‘The power of coaching is to offer a different perspective’

This book is a tribute to former Football coach Bill Campbell, who went on to coach many Silicon Valley companies, became a board member at Apple, and a roving coach at Google.

Treat teams and not individuals as the building block of a company.

Excellent teams at Google had psychological safety. The teams had clear goals, members were reliable and confident.

Speed and innovation require a different type of employee—the smart creative person.

There is another important factor for success in teams—being collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company and not for yourself.

To balance the tension and mould a team, you need someone to nurture the community—a good coach.

Coaching is the best way to mould effective people into powerful teams.

Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader.

In a 2017 study across manufacturing in America, factories that adopted performance metrics like performance oriented management techniques, monitoring, and targeting, performed better than other plants.

Many managers demand respect as opposed to having it accrue to them. People respect leaders who have humility, are selfless, and project that they care about the company and not themselves.

People are the foundation of any company and every manager must help people achieve more than what they are currently achieving.

There is a direct correlation between a fun work environment and higher performance.

Knowing what to share, with whom and when is a critical part of a manager’s job.

Team meetings are a terrific opportunity to engage people, give everyone a voice and manage the clock to keep the energy.

Failure to make a decision can be as bad as making a wrong decision. There is indecision in business all the time, since there is nothing called a perfect answer.

The manager’s job is to run a decision making process, listen to all perspectives and if necessary, break ties and make the decision.

In any situation, good leaders go back to first principles and ensure that people agree on principles as opposed to arguing about opinions.

One of the big challenges for a leader is to decide what to do with the diva—someone who is a star performer but a pain to work with.

Compensation or salary is not just about the economic value of money but also the emotional value.

Creating a good performance culture means that anything less than operational excellence is not tolerated.

Leadership is not about you, it is about contributing to something bigger, the company, the team.

People who are curious and willing to learn are best suited for this. Good leaders grow over time, learning regularly. Bill Campbell never coached anyone who was not humble and honest, and willing to persevere with hard work.

Humility in a leader is recognising that there is something more than him, bigger than him.

People who generate a lot of BS are not coachable.

People believe that the best listeners are those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.

Campbell was always 100% honest. He always told the truth even if it was harsh. He got away because he had no hidden agenda.

It’s a manager’s job to push the team to be more courageous. Courage is hard because people are naturally scared of making mistakes.

The CEO has to be a coach, especially in difficult times.

Teams are never successful until every member is loyal and will subjugate his personal goals in the interest of team goals.

The 4 characteristics Campbell looked for in people:

• Being smart—essentially the ability to make connections based on different data points
• Hard working
• High integrity
• Have grit.

When there is change, always do what’s right for the team.

A very important aspect of a team is to develop the relationships in the team.

Winning depends on having the best team. In good teams, everyone contributes rather than one or two dominating the discussion. In good teams, people are good at reading complex emotional messages.

In any meeting, get out the negatives on the table, don’t dwell on it too long, acknowledge it, and move forward.

When things go bad, people are looking for more loyalty, more commitment, and decisiveness from their leaders.

Be generous with your time, your resources and connections for the sake of your team.

When we reduce a company performance to operational excellence, we lose vision.

Campbell often didn’t voice an opinion on which way he wanted a decision, he just pushed for the decision to get made.

The power of coaching is to offer a different perspective.