considered by any manager or coach. Bill knew that he had to appeal to Eric both emotionally and rationally. His suggested compromise worked.
At the time he proposed the compromise, Bill did not have everyone’s agreement that Eric would be reinstated as chairman down the road. He simply knew that it was the right thing to do for the company, and that, as the coach, he had the influence to make things like that happen. Bill’s integrity and his long record of sound judgment were paramount. When the time was right, when the IPO was done and emotions had simmered down, Bill would make the case to reinstate Eric as chairman. Which is exactly what happened.
This was an example of high-stakes team building, with a multibillion-dollar IPO at stake and investors, founders, and executives debating difficult issues. But it is in precisely these situations that a team coach is needed the most, someone who can see past individual egos and understand the value that all of the members, combined, create. Team building is vital at every company, and the principles Bill espoused apply at every level of an organization. But it gets a lot harder to hold a team together at senior levels in companies, where egos and ambitions are considerable.
Senior executives may have access to individual executive coaching, but team coaches at that level are more rare. After all, all-star teams may have coaches, but they aren’t really coaching—they usually just sit back and enjoy the show! So why should executive teams, which consist of presumably the most talented people in the company, need a coach? “It was bizarre to me when I first joined the company,” Patrick Pichette says. “You have all these amazing people at Google. Why would they need a coach?”
In fact, it’s nearly impossible to overstate Bill’s influence in nurturing the Google management team during the company’s formative years, an influence that continued until he passed away. As Omid Kordestani, former Google head of sales, puts it: “What was very special about Google was the community aspect of the senior team. Bill was the glue in that process.”
So as a coach of teams, what would Bill do? His first instinct was always to work the team, not the problem. In other words, he focused on the team’s dynamics, not on trying to solve the team’s particular challenges. That was their job. His job was team building, assessing people’s talents, and finding the doers. He ran toward the biggest problems, the stinkers that fester and cause tension. He focused on winning but winning right, and he doubled down on his core values when things turned south. And he brought resolution by filling the gaps between people, listening, observing, and then seeking people out in behind-the-scenes conversations that brought teams together.
“You always had the sense he was building a team,” says Sheryl Sandberg. “With Bill, it wasn’t executive coaching or career coaching. It was never just about me. It was always about the team.”
WORK THE TEAM, THEN THE PROBLEM
At a Google meeting a few years ago, the group was discussing an issue related to costs in some of the developing businesses. Ram Shriram raised concerns: the numbers were getting big! Shouldn’t we get more details on how we are working on this? There was some back-and-forth, then Bill spoke up. Don’t worry, he said, we have the right team in place. They are working the problem.
“I learned something from that,” Ram says. “Bill didn’t work the problem first, he worked the team. We didn’t talk about the problem analytically. We talked about the people on the team and if they could get it done.”
As managers, we tend to focus on the problem at hand. What is the situation? What are the issues? What are the options? And so on. These are valid questions, but the coach’s instinct is to lead with a more fundamental one. Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed? “When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.”
Bill helped us employ this approach in a problem that arose in 2010. Apple (and in particular, Steve Jobs) believed that Google’s Android operating system violated patents that Apple had developed for the iPhone. They sued Google’s business partners, the manufacturers of Android phones. This wasn’t just a business or a legal problem to Bill—it was personal. He was close friends with Jobs and a member of Apple’s board—as well as an informal but influential coach to Google’s leadership team. It was like his two children were fighting, with much more at stake than a favorite toy.
Bill’s approach was to focus on the team, not the problem. He never even offered an opinion on the relative merits of each side’s case, even though he was quite knowledgeable about the issues and the phone features in question. He did, however, counsel Eric to put the right guy in charge of talking to Apple: Alan Eustace. Alan became the chief diplomat interfacing with Apple. It became his job to ensure that the relationship between the companies didn’t implode.
Much later in Bill’s career, Google was planning an important change to its corporate structure. The company was forming a new holding company, to be called Alphabet, and moving some of its most speculative efforts (called “other bets”) out into separate companies. This new organization was a major shift in the operating structure and management culture; Sundar Pichai was being promoted to run Google, with Larry Page moving over to become CEO of Alphabet. Meanwhile, the company’s head of sales, Nikesh Arora, had left, creating a big hole in one of the key leadership positions. The company contacted Omid Kordestani, its first head of sales. Would he be interested in coming back?
“It was clear at that point that we would be moving to Alphabet, and that Sundar would be CEO of Google,” Omid says, “but it wasn’t clear how we would get there. There were so many complex steps involved.” When he talked to Bill, they didn’t talk about the operational changes or any of the tactics or strategy involved. They talked about the team. Bill wanted someone who cared about the company and its people to help with the transition, which described Omid perfectly. “Care for the team like that is unusual at that level,” Omid says. “It tends to be pretty cutthroat. But not for Bill. The management team was his primary love.”
WORK THE TEAM, THEN THE PROBLEM
WHEN FACED WITH A PROBLEM OR OPPORTUNITY, THE FIRST STEP IS TO ENSURE THE RIGHT TEAM IS IN PLACE AND WORKING ON IT.
PICK THE RIGHT PLAYERS
“If you’re running a company, you have to surround yourself with really, really good people,” Bill said. Not one of his most surprising statements: it is a tired business mantra to always hire people smarter than yourself. “Everybody that is managing a function on behalf of the CEO ought to be better at that function than the CEO. Some of the time, they are going to be wearing their HR hat or their IT hat, but most of the time you want them to be wearing their company hat. These are all smart people that have great capabilities, and what you want to get is the best idea that comes from that group.”
Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be 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. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.
