The human values that motivate us in our personal lives—love, family, friends, money, power, meaning, purpose—are the same values that motivate us at work. That's the core message of business guru and ex-football coach Bill Campbell, whose principles for how to successfully lead people and manage a company are outlined in Trillion Dollar Coach, authored by Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, Senior Vice-President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg, and Director of Executive Communications Alan Eagle.
For 15 years, Campbell walked Google's hallways, chatted with employees, and attended staff meetings led by the CEO. Nearly every week, he also met one-on-one with Schmidt and Rosenberg, two members of a big club of tech titans who turned to Campbell for advice. Before their tenure at Google began, he coached Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He worked with Steve Jobs to pull Apple out of bankruptcy. He mentored Brad Smith, former CEO of Intuit, and John Donahoe, former CEO of eBay. He coached U.S. Vice President Al Gore, NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, and Stanford University President John Hennessy.
According to Schmidt, the book's title is an understatement—if you add up the market capitalization of all the companies he coached, Campbell's value was worth much more than one trillion dollars. Yet he never accepted compensation for his services.
Campbell began his career as a football coach, first at Boston College and then at his alma mater, Columbia University. Realizing that he was too compassionate to succeed in coaching, he left the world of athletics. Within five years, he became a senior executive at Kodak, then a Fortune-500 company. A career move led him to Apple Computer, where he made waves as vice-president of sales and marketing. He held CEO positions at several Silicon Valley tech companies before branching into executive coaching and becoming a legendary CEO-whisperer.
Campbell's coaching can be distilled into a simple equation: Humanity and compassion in the workplace equals happy employees, and happy employees are more productive. Campbell built his business principles around two main themes: 1) create and maintain strong teams; and 2) bring love and compassion into the workplace.
One of Campbell's most often-repeated lines was "positive human values generate positive business outcomes." Team members who feel genuinely listened to, respected, and cared for will work harder, innovate more, and feel happier and more fulfilled in their jobs.
Campbell coached executives on how to nurture their employees so they could grow and develop into the best version of themselves. He believed a leader's or manager's primary role was to help his or her employees succeed. In Campbell’s view, running a successful business was not much different than winning at sports. His approach centered on teamwork—he sought to maximize the performance of teams, not individuals. He insisted the only way to thrive in the cutthroat tech business was to build high-performing teams, then install a team leader who was both a caring coach and a strong operations manager.
Campbell died of cancer in 2016, but his management principles live on at Google, where leaders continue to teach Campbell's lessons to new managers and executives. In Trillion Dollar Coach, the authors outline both the content of Campbell's coaching and also his nonconformist methods—like hugging everyone in the room and peppering his language with four-letter words.
The main principles are grouped into four themes. The first is operational leadership, offering advice on how to be a better manager, including:
Example: Apple’s Steve Jobs, who was close friends with Campbell, serves as a great example of why operational leadership matters—and why you’re not truly a leader until your employees think you are. For all his genius and charisma, Jobs was a disorganized and often temperamental manager, and his beleaguered employees suffered from low morale. In 1985, Apple's board of directors removed him from the company and replaced him with CEO John Sculley.
Twelve years later, Jobs returned to Apple, and Campbell noted that Jobs was a changed man—or rather, a changed leader. Jobs was much more thorough and detailed in every aspect of operational leadership—sales, finances, product development, and so on. He paid close attention to what his teams were doing, and his employees came to admire him. And of course, Apple's greatest successes came during Jobs's second tenure at Apple.
The second theme focuses on building trust in the workplace.
Example: Campbell coached David Drummond, Alphabet's head of corporate development and legal affairs, who is Black. Drummond said that being Black in Silicon Valley made him feel uncomfortably self-conscious—he was noticeably different from most everybody else. But Campbell encouraged Drummond to be proud of his identity, to make it his source of motivation and strength rather than diminish it in an attempt to conform. He told Drummond that people would respect him for being who he was, not for trying to be someone else.
Campbell understood that encouraging people to be authentically themselves—rather than forcing them to conform to dominant norms—would create a sense of psychological safety in the workplace. When employees feel like they are accepted and supported, they automatically want to do their best work.