He would tolerate a lot of other faults if he thought a person had those four characteristics. When he interviewed job candidates to assess these points, he wouldn’t just ask about what a person did, he would ask how they did it. If the person said they “led a project that led to revenue growth,” asking how they achieved that growth will tell you a lot about how they were involved in the project. Were they hands-on? Were they doers? Did they build the team? He would listen for the pronouns: does the person say “I” (could signify a me-first mentality) or “we” (a potential indicator of a team player)?*2
A big turnoff for Bill was if they were no longer learning. Do they have more answers than questions? That’s a bad sign!
He looked for commitment, to the cause and not just to their own success. Team first! You need to find, as Sundar Pichai says, “people who understand that their success depends on working well together, that there’s give-and-take—people who put the company first.” Whenever Sundar and Bill found people like that, Sundar says, “we would cherish them.”
But how do you know when you have found such a person? Keep note of the times when they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else’s success. Sundar notes that “sometimes decisions come up and people have to give up things. I overindex on those signals when people give something up.* And also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn’t related to them, but they are excited. I watch for that. Like when you see a player on the bench cheering for someone else on the team, like Steph Curry jumping up and down when Kevin Durant hits a big shot. You can’t fake that.”*
In 2011, Eric stepped down as Google CEO. In the ensuing reorganization, Jonathan’s job as head of products was eliminated. He was considering a few options, including running the Enterprise business (now Google Cloud, a multibillion-dollar division), but decided to decline them all. He felt hurt by the reorg and considered these other jobs a demotion. Bill was so disappointed; Jonathan was putting his bruised ego ahead of what was best for the Google team (and, in fact, himself). He was making a “mistake born of ego and emotion,” and Bill thought Jonathan maybe should consider removing his head from his ass.
Bill suggested that Jonathan take more time to consider his decision, and he continued to meet with him on a regular basis. With Bill’s help, Jonathan later found his way back into the Google fold by taking on other roles. Bill didn’t give up on him, but he also never let him forget how he had let the team down. This was a vivid and personal lesson: when change happens, the priority has to be what is best for the team.
Bill valued 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. Earlier in his Google career, before he became CEO, Sundar Pichai would often speak up when he felt something wasn’t the right choice, both to us and later to Larry Page when he was CEO. That takes some guts, but as Sundar says, “Bill always appreciated it when I spoke my mind about difficult issues because he knew I cared about the company and the products, and that’s where I was coming from.”
Sundar respects the same in others when he sees it today. “There are people who are team players and really care about the company. When they speak up, it matters a lot to me because I know they are coming from the right place.”
Bill was attracted to people who were “difficult”—more outspoken in their opinions, occasionally abrasive, not afraid to buck trends or the crowd. “Like diamonds that are somehow misshapen,” is how Alan Eustace puts it. Bill’s friendship with Steve Jobs was a testament to this, as was his long partnership with other founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Scott Cook of Intuit. Not an easygoing person among them! We don’t think Bill sought this out as a personality trait, but he tolerated it and even embraced it. Whereas others might find this type of person difficult, Bill found these people interesting and worth developing, sometimes helping them smooth away rough edges. The most effective coaches tolerate and even encourage some level of eccentricity and “prickliness” among their team members. Outstanding performers, from athletes to founders to business executives, are often “difficult.” You want them on your team.
Sheryl Sandberg says that the first time she met Bill, during her first week at Google in late 2001, he asked her, what do you do here? At the time, Sheryl had been hired with the title of “business unit general manager,” a position that didn’t exist before she arrived. There were, in fact, no business units, so she had nothing to manage. She answered by saying that she used to be at the Treasury Department. He stopped her: okay, but what do you do here? This time, she replied with ideas of what she thought she might do. Bill wasn’t satisfied: but what do you do here? Sheryl finally copped to the truth: so far, she didn’t do anything. “I learned an incredibly important lesson,” she says. “It’s not what you used to do, it’s not what you think, it’s what you do every day.” This is perhaps the most important characteristic Bill looked for in his players: people who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day. Doers.
As you evaluate people, it’s important to consider how they fit in the team and the company. People, especially in Silicon Valley, tend to look for “superheroes,” people with superior smarts and savvy who can do it all and be the best at everything. This is magnified at companies’ senior levels. As Philipp Schindler says, “Bill made the point that you don’t want to staff a team with just quarterbacks; you need to pay a lot of attention to the team composition and have a diverse set of different talents smartly woven together.” All people have their limitations; what’s important is to understand them individually, to identify what makes them different, and then to see how you can help them mesh with the rest of the team. Bill appreciated high cognitive abilities, but he also understood the value of soft skills, like empathy, that aren’t always valued in businesses, especially tech ones. At Google, he helped us learn to appreciate that this combination—smarts and hearts—creates better managers.
He did not overemphasize experience. He looked at skills and mind-set, and he could project what you could become. This is a coach’s talent, the ability to see a player’s potential, not just current performance. Maybe not completely accurately: as Stanford professor Carol Dweck points out in her 2006 book, Mindset, someone’s true potential is unknowable, since “it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”3 But even without that accuracy, you can bet on potential enough to avoid writing off people solely because they lack experience. The general tendency is to hire for experience: I’m hiring for job X, so I want someone who has years of experience doing job X. If you are creating a high-performing team and building for the future, you need to hire for potential as well as experience.
Picking the right players can also entail reconsidering who else within the company should be on the team. When Jonathan ran the product team at Google, his staff included several product management leaders. But because of how the company was organized, it did not include engineering leaders. This led to some conflict when it came time to allocate and assign people and resources; the product leads didn’t always agree with the engineering leads. Jonathan’s staff meetings often involved a lot of argument about these decisions, and some complaining about the absent engineering leads.
Bill’s counsel to Jonathan was simple: add some players to the team. Jonathan should invite the engineering leads to his staff meeting. Not to just one meeting, but permanently. Then force the discussion of plans with them, air the arguments, and get everyone to buy in on whatever decisions were made. The purpose of the meetings was not for Jonathan to demonstrate command of topics discussed and tell people what to do (which, as Bill observed, was sometimes Jonathan’s practice); it was to get the team to gel. Bringing in the people who were a focal point of dissension was the only way to do that. Sure, there were still plenty of arguments, but because more of the players were in the room, they got resolved more quickly, which helped create stronger relationships across groups.
Bill started to show a knack for picking players early in his business career. Eric Johnson was a colleague of Bill’s at Kodak. Eric says that at the time Kodak was very profitable, so it wasn’t too concerned with getting rid of mediocre performers. Bill wasn’t one to make heads roll, either—he got better at dealing with poor performers later on, when he had to as CEO of Intuit. However, at Kodak he developed a talent for finding the “doers” in any department and getting those people talking. This isn’t always easy in a large company, but Bill would look for those same characteristics he looked for in candidates: smarts, hard work, integrity, grit. And then he would figure out ways to formally or informally bring those people together to talk and make stuff happen, around a particular project or problem.
“People would look forward to the meeting with Bill,” Eric recounts, “because when Campbell ran a meeting or brought a group together, the environment was results oriented, everyone participated and contributed, and they actually enjoyed the meeting. It was positive and fun to be part of a team.”
PICK THE RIGHT PLAYERS
THE TOP CHARACTERISTICS TO LOOK FOR ARE SMARTS AND HEARTS: THE ABILITY TO LEARN FAST, A WILLINGNESS TO WORK HARD, INTEGRITY, GRIT, EMPATHY, AND A TEAM-FIRST ATTITUDE.
PAIR PEOPLE
As we noted earlier, Bill highly valued peer relationships. An important, often overlooked, 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. So Bill looked 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.*4
This was one of Bill’s first suggestions to Jonathan. After sitting in on a couple of his staff meetings, Bill told Jonathan that he needed to work more on coaching people and pairing them up on things. Don’t just be a dictator assigning tasks, pair people up! So from that point forward, for projects such as preparing material for public events like earnings calls, producing team off-sites, working on compensation and promotion ladders, and developing internal tools, Jonathan stopped dictating and started pairing people up. The results: better decisions, stronger team.
Bill would coach Jonathan to do this himself. When Patrick Pichette joined Google as CFO, Bill asked Jonathan to seek him out and mentor him on the ways of the company. This was helpful to Patrick, but it also helped create a new trusted pair relationship on Eric’s management team, which was the actual objective. The deliverable matters, but what matters just as much is the opportunity for the pair of teammates to work together on something and get to know and trust each other. That is invaluable to the team’s success.
PAIR PEOPLE
PEER RELATIONSHIPS ARE CRITICAL AND OFTEN OVERLOOKED, SO SEEK OPPORTUNITIES TO PAIR PEOPLE UP ON PROJECTS OR DECISIONS.
THE PEER FEEDBACK SURVEY
Bill felt so strongly about the importance of peer relationships that he helped design a peer feedback survey we used for years at Google. Respondents gave feedback about colleagues, and the results provided a good picture of how well a person was performing in the eyes of their peers, the most important evaluators, in Bill’s opinion.
The survey was initially designed to elicit opinions on four aspects of a person’s performance: job performance, relationship with peer groups, management and leadership, and innovation. Later Bill insisted that it be expanded to include a question about people’s behavior in meetings. He was dismayed by how many people chose to be on their phones or laptops in meetings! We added a question about collaboration as well, and a set of questions on product vision that went just to product leaders. Here is the complete survey:
CORE ATTRIBUTES
For the past 12 months, to what extent do you agree/disagree that each person:
PRODUCT LEADER ATTRIBUTES
For the past 12 months, to what extent do you agree/disagree that each person demonstrated exemplary leadership in the following areas:
OPEN-TEXT QUESTIONS
GET TO THE TABLE
In the 1980s, the majority of executives at technology companies were men; there were very few women.*5 Deb Biondolillo was one of those women, the head of U.S. human resources at Apple. Still, when the weekly CEO staff meeting rolled around, Deb would sit in the row of chairs along the wall, not at the table. Bill couldn’t stand this. “What are you doing back there?” he would ask Deb. “Get to the table!” Finally, one day Deb got to the meeting early and nervously grabbed a seat at the table. The other guys filtered in, and one of them, Al Eisenstat, ended up sitting next to Deb. Al was a dynamic executive, Apple’s general counsel, and one of its heads of marketing prior to Bill, a powerful man who was instrumental to Apple’s early growth. He was also well known for being rather gruff. When he took his seat that day, he was surprised to see Deb sitting next to him, at the table. “What are you doing here?” he barked.
“Going to the meeting,” she replied, with more confidence than she felt.
“Al looked at me for a few seconds,” Deb says. “Then he looked over at Bill. That’s when I knew it would be okay. Bill would back me up.”
More than anyone we have ever encountered in our careers, Bill was an advocate for women being “at the table.” He believed in diversity on teams well before it was a common topic. This is counterintuitive: Bill swore, loved football and a good dirty joke, perfected the guys’ trip, and loved beer. He was a real guy’s guy. Most of this “guy” activity, except for the swearing, took place outside the workplace, but not entirely. And it likely made at least some of the women around Bill feel excluded from time to time; some women may not feel comfortable telling jokes over beers at a sports bar. Yet all of the women we talked to about Bill felt comfortable with his style, because they saw firsthand that Bill was a straight shooter who delivered tough messages with respect, warmth, and candor.