The third theme expresses the importance of building and maintaining strong teams.
Example: Campbell paid close attention to how existing managers and employees talked and acted. Did they say “I” a lot or did they say “we”? Did they get excited about other people's successes? Were they willing to make concessions for the overall benefit of the team? Campbell championed the idea that it was a leader's job to be an enthusiastic cheerleader, and he was famous for clapping loudly when someone finished a staff meeting presentation about a new project. One of the Google executives named this behavior “BCC” for “the Bill Campbell clap.” New team members still practice it during orientation.
The fourth theme focuses on bringing compassion and humanity into the workplace.
Example: Campbell was convinced that leaders should always pay close attention to an employee’s family situation. He understood that an employee’s work life was not completely separate from their family life—that one influenced the other. A good leader should be concerned about both. For example, when Ruth Porat was hired as Google's CFO, she had to commute to Silicon Valley from New York. Campbell constantly asked her how her husband was handling the arrangement. He wanted to make sure that not just his CFO was happy, but also her husband.
Bill Campbell was one of the most influential players in Silicon Valley from 1983 until his death in 2016. Campbell was known as “Coach” partly because he coached Columbia University's and Boston College's football teams in the 1970s but mostly for his role as a business mentor. He helped to build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies, including Google, Apple, and Intuit. He coached numerous titans of the tech world, including Steve Jobs (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), Brad Smith (Intuit), Dick Costolo (Twitter), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), John Donahoe (eBay), and Marissa Mayer (Yahoo).
In Trillion Dollar Coach, authors and Google executives Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle have compiled Campbell's principles for business and life. They're intertwined with anecdotes and stories from some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley history.
(Shortform note: For the sake of coherency, material from Chapter 6 is included in our summary of Chapter 1.)
Born in a western Pennsylvania steel town in 1940, Campbell was the son of a physical education teacher. He became a high-school football star despite the fact that he was only 5-foot-10 and weighed 165 pounds. He also excelled in his classes, and he went on to play football at Columbia University in New York as a linebacker on defense and a guard on offense. In his senior year, Columbia won the Ivy League title with Campbell as team captain. He graduated with a degree in economics, then stayed on to earn his master's in education.
In 1964, Campbell accepted a job as assistant football coach at Boston College, where he had a successful 10-year run. Then his alma mater, Columbia, invited him to become head coach. He accepted the job, but the next five years were difficult. His team was a dismal failure. There were many contributing factors—lack of support from the administration, poor practice facilities, problems in recruiting good players—but Campbell blamed his coaching difficulties on the fact that he was overly sensitive to his players' feelings. He didn't have the hard edge that was needed to kick out the poor players and let only the stronger ones play.
At age 39, Campbell's football career was over, so he took a job with the ad agency J. Walter Thompson and worked on the Kodak account. Kodak was so impressed by Campbell that they hired him away from the ad agency, making him head of consumer products for Europe. But Campbell's tenure at Kodak was cut short because one of his football buddies introduced him to John Sculley, who had recently become CEO of Apple. Sculley invited him to come work at the exciting new computer company in Silicon Valley (this was in 1983, when very few people owned a personal computer). In less than a year, Campbell was promoted to vice-president of sales and marketing.
In 1984, Apple was about to launch the Macintosh computer, a product that would replace the Apple II, one of the original personal computers. The company bought commercial time during the Super Bowl to announce the launch, and Campbell was in charge of creating the television ad. The commercial was a clever riff of the apocalyptic George Orwell novel 1984. In it, a young woman rebels against a Big-Brother-like dictator who preaches to the people from a giant TV screen—she liberates the masses by throwing a mallet through the screen. The tagline promised that the new Apple Macintosh would ensure that 1984 wouldn't turn out like Orwell's novel. (It’s important to remember that at that time, personal computers were a revolutionary new product, something that had never been available to the average consumer. Most people thought of computers as giant, room-sized data crunchers that only large corporations would own.)
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs loved the ad, but Apple's board of directors hated it. They wanted to kill it and sell their prepaid Super Bowl airtime to another advertiser. Campbell insisted they run with the ad, and it turned out to be one of the most famous commercials of all time. At 44 years old, Campbell had revolutionized the way computers were marketed and kicked off the trend of blockbuster commercials being as popular as the Super Bowl itself.
In 1987, Apple spun off a separate software company, Claris. Campbell was named the CEO, but a few years later, Claris was pulled back into the parent company. Campbell left and became the CEO of another startup, GO Corporation, which failed within a few years. In 1994, he was hired as CEO of Intuit, a position he held until 2000.
Campbell's next career move was his most defining. Kleiner Perkins, a prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital firm managed by tech genius John Doerr, invited him to work as a mentor and coach for the startup companies it funded. Campbell's job was to help the new CEOs navigate their way through the startup process.
Kleiner Perkins was funding Google, a small company run by a couple of Stanford University grads. In 2001, Google had just hired its first “real” CEO, Eric Schmidt, who had previously worked at software companies Sun Microsystems and Novell. John Doerr informed Schmidt that he needed to meet with Campbell for a coaching session.
Schmidt was insulted—he didn't think he needed help from anybody, let alone an ex-football coach. But within a few months of working with Campbell, Schmidt was a convert. Campbell wound up coaching not just him but also Google's entire senior team.
For the next 15 years until his death, Campbell met almost weekly with Google's principal players while simultaneously coaching executives at dozens of other Silicon Valley companies—even some that were competing with Google.
His coaching sessions did not involve complex profit-and-loss equations. Instead, he relied on home-spun wisdom founded on basic human decency. His overarching message: The top priority of any team leader is the well-being and success of his or her people.
Campbell repeatedly declined compensation for his coaching work, saying that he had a different way of measuring his impact. Payment was unimportant; his glory came from seeing others flourish. At one point, he did accept some Google stock, which he then donated to charity. One of his famous lines was, “I don't take cash, I don't take stock, and I don't take shit.” He was practicing service leadership before the term existed.
Campbell was famous for his colorful four-letter words (which he called “sweet profanity”), his propensity for bear-hugging and blowing kisses to everybody in the room, and his generosity. In addition to coaching executives, he coached middle- and high-school kids in football and always seemed to have time to give advice or friendly encouragement to neighbors and friends.
When Campbell died of cancer at age 75, every Silicon Valley A-lister attended his memorial service, from Apple CEO Tim Cook to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Sitting beside them were hundreds of Campbell's fans and friends, including the now-grown children he had coached in youth sports, his Columbia football squad teammates, and the caddy at his Cabo San Lucas golf club. What united the disparate group was admiration for Campbell's strong character and big heart.
Campbell instructed hundreds of CEOs and executives that leadership is not about you; it's about service to the company and more importantly, service to the team you're leading. He felt strongly that being a skilled manager was important, but it wasn’t enough. Savvy management is critical, but it's ineffective if you don't combine it with caring people skills.
Chapter 2 outlines management principles that can help you become a better leader.
The principle: Don’t demand respect from your employees; earn their respect. No one likes to work for a dictator, but people actually like being managed if they respect their manager, if they think their manager can teach them something, and if their manager helps the team make decisions.
Bill Campbell developed a manifesto called “It's the People.” It states that a company's success is founded on its employees. A manager's job is to create an environment in which employees can grow, develop, and flourish. They can do so by giving their employees the information and training they need, and by respecting and trusting them to do their jobs well. If a manager does this, she will automatically build credibility.
Campbell used to tell the executives he coached that they should go to bed each night not thinking about profit margins or budgets, but rather thinking about their employees and how they could make them more successful.
Supporting research: Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill authored a 2007 study that showed that a manager's authority has to emerge. The more talented an employee is, the less likely he or she is to simply follow orders from a manager—unless that manager has taken steps to establish their credibility.
Executives often overlook their company's management culture when searching for ways to improve company performance. But dozens of studies—including an internal study at Google—have proven that teams who rate their managers highly have lower turnover and higher performance.