We learned early on from Bill that when it came to creating teams, you have to put your bias blinders on (and that we all have biases). To him it was simple. Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women. A pair of 2010 studies bear Bill out on this point. They examined collective intelligence in teams: why are some teams “smarter” than the sum of their individual IQs? The answer is threefold: on the most effective teams everyone contributes rather than one or two people dominating discussions, people on those teams are better at reading complex emotional states, and . . . the teams have more women. This can be partly explained by the fact that women tend to be better at reading emotional states than men.6 So Bill always pushed us to consider women for any senior positions; he believed “you can always find a woman for a job, it may just take a little longer.” He helped recruit them when he could, such as when he got Ruth Porat to come on board as Google’s CFO in 2015.
He pushed the women he coached to be more aggressive in seeking bigger roles and more P&L responsibility, particularly in jobs outside of “typical” female areas such as HR or PR.* He connected successful women he knew with other successful women. He had zero tolerance for any gender bias in business conversations.
Bill helped bring Eve Burton to the Intuit board and worked with her extensively in her role as SVP and general counsel at Hearst, the media conglomerate. He coached Eve on various content deals she was negotiating, and the two of them collaborated on a journalism and technology partnership between Columbia and Stanford. But none of this work was more important to Bill than the HearstLab, a business “greenhouse” for women-led companies that Eve started at Hearst under Bill’s prodding and tutelage. Those companies now have a collective value of more than $200 million! “It was the last thing he pushed me to do,” Eve says. “His vision was to give women a place to seed their companies and make them successful.”
And a place to get some grass stains, too. One day, Diane Greene was attending an Intuit board meeting when she and Bill started chatting about their kids. Diane’s son was playing flag football at his middle school, and her daughter, in fifth grade, had complained that it wasn’t fair that the boys got to play football and the girls didn’t. Bill told Diane to come to Sacred Heart, the private school in nearby Atherton, on Thursday afternoon, and to bring her daughter. He didn’t say why. When Diane and her daughter arrived, they saw a bunch of middle school girls practicing football. Bill was on the field coaching them, with as much energy (and colorful language) as he did the boys’ team. “He wanted her to see that girls can play football, too,” Diane says. “He was coaching a football team; it didn’t matter that it was girls. He found the time to fit it in and hardly even talked about it.”
He took time to talk to adult women’s teams, too. For example, not long after she became CEO of MetricStream, Shellye Archambeau formed a group of women CEOs to support and mentor each other. She invited Bill to come to one meeting, and they all enjoyed it so much that it became a regular event. They would gather in the conference room at Bill’s office in Palo Alto and spend a couple of hours talking about a particular topic du jour. Bill prepared for and usually orchestrated the meeting. He didn’t tell the women what to do; rather, he told stories about his experiences and asked questions.
In most of the discussions, the fact that the CEOs around the table were all women didn’t even come up and wasn’t particularly relevant. However, when diversity did come up, or when some of the women related some of the biases they had experienced, Bill always got frustrated. He reminded them to think of the other women around the table when opportunities come up. This can be a problem: a 2017 Harvard Business Review article notes that sometimes members of minority groups hesitate to bring other members of that group into their organizations because they don’t want to be perceived as giving special treatment, and they worry that the people they bring in might not “make the grade.”7 So Bill always told Shellye’s group that if they were looking for board members, look around the group first.
Shellye thought of Bill when she launched a diversity program for women at her company’s office in Bangalore, India. They had more than a thousand people there, 30 percent of whom were women, at the time a high percentage for a tech company in India. Not long after launching the program she traveled to the office to check in on business and see how the initiative was going. She gathered the diversity committee and the leadership team into a conference room that was a bit too small. There were not enough chairs at the table for everyone. Shellye noticed that the women who filed in all took the chairs around the edge of the room; the men automatically sat at the table. She stopped them and instructed the women to sit at the table and the men to move to the outer chairs. Then she proceeded with the meeting.
When it was over, she asked the men how it felt to be sitting against the wall, not at the table. Um, weird and uncomfortable, they responded.
Exactly, she replied. To truly include everyone, everyone needs to be at the table.
GET TO THE TABLE
WINNING DEPENDS ON HAVING THE BEST TEAM, AND THE BEST TEAMS HAVE MORE WOMEN.
SOLVE THE BIGGEST PROBLEM
There is another issue with the largely cognitive approach to management, which we had big-time at Google. Smart, analytical people, especially ones steeped in computer science and mathematics as we were, will tend to assume that data and other empirical evidence can solve all problems. Quants or techies with this worldview tend to see the inherently messy, emotional tension that’s always present in teams of humans as inconvenient and irrational—an irritant that will surely be resolved in the course of a data-driven decision process. Of course, humans don’t always work that way. Things come up, tensions arise, and they don’t naturally go away. People do their best to avoid talking about these situations, because they’re awkward. Which makes it worse.
When that happens, people refer to the “elephant in the room”: the big problem that overshadows everything but that no one acknowledges. As former Avon CEO Andrea Jung says, “With Bill there was never an elephant in the room.” Or, more accurately, there might have been an elephant, but it wasn’t hiding in the corner. Bill wouldn’t allow that. He brought the thing front and center.
“It’s a football mentality,” Shona Brown points out. “Where’s the weakest link on the offensive line, or the defensive secondary?” Throughout her tenure at Google, Shona worked weekly with Bill tackling numerous operational issues, many of which were lurking like elephants in the corner. The company was just growing so fast, well ahead of any semblance of process. Bill’s approach, Shona says, was always to tackle the hardest problem first. “You have to address that first.”
A litmus test for when issues have simmered for too long, a way to spot the elephant, is if the team can’t even have honest conversations about them. This is where the coach comes in, as a “tension spotter.”