Example: Bill Campbell worked closely with Steve Jobs at Apple. For all his genius and charisma, Jobs was a disorganized and often temperamental manager, and his beleaguered employees suffered from low morale. In 1985, Apple's board of directors removed him from the company and replaced him with CEO John Sculley. Twelve years later, Jobs returned to Apple, and Campbell saw that he was a changed man—or rather, a changed manager. Jobs was much more thorough and detailed in every aspect of operational leadership—sales, finances, product development, and so on. He paid close attention to what his teams were doing, and his employees came to admire him. And of course, Apple's greatest successes came during Jobs's second tenure at Apple.
The principle: Good leaders don't just focus on business; they also work at establishing camaraderie in the workplace. Campbell developed a strategy at Google to help team members get to know each other and make everyone feel comfortable speaking up. Instead of jumping right into a meeting agenda, he insisted that meetings start with “trip reports.” Any team member who had been on vacation or traveling for business would share some interesting details about their trip. People who hadn’t been traveling might talk about their weekend activities or their families.
This low-stakes chit-chat at each meeting's start served as an ice-breaker for later in the meeting when decisions needed to be made. Google's CEO Schmidt wanted to hear input from everyone, and since team members were already comfortable chatting with each other, they were more likely to offer feedback.
In lieu of trip reports, you could also start the meeting with other personal, non-business topics like asking every employee to give an update on their children or pets.
Example: Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, started her meetings with each team member thanking another member for their contributions during the previous week. Her staff called it “the family prayer.” The only rule was that you couldn't repeat what someone else had said.
The principle: A manager needs to know what information to discuss and in what forum to discuss it. To disseminate information and get input on company decisions, Campbell believed the staff meeting and the one-on-one meeting were the most important tools a leader had.
Each type of meeting has its own strict purpose. Staff meetings are big-picture forums for important company-wide problems, opportunities, and decision-making, while one-on-ones are intimate opportunities to help an employee be more effective in their job.
Example: GO's founder Jerry Kaplan wanted to discuss GO's competition with Microsoft in a one-on-one meeting with Campbell, who was GO's CEO at the time. But Campbell refused. He insisted that Microsoft’s competition was a big-picture issue. Because it crossed over many company departments and functions, it should be discussed in a team staff meeting, not a one-on-one.
In a staff meeting, teams learn about what other teams are doing, and leaders try to get everyone on the same page. The focus should be on the company's operations and tactics; i.e. how is the current crisis being managed? What are we working toward?
The leader's responsibility is to make sure the staff meeting is run well. That means the meeting's content is relevant, and the agenda is on-task and efficient. Every member should be encouraged to speak openly about the issues at stake.
Supporting research: A 2013 study shows that staff and team meetings make employees feel engaged, especially if everyone has a voice in the meeting and the meeting time is managed well. Additionally, some companies are choosing to hold “tech-free” staff meetings. Recent studies have shown that when people aren't distracted by texts or emails, participation and interaction increase.
A one-on-one meeting between a manager and an employee is much like an executive coaching session. The focus should be on the growth and development of the employee or the "coachee." In a one-on-one, managers should follow a highly structured framework, focusing on the employee's projects, performance, peer relationships, and innovation.
Campbell ran one-on-one coaching meetings with Google CEO Eric Schmidt under a framework that Schmidt calls “Five Words on a White Board.” Campbell would write a top-five list of items he wanted to discuss (one word for each item). Schmidt also wrote a top-five list of items he wanted to discuss. Both men would then simultaneously write their lists on a whiteboard, and if there were overlapping items, those topics would take priority during the one-on-one meeting.
Campbell had a standard framework for every one-on-one meeting:
1. Friendly chatter about non-business topics like family news or updates on favorite sports teams (as in staff meetings).
2. Job performance questions, such as:
3. Discussion about peer relationships.
4. Discussion about hiring and leadership.
5. Discussion about progress toward innovation.
The principle: A manager's job is to make the best ideas come to light, which should happen through discussion, not consensus. Democracy doesn't work well in business (and neither does dictatorship). Campbell would not allow teams to make decisions by simple all-in-favor voting. He wanted to make sure that all perspectives were considered and thoroughly analyzed by the team before any decision was finalized.