Of course, another word for tension is politics. When you hear people saying that things are getting “political,” that often means that problems have arisen because the data or process hasn’t led to the best decision. At that point, personalities take over. As we discussed earlier, this was anathema to Bill. “For us, political stuff is very toxic,” he wrote Jonathan. “We have managed to become a big company with a wonderful absence of politics.” The reason we accomplished that, he failed to mention, was his own diligence in tackling the toughest, ugliest problems head-on. He would, as former Google head of communications Rachel Whetstone says, “beat the politics out of the situation” by bringing up the problem clearly, then forcing everyone to focus on it.
There was one situation we had a few years ago where two different product leaders were arguing about which team should manage a particular group of products. Both could legitimately argue that the products belonged on their team. For a while, this was treated as a technical discussion, where data and logic would eventually determine which way to go. But that didn’t happen, the problem festered, and tensions rose. It was causing problems within the teams, and with external partners as well. Who was in control?
This is when Bill got involved. There had to be a difficult meeting where one exec would win and the other would lose. Bill made the meeting happen; he spotted a fundamental tension that was not getting resolved and forced the issue. He didn’t have a clear opinion on how to resolve the matter, on which team the product belonged, he simply knew we had to decide one way or another, now. It was one of the most heated meetings we’ve had, but it had to happen.
SOLVE THE BIGGEST PROBLEM
IDENTIFY THE BIGGEST PROBLEM, THE “ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM,” BRING IT FRONT AND CENTER, AND TACKLE IT FIRST.
DON’T LET THE BITCH SESSIONS LAST
The launch day of Apple’s second-generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G, did not go well. Each new phone that was sold was required to connect to Apple servers in order to be activated and functional. But the morning the phones went on sale, July 11, 2008, the servers ran into technical issues and went down. People could buy new phones but couldn’t activate them. Furthermore, anyone who had an older version iPhone and tried to upgrade to the new iOS operating system (the first to support the App Store) found that their phones were rendered inoperable in the process. In techie jargon, their phones were “bricked.”
At Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Eddy Cue and his team gathered around the table in a conference room, trying to figure out what to do. It was “mass chaos, my worst day at Apple,” Eddy says. “All of these issues are coming in, we’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on, what are the issues? There was a ton of negativity in the room, people had been lining up all night and we couldn’t sell any phones!” The negativity, Eddy realized, was an issue itself. “We had to get down to focus, get our team thinking in the right way, stop worrying about selling phones, and worry instead about fixing the right problems.”
Which is what they did. The first step was to take down the iOS update so that people would stop trying to upgrade their original iPhones. And then they got to work on getting their servers up and running, which they did a couple of hours later. Bill Campbell wasn’t involved in this situation, but his influence was felt. Bill always made sure that problems were aired completely and transparently. And then, once that was accomplished, he moved on.
“That’s one of the big things he taught me,” Eddy says. “When it gets to the negative, get it out, get to the issues, but don’t let the damn meeting dwell on that. Don’t let bitch sessions last for very long.” Psychologists would call this approach “problem-focused coping,” in contrast to “emotion-focused coping.” The latter may be more appropriate when facing a problem that can’t be solved, but in a business context focusing on and venting emotions needs to happen quickly, so more energy is directed to solutions.8
Bill and the Apple board had plenty of chances to practice this approach in the days after Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. It’s easy to forget how Apple, now one of the most successful and valuable companies in the world, was nearly bankrupt when Jobs came back. There were some tough times then, and even later, after the success of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, some very challenging issues. Bill’s approach was always to be levelheaded and constructive, to immediately focus on what they were going to do about it. Andrea Jung, who joined the Apple board in 2008, calls it “learning forward.” Not what happened and who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it?
One way Bill was able to accomplish this trick was by staying relentlessly positive. Negative situations can be infectious, people get cynical, optimism fades. “In those early years we had some tough times,” Eddy says, “but Bill was by far the most positive board member we had.” It would be easy to dismiss this attitude as mere cheerleading, except that he was also relentless in identifying and addressing problems, which cheerleaders don’t do. Studies show that positive leadership makes it easier to solve problems, so Bill would praise teams and people, give them a hug, and clap them on the shoulder to boost their confidence and comfort. Then, when he asked the tough questions, everyone understood that he was on their side, and that he was pushing on things because he wanted them to be better, to be successful. He would always get to the heart of a problem, but in a positive way.9
Again, we feel the influence of coaching sports at work here. When we leave the office behind and go coach our kids’ soccer or baseball teams, we are always taught the value of “positive coaching,” of leading with praise and then following with constructive feedback. But when we get back to work, we forget all that and rip into people. We aren’t suggesting that everyone start treating their teams like kids on a playground, but Bill’s approach demonstrates that the same basics work even at the highest levels of an organization.
DON’T LET THE BITCH SESSIONS LAST
AIR ALL THE NEGATIVE ISSUES, BUT DON’T DWELL ON THEM. MOVE ON AS FAST AS POSSIBLE.
WINNING RIGHT
In sports, coaches and players talk about a “culture of winning” and the dynasties that have it. Discussion of the greatest sports dynasties must include the Boston Celtics (eight straight NBA championships from 1959 to 1966), São Paulo’s Santos FC (eleven titles from 1955 to 1969), UCLA Bruins men’s basketball (ten titles from 1964 to 1975), Manchester United (twelve titles from 1992 to 2011), and the New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers (both with five Super Bowl wins, the Niners in the 1980s and ’90s and the Patriots from 2002 to 2017). Here are some other numbers that rank right up there: ten league titles in fourteen years. This is what Bill achieved with the Sacred Heart middle school flag football team. Sacred Heart is a private school in Atherton, California, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States. Bill turned it into a football dynasty. He would tell the kids, you aren’t the rich kids from Atherton, you’re the tough kids from Sacred Heart.