Campbell recommended an “ensemble” approach to decision-making. All team members should put their ideas on the table. (To ensure the ideas were well-thought-out, Campbell often met with individuals prior to the meeting, allowing them to talk through their ideas before presenting them.) All perspectives should be heard and considered, and then the team should have an open debate about which idea was best. Heated discussions should be encouraged because dissenting opinions usually lead to better decisions. The best idea should rise to the top as the debate evolves.
If the team can't decide on a best decision, then the manager has to step up, end the debate, and make a decision. Failure to make a decision can be worse than making a bad decision.
When decisions are particularly hard—either for the team or the manager—Campbell recommended that the decision-makers reframe the problem in terms of the company's “first principles.” Every company has its own set of foundational principles that are the reason for the company or product. When faced with a tough decision, the leader or manager should always fall back on the company's founding principles.
Example: When Brad Smith became CEO of Intuit, Campbell told him that he should let his teams make decisions through organized discussions. He said that 8 out of 10 times, the team would make a good decision on their own, but when they didn't, Smith would have to make the call. Campbell called this the “King Arthur Round Table” decision-making model. Most of the time, the knights can figure it out. When they can't, the king has to make a ruling.
Supporting research: Numerous communication studies have shown that when groups try to achieve consensus or make decisions by majority vote, poor decisions are made. “Groupthink” is a common problem—team members may not want to disrupt the team’s progress toward decision-making, so they won't offer a dissenting opinion. Efforts to keep the peace, or not point out possible downsides to a largely popular solution, result in dysfunctional decision-making.
The principle: Innovation requires out-of-the-box thinking, but the “geniuses” who excel at that require careful management. The high-tech world is famous for cultivating divas—high-performing innovators who are terrible team players. Campbell had a soft spot for these smart but difficult people, whom he called “aberrant geniuses.” Steve Jobs was a great example—certainly a genius, but not easy to get along with. Campbell wanted Jobs-like characters on his teams, but he knew he had to smooth out their rough edges.
Campbell's approach was to overlook the fact that these high achievers' behavior didn't fit neatly into the workplace culture. He said that aberrant geniuses should be tolerated as long as their actions don’t cross ethical lines, and as long as their value outweighs their cost to the team. Managers should give a genius autonomy to do what she does best—think outside the box—but make sure she upholds a team-first attitude. The challenge is to get the most value from the genius while not jeopardizing the health of the team.
The principle: Creating innovative products or services should be the company's primary goal. Campbell believed since this was the core of the company mission, engineers should take the lead in decision-making. Not every creator is an aberrant genius; some are just hardworking engineers or designers who make daily efforts at innovation, and they need latitude to do so. The people who work in sales, marketing, and finance can supply useful information about what customer problems need to be fixed and what opportunities they see, but they should never tell the product teams what exactly to build. Workers who are developing new products should always be given a certain amount of company clout and freedom to create.
The principle: Campbell encouraged the leaders he coached to make sure their employees were well compensated. It wasn’t for the sake of generosity. Campbell believed that compensation has emotional value that is far greater than its economic value. Paying people well is a way of recognizing an employee’s worth and showing them respect. Fair compensation inspires them to remain loyal to the company.
The principle: Make layoffs and firings dignified. If you have to let people go, do it gently. For the sake of the person who is leaving and also for the team that remains, endings should always take place in the kindest possible way. The firing or layoff should never come as a total surprise to the departing employee or the remaining team. The manager doing the firing or layoff should be kind and generous, celebrate the departing employee's achievements, and treat them well.
Supporting research: In the 2014 book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, author Ben Horowitz notes that firings and layoffs must be handled carefully to preserve the morale of the remaining team as well as the departing employee. Studies show that laid-off employees are greatly affected by how thoroughly their termination is explained to them, and who delivers the bad news.
(Shortform note: For more of Horowitz’s advice on getting through your company’s inevitable hard times, read our summary of The Hard Thing About Hard Things.)
The principle: The CEO is in charge of the board of directors, not the other way around. Campbell served on a number of boards over the years, and he also coached dozens of CEOs. Over time, he developed a series of guidelines on how CEOs could work successfully with their boards.
During a board meeting, the CEO should always follow his or her own agenda. That agenda should start with a frank discussion about how the company is doing—bad news as well as good news. Backup reports and numbers should have been sent to the directors ahead of time, so they don't get bogged down in them during the meeting.