You can’t talk about coaching—or leading a company—without talking about winning. That’s what the good coaches do. That’s what great leaders do. Bill didn’t approach coaching at Sacred Heart any differently because it was middle school, or because it was an exclusive private school. Those things didn’t matter. It was still football, and you still played to win. He demanded commitment, passion, and above all, loyalty, just like in his business life. Sometimes a parent would come to him and explain that their son or daughter would be late to practice because he or she was playing soccer or some other sport. Bill’s reply was, that’s fine, and he was sure that their child would fare quite well . . . on the B team. They wouldn’t be playing on the A squad. Football would not be a second priority for any of his players, and no one got special treatment to accommodate an interest outside the team.
He demanded the same level of commitment from himself and his other coaches (all volunteers with demanding jobs). Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the fall, you would find Bill on the Sacred Heart football field, leading practice. Most people knew not to call Bill during those hours, but at least one person did not. Occasionally Bill’s phone would ring during practice and he would take it out of his pocket just long enough to see who was calling, and for the kids to get a glimpse at the caller ID. Then Bill would put the phone back in his pocket, letting the call from Steve Jobs go unanswered. “There was nothing cooler than knowing that for that hour at practice, we were the most important thing to him,” one of his players says. “We had his full attention.”
(Sometimes the young players had his attention even when he wasn’t with them. One time Bill came to a practice with a few plays that he had just created for the upcoming game. He had spent the day at a meeting at Google, he explained, and had drawn up the plays during the presentations.)
Still, winning wasn’t everything to Bill. Winning right was. He would often say he turned to business because he wasn’t a very good football coach (“Have you seen my record?”), which is debatable. But what’s not debatable is his ability to instill a culture of winning, and winning right. This is what Bill instilled at Sacred Heart, Google, and all the other companies he worked with. Todd Bradley, a former Hewlett-Packard executive who worked extensively with Bill, says that the biggest lesson he learned from him was about “the humanity of winning,” by which he means winning as a team (not as individuals) and winning ethically. Whether in business or in sports, it’s amazing what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.
What’s remarkable to us, as we talked to numerous people who didn’t know Bill as a businessman but as a football coach, is that he treated his middle school football players the same way he treated his executive coachees (like us). The commitment and loyalty. The intolerance for lapses in integrity. The swearing (the kids started a “Coach Campbell Swore” fund, demanding ten bucks from Bill for every curse word; that fund became a down payment on the school’s new football field). The way he listened intently to the kids and would take them aside for quick 1:1s. The tough talk, and sincere love. It didn’t matter if you were a middle school kid or an exec at a big corporation: Bill’s approach didn’t waver.
The same thing worked for much more advanced football players, too. Charlie Batch grew up in Bill’s hometown, Homestead, Pennsylvania, and they grew to be friends over the years, working together to help Homestead. Charlie played quarterback at Eastern Michigan University and then for fifteen years in the NFL for the Detroit Lions and Pittsburgh Steelers, who play their home games about ten miles from Homestead. In 2012, the starting quarterback for the Steelers, Ben Roethlisberger, got injured, and Charlie stepped in. Things didn’t go well in that game: Charlie threw three interceptions and the Steelers lost to the Browns. The week after that loss, Bill and Charlie saw each other at an event in Homestead. Bill didn’t do that finger-popping thing, but he might as well have. He had watched the game, and he chewed Charlie out pretty good, telling him to change his attitude, step up, take responsibility, and be a pro. Charlie was taken aback but not surprised. The coach was right.
The following Sunday, Charlie led the Steelers back from a ten-point deficit to beat their rivals, the Baltimore Ravens, and threw five completed passes on the winning drive. As he walked out of the victorious locker room he got a text from Bill: “Told you.”
WINNING RIGHT
STRIVE TO WIN, BUT ALWAYS WIN RIGHT, WITH COMMITMENT, TEAMWORK, AND INTEGRITY.
LEADERS LEAD
When Dan Rosensweig joined Chegg in 2010, he had been told they were six months away from an IPO. In fact, they were about three months away from bankruptcy. But he righted the ship and led it to an IPO in 2013, whereupon the stock tanked, dropping well below its IPO price. Dan, feeling the strain after a tough multiyear slog, was privately starting to lose faith. Was this company going to make it? Was he the right guy to lead it? He was thinking about quitting but didn’t tell anyone.
Then he got a call from Bill, who had been coaching Dan for a few years, helping him through the ups and downs at Chegg.
“Dan,” he said, “let’s take a walk.”
“Right now? Should I come over?”
“No, we’re going to take a virtual walk, right here on the phone.”
Uh-oh, Dan thought, looking past the mini football helmets on his desk and out the window at the fountain in the courtyard below. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“Behind the woodshed,” Bill replied.
He went on to lecture Dan about how he needed to stick with it at Chegg. Leaders lead, he told him. You can’t afford to doubt. 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.
“I don’t know how he knew I was thinking of leaving,” Dan says, “but he did. And he wasn’t having it.” Dan did not quit. He led. He rallied his team, which is still intact, and together they turned around and built the company.
It’s great and fun to talk about winning, but what about losing? Bill knew something about losing. His teams at Columbia lost a lot, and the startup he joined, GO, failed, losing a lot of investor money in the process.* Failure is a good teacher, and Bill learned from these experiences that loyalty and commitment are easy when you are winning and much harder when you are losing. But that’s, as Dan’s story highlights, when loyalty, commitment, and integrity are even more important. When things are going badly, teams need even more of those characteristics from their leaders.
At Columbia, after a particularly tough loss, Bill yelled at his team in the locker room; he really read them the riot act. “That was the team I lost,” he later said, “and that’s the moment I lost them.” He didn’t rally the team, he didn’t show them his loyalty, and he didn’t make decisions that might help them. He just yelled at them. This was a moment he filed away. The moment he truly lost.
Decisiveness also becomes more important in challenging situations, as illustrated by the final days of GO. In Startup, Jerry Kaplan describes a pivotal moment that came one afternoon when Bill requested that the company’s senior execs gather for an emergency meeting. The company had been struggling for a while, with virtually no sales and tough competition from Microsoft. Bill came to the conclusion that the company was not going to survive, much less be successful. He suggested to his team that they should sell the company, and after some discussion, they agreed. The reasoning, though, wasn’t financial per se. They didn’t want to sell to salvage at least some financial returns for themselves or for investors. They wanted to preserve the work they had done. “The important thing is to save the project and the organization—to protect what we’ve built,” Bill said. He hoped to accomplish this by selling to a larger company that could fund and continue the work, even if that meant he’d be out of a job. In this case, Bill’s loyalty wasn’t to the company so much as to the cause.10
So, when you’re losing, recommit to the cause. Lead. Nirav Tolia, currently CEO of Nextdoor, was the CEO of a dot-com startup called Epinions and a coachee of Bill’s. Epinions went through several near-death experiences before eventually merging with a company called DealTime and relaunching as part of Shopping.com. When Nirav and the board decided to start looking for that merger, he informed his management team. One of the key team members, let’s call him Bob, got spooked and within a few weeks left Epinions for a more stable situation. “That was a real body blow,” Nirav says. “It was very traumatic that he left.” Nirav got on the phone with Bill and told him about the departure. I’m coming over, Bill replied.
Nirav convened his team when Bill arrived at the office. Bill walked into the room. “I love you guys,” he said. “There’s something that’s really bothering me. Bob leaving, he betrayed us. He was disloyal. He left us in our time of need. Fuck him.” And that was pretty much it. Bill got up and walked out, not just out of the room but out of the building.
A few minutes later Nirav got a call, Bill again. “I bet no one else is going to quit on you now.”
LEADERS LEAD
WHEN THINGS ARE GOING BAD, TEAMS ARE LOOKING FOR EVEN MORE LOYALTY, COMMITMENT, AND DECISIVENESS FROM THEIR LEADERS.
FILL THE GAPS BETWEEN PEOPLE
Eric was involved in a Google meeting, with some people attending in person in Mountain View, and some (including Eric) joining via videoconference. They were discussing a few different issues, but they ran out of time and one of the issues didn’t get resolved. One person made a comment toward the end of the meeting, which Eric interpreted negatively. He felt sure, based on that one remark, that things weren’t going to go his way on the issue in question. The comment sat with him and festered for a full week, and by the time the group got back together, Eric was gunning for battle. That is when he realized, though, that he had completely misunderstood the comment and, as a result, the entire situation. The crisis was inadvertent. A lack of communication and an apparent slight had dug a fissure that was completely false.
This is not an unusual story. It happens every day: the offhand comment, the quickly drafted email or text, and people careen off in emotional directions way out of whack with reality. This is when a coach can really come in handy. As Bill described it, his job as our coach was to “see little flaws in the organization that with a little massage we can make better. I listen, observe, and fill the communication and understanding gaps between people.” The coach can spot those fissures before they become deep and permanent, and act to fix them by filling in the information gaps and correcting any miscommunication. Bill wasn’t involved in that meeting with Eric, but if he had been, Eric would have gone to him to test out his assumptions about the perceived slight. Bill would have corrected him—everyone was, in fact, aligned—and Eric would have been spared a lot of angst.
So what would Bill do? First, he would listen and observe. This is the power of coaching in general: the ability to offer a different perspective, one unaffected by being “in the game.” (Patrick Pichette: “Bill saw all the chess pieces all the time, because he had the luxury of not being on the board.”) Bill sat in Eric’s weekly staff meetings, listening intently, watching the body language of attendees, sensing mood shifts.
Marissa Mayer tells a story about Bill’s power of observation. She had started a new program at Google for people right out of college, computer science majors who were brought into the company as “associate product managers.” One day Eric told her, “Marissa, you’ve hired all the smartest twenty-three-year-olds on the planet. But they are driving everyone crazy. Either this becomes a home run or the whole thing blows up. Get them under control.”
Marissa turned to Bill. Could he help? He agreed to attend one of their meetings, an evening session where the first class of APMs gave updates on their projects and what problems they were having. Marissa thought the meeting was a failure—it was so boring! Just a bunch of people giving status updates and griping.
Bill observed something different. After the meeting he took Marissa aside. They are all getting stuck, he said, and you are the wrong person to help them. You’ve been here since almost the beginning and know how to get things done, so you can’t relate to the problems they are having. Get someone who will help them figure out what the next step is. Create a forum where they can help each other. That will fix the problem. And of course, he was right.
This is one example of the power of observation at work; listening, looking for patterns, assessing strengths and weaknesses. As Lee C. Bollinger says, “Bill had the highest capacity to understand the people he was working with. He had an intuitive sense of people and what motivated them and how to move them forward.” He accomplished a lot of this by looking for tension, the smoke to a problem’s fire. In Eric’s staff meetings, for example, he’d sit in the room, usually not saying much, sensing when tension levels were rising and from where. Our staff meetings were generally open, transparent affairs where everyone was encouraged to share opinions and ideas, even on issues not directly related to their functions. Still, that goes only so far. People would simmer, and Bill would spot it.
This requires keen observation. Not just listening to the words, but noticing the body language and the side conversations. So many of the people we talked to commented on Bill’s ability to sense when people were frustrated. This is a natural skill, but one that can be developed. You have to listen and watch.
Jim Rudgers, who was on Bill’s coaching staff at Columbia, recalls Bill’s remarkable ability to see the entire field of twenty-two players as a play unfolded. Hold up a finger and look at it, Jim says. That’s how most of us watch football; the finger is the player with the ball. But Bill could see, recall, and assess the things that happen on the periphery as well. He brought that skill to team meetings. He wouldn’t just see the speaker, he could see the entire field and gauge reactions and intents even with the people who remained silent, the ones without the ball.