Every board member should care deeply about the company and have good expertise to contribute. Members should always be available and willing to get their hands dirty to help the CEO do his or her job. Board members who don't do their homework before meetings or contribute in any useful way should be fired.
Example: When Dick Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter, its board consisted of Twitter's founders and venture capitalists. There was no one with direct management experience. Campbell counseled Costolo to bring in more people who could actually help him run the day-to-day operations. He didn't want a board that merely provided oversight; he wanted a collaborative working relationship between Twitter's board and the CEO.
If you want a relationship to be successful, you must build a foundation of trust. Obviously trust matters in friendships and marriages, but we sometimes forget its importance in managing employees. Trust means employees can safely make themselves vulnerable because managers have created a protective, nurturing environment. People can take risks and innovate at work when they know managers and teammates “have their back.”
Chapter 3 outlines principles that can help to build trust in the workplace.
The principle: Build trust within your teams so they can do their best work. This type of trust is also known as “psychological safety,” and it often leads to productive task conflict and eliminates relationship conflict. (Task conflict informs us of the best ways to make decisions and get things done. Relationship conflict leads to low morale and poor decision-making. Conflict over tasks is healthy, but conflict over relationships is unhealthy.)
Campbell insisted that high-performing teams don’t consist of people with similar personalities who never disagree about anything; they consist of team members who feel psychologically safe. You can create psychological safety within your teams by ensuring that everyone can be fully themselves and take risks without fear of reprisal from other team members.
(Shortform note: Organizational behavior scientist Amy Edmondson coined the phrase “psychological safety” in 1999, describing it as an environment where people can speak out, challenge, and contribute to a group dynamic without fear.)
Example: At one point when Campbell was CEO of Intuit, the company was having a rough quarter and wasn't going to make its numbers. Campbell met with the board, who wanted to focus on investing for the future and not worry about the current quarter. Campbell disagreed. He wanted to curtail spending immediately. After much discussion, board member John Doerr of the investment capital firm Kleiner Perkins spoke up, saying, “We should back the CEO.” Even though Doerr didn't agree with Campbell's position, he thought it was important to create a psychologically safe environment in which Campbell could function, knowing his board would support him.
(Shortform note: In 2018, billionaire Doerr authored Measure What Matters, a handbook for setting and achieving big goals. Read our summary of Measure What Matters.)
The principle: Listen to people with your full and undivided attention. Campbell believed that teams would be more successful if every team member felt like his or her opinion was thoroughly listened to, especially by the manager or team leader.
Since the 1950s, communications researchers have studied the importance of “active listening,” which means giving the person speaking your complete attention, not checking your phone for texts while they’re talking, not letting your mind wander, not interrupting or reacting, and not thinking about the next thing you’re going to say.
Today we might call this behavior “being present” in conversation with another person. It means a wholehearted attempt to fully grasp the speaker's perspective.
Campbell's style of listening included asking many questions. It's the classic Socratic method used in many college classrooms. When you listen closely to what someone is saying and ask relevant, probing questions that target the real issue, people feel encouraged to share more information. They also feel highly valued.
Supporting research: Studies on attention show that it’s typical for our minds to wander about half of the time that someone else is speaking. It's easy to get distracted by external interruptions (loud conversations, emails, or Slack notifications) as well as inner distractions (like being in a bad mood or feeling hungry, tired, or uncomfortable). Any of these can impact your ability to be an active, attentive listener.
The principle: A strong leader or coach is unafraid to state a harsh truth or an unpopular opinion. Honesty and authenticity are key. To get the most out of your employees, give honest, direct assessments—sometimes even tough critiques—that nudge the receiver forward.
The key, according to former Google employee Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, is the “tough love” concept. Deliver the blunt truth in such a way that the recipient knows you care. It might mean cushioning unpleasant words with encouragement and validation to lessen the sting. For Campbell, who was fond of using four-letter words, it usually meant swearing and hugging at the same time. Somehow the people he worked with found this approach comforting, not offensive (but if you don’t have Campbell’s charisma, you might not want to try it.)