Then he would talk to people. As Bill explained it one time at a Google management seminar: “I have a little more time than Larry does to do some of that stuff. I have a little more time than Sundar does to do some of that stuff, so, you know, I’ll say to Sundar, Do you want me to meet with so-and-so? Sure. And here’s what I’m going to tell ’em. You okay with that? Yeah. Great. Perfect, and, you know, that helps a little bit in moving the thing along. Let’s get it moving.”
Rachel Whetstone recalls a time a decision didn’t go her way when she was running communications and policy for Google. She was in one of Eric’s staff meetings, where they were discussing an important issue that had been causing PR headaches. She had been pushing for a change for a while, and when she didn’t get the decision she wanted, she was upset. She felt they were making a mistake. Bill sought her out after the meeting. Listen, he told her, we decided not to make that change to that particular thing this time. I’m sorry and I know it’s tough, but you’re going to have to suck it up. Deal with the problem, okay?
Not much of a pep talk, right? His advice was “deal with it”! But sometimes that’s all it takes. An acknowledgment that things didn’t go your way, some empathy that it sucks, a reminder to buck up and soldier on for the team. These were the sort of messages that Bill delivered all the time. Short, timely, and highly effective.*11
And while the skill of observing tension is a challenging one to develop, this idea of going around and talking to people is not. It simply takes time, and the ability to communicate well with colleagues. Bill could have noted Rachel’s frustration and simply forgotten about it; it wasn’t his job to fix her problem. But instead he made the effort to have a conversation with her. To make that short, important connection. It’s so easy to forget to have these little conversations in a busy day; Bill made it a priority.
While none of this was underhanded or secretive, it all had a behind-the-scenes quality. Bill rarely talked about these little 1:1 conversations; he would simply take you aside and have a few quiet words. This was all by design, another difference between a sports coach (who’s out in front, leading the team, highly visible) and a business coach. As Deb Biondolillo says, Bill was “the shadow behind you. You hear him, but you are the one in front. He could be less confined, more genuine if he was in the background.”
This was all done without an agenda. Bill often didn’t voice an opinion about which way a decision would go—he just pushed for the decision to be made. When he sensed those moments, he’d work behind the scenes, drawing out people’s points of view, closing communication gaps, and fixing miscommunications, so that when the time came to discuss things in the meeting and make the decision, everyone was prepared.
Then Bill would sit back, observe, and start the cycle over again.
FILL THE GAPS BETWEEN PEOPLE
LISTEN, OBSERVE, AND FILL THE COMMUNICATION AND UNDERSTANDING GAPS BETWEEN PEOPLE.
PERMISSION TO BE EMPATHETIC
When you sum up the principles Bill used to build teams, and try to apply them as a manager, you give yourself, as Bradley Horowitz puts it, the “permission to be empathetic.” After a successful career in the valley at Virage and Yahoo, Bradley co-led development of Google+, followed by its far more successful offspring, Google Photos. He met with Bill several times over this span and was always impressed by how he invariably led off the meetings by talking about personal stuff: What was going on with Bradley’s family? What motivated him? Bill’s approach was to make the human connection first, then approach the work with that understanding.
“This touchy-feely stuff isn’t in the manual,” Bradley says. “It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the work of what we’re producing, and not how we’re doing it. But leading teams becomes a lot more joyful when you know and care about people. It’s freeing.” (One reason empathy isn’t in the manual, according to The Athena Doctrine, a 2013 book by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, is that it is typically seen as a feminine trait.12 The proverbial manual was mostly written by men!)
Bradley got the chance to apply what he learned from Bill when he was tasked with figuring out what to do with Google+. The product had been launched with great fanfare as Google’s entry into social networking. Google+ failed to get widespread adoption, but a few components, including its photo management features, were quite popular. So Bradley and other team members devised a plan to spin Photos off as a stand-alone product. They got buy-in from senior leadership and got to work.
The problem was, many of the engineers and product managers who had worked on Google+, including many senior people, had left the team and in many cases the company. Many of those who remained on the team had never led a project of this scope before. Bradley and the team knew there was a great product market fit—it was the right product for mobile users who loved photos (just about everyone!) at the right time. But was it the right team to deliver and were they set up to succeed?
Bradley put Bill’s approach, the permission to be empathetic, to work. He prioritized his time to focus not on tactical and technical issues, but on team ones. He got to know and care about team members as people, pumped them up, pushed and implored them, then helped build momentum as they started to achieve important milestones. He focused on the team and not the problem, and the team responded. Senior leads started stepping up as Bradley gave them more freedom.
At one point, as the project was really starting to roll, one of the most important technical leads on the team came to Bradley. He knew he was performing well, and he demanded more power and responsibility, which he was currently sharing with another lead. If not, he would go to Facebook, which had just given him a very nice offer.
It didn’t take Bradley long to decide. The team that he had nurtured through empathy was more important than the one person. “I guess you’re going to Facebook,” he said.
PERMISSION TO BE EMPATHETIC
LEADING TEAMS BECOMES A LOT MORE JOYFUL, AND THE TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE, WHEN YOU KNOW AND CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE.
Bill Campbell employed all of these techniques, from hiring well (pick the right players) to promoting gender diversity (get to the table) to taking care of small misunderstandings before they become big (fill the gaps between people), to help teams achieve greatness. And the essence of Bill was the essence of just about any sports coach: team first. All players, from stars to scrubs, must be ready to place the needs of the team above the needs of the individual. Given that commitment, teams can accomplish great things. That’s why, when faced with an issue, his first question wasn’t about the issue itself, it was about the team tasked with tackling the issue. Get the team right and you’ll get the issue right.