(Shortform note: For more of Scott’s advice on honesty and candid feedback in the workplace, read our summary of Radical Candor.)
Campbell encouraged teams and individuals to see feedback as a way to strengthen and build upon their ideas and processes, not simply as criticism. For negative feedback, prompt timing is critical. Tough criticism should always be delivered immediately—don't wait until a performance review that's scheduled for three weeks from now.
Also, negative feedback should always be delivered in private. No team member should ever be publicly criticized.
Supporting research: Campbell's approach is backed up by what scholars call “relational transparency.” We are often divided in our desire to support people and also demand more of them. But if we stick to providing honest feedback, we can do what good parents do with their children—maintain high standards while simultaneously encouraging them to do better.
Example: Campbell was coaching CEO Dan Rosenweig at Chegg during a difficult period in the textbook-rental company's history. Chegg had nearly gone bankrupt and the CEO saved the company by making major cuts. He was thrilled that he'd managed to pull off a miracle. Campbell gave him a big hug of congratulations, then reminded him that this was no time to celebrate—in fact, Rosenweig needed to get back to work. The company needed to grow to survive, so the CEO shouldn't be rejoicing about making cuts.
Example: Campbell was a friend and neighbor of Pat Gallagher, who worked for the San Francisco Giants in the years before they became world champions and had their new beautiful playing field in San Francisco's South Beach District. Campbell once told Gallagher that he had to make himself into the world's greatest marketing manager because he worked for a losing team who played at America's worst ballpark. (Harsh words, but true.)
The principle: Guide people toward making their own good decisions. Campbell didn't tell people what the right answer was. Instead, he believed in the instructive power of stories. Instead of doling out his version of the best decision, he would tell anecdotes about events that had happened in his own business career that might help guide them to making the best decision on their own. Often he would simply listen and ask probing questions, then let them come to their own conclusions.
Coaches and leaders can help people discover what they need to do and solve their own problems without telling them directly. Campbell suggested that managers should stop using controlling language and instead frame their guidance as questions. Instead of saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do,” say “What do you think?” Instead of saying, “Do it this way instead of that way,” try “How could you do it differently?” Employees feel more engaged when managers reframe the way they communicate to sound less authoritative.
The principle: In order for anyone to improve, they need to be humble. The traits that make an employee or executive “coachable” include humility, honesty, perseverance, and a perpetual willingness to learn. Campbell's theory of coaching started with the idea that all people have value, and it’s not based on their title in the company. It's based on who they are and how much they're willing to improve. A coach's job is to increase the value of the person they're coaching, but that requires the “coachee” to be humble, hungry for self-improvement, and always willing to learn. The “coachee” needs to be self-aware and understand his or her own strengths and limitations. There's no room for pretending you're more than you are.
Example: When Jonathan Rosenberg, a seasoned CEO who had worked with other startups, came to Google's offices for a meeting in 2002, he thought he was coming to accept a job offer. But instead he had to face one final hiring hurdle—he had to meet Campbell—and Rosenberg had no idea who he was. Campbell asked Rosenberg point-blank if he was coachable.
Rosenberg replied, “It depends on the coach.” This infuriated Campbell, who stood up to leave the meeting. Rosenberg started back-pedaling, realizing that maybe he shouldn’t have been so brash. Campbell eventually sat back down and explained that he was only willing to work with people who were humble, curious, and wanted to learn.
The principle: It's a leader's job to make his or her team more courageous. People are naturally afraid of taking risks, so effective leaders offer encouragement and push for bolder action. Campbell often said that much of what he did during coaching sessions was convince people they could do much more than they thought they could.
Teachers learn early on that their primary role is to believe in their students more than the students believe in themselves. It's the same for managers and the people they manage. This doesn't mean mindless cheerleading—it means setting someone's aspirations high. It means doling out positive messages based on what you know someone is capable of.
The principle: People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identity to work. Campbell was not a tech wizard, and he didn't have a bunch of fancy engineering degrees. He claimed that he “didn't even know how to do HTML.” He earned his reputation by being exactly who he was—an ex-football player and coach with superior people skills and valuable experience running companies (and a habit of swearing a lot and hugging people). He didn't fit the Silicon Valley mold, but it didn’t matter.
Campbell believed that when you're not being yourself, people know it, and that creates mistrust. He encouraged people to bring their full, transparent selves to the workplace. And he instructed CEOs and managers to avoid making their employees conform to dominant norms. Unique personalities play a critical role in the workplace. People from different backgrounds and walks of life create valuable diversity, which makes teams more interesting and productive and can deflect the dangerous effects of “groupthink.”
For Campbell, diversity also applied to the sexes. When he helped companies with hiring and team-building, he always made sure the teams were staffed with women as well as men. The tech industry is notoriously male-dominated, and Campbell believed that having more women in the mix would lead to better decision-making.
Example: Campbell coached David Drummond, Alphabet's head of corporate development and legal affairs, who is Black. Drummond said that being Black in Silicon Valley made him feel uncomfortably self-conscious—he was noticeably different from most everybody else. But Campbell encouraged Drummond to be proud of his identity, to make it his source of motivation and strength rather than diminish it in an attempt to conform. He told Drummond that people would respect him for being who he was, not for trying to be someone else.
Campbell believed you can’t get anything done without a team, so the most important thing to look for in hiring people is a team-first attitude. The entire team's success must be more important than any individual's success.
Chapter 4 outlines principles that can help you build stronger teams.
The principle: People skills matter as much as technical skills. Most business people are familiar with the platitude that you should always hire people who are smarter than you, and Campbell believed it, too, but his criteria went farther than that. When hiring, Campbell looked for smart people who worked hard, had high integrity, would persevere even when faced with disaster, and most importantly, possessed a team-first attitude.
You can't have a team full of quarterbacks—every team needs a diverse array of talents and abilities. Campbell said teams needed super-smart members but also people who were good at skills like empathy and communication. He called this “smarts and hearts.” He wasn't overly concerned with experience or technical skills because he knew these could be developed. He hired people for potential.
Campbell paid attention to how existing managers and employees talked and acted. Did they say “I” a lot or did they say “we”? Were they willing to make concessions? Did they get excited about other people's successes? He championed the idea that it was a leader's job to be an enthusiastic cheerleader. Campbell was famous for clapping loudly when someone finished a staff meeting presentation on a new project or a new idea. (One of the Google executives named this behavior “BCC” for “the Bill Campbell clap.” New team members even practice it during orientation.)
The principle: When faced with a problem, the first step is to ensure the right team or individual is handling it. On the football field or basketball court, if you’ve got the wrong player in the wrong position, the team can't win. Campbell's motto was “work the team, not the problem.” Business leaders don't need to be overly concerned about a problem's nitty-gritty details as long as they have the right individual or team in place to solve the problem.
Example: In 2010, Steve Jobs of Apple believed that Google's Android operating system was violating Apple's iPhone patents. Apple sued the Android phone manufacturers, who were Google's business partners. Even though Campbell was friends with players at both Apple and Google, he didn't get involved in solving the conflict. Instead, he focused on putting the right player into action. He told Google's CEO to utilize engineering chief Alan Eustace to negotiate with Apple. Eustace had the best skillset for the job. Because he was an engineer, he was able to get the engineers on both sides to talk to each other.
(Shortform note: Eustace achieved much greater fame in October 2014 by jumping from a helium-filled balloon floating in the stratosphere. He holds the world's highest freefall record at 135,899 feet.)
The principle: A strong leader will pair people up to work on projects or make decisions. These pairings enhance peer relationships and make the entire team stronger. When Campbell paired people up—especially people who hadn't worked together before—he knew he was building alliances and trust within a team.
Example: In 2008, Campbell asked Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice-president of products, to seek out Google's new CFO Patrick Pichette and mentor him. This helped Pichette navigate his way around a new environment, but more importantly, it created a new pair of trusting teammates on CEO Schmidt's team.
Because Campbell believed that peers were better at evaluating each other than managers were at evaluating their subordinates, he helped to develop a peer feedback survey at Google. The survey examined job performance, relationships with peer groups, leadership, innovation, and behavior at meetings.
In the last year, did this person:
Open-ended questions:
The principle: Bring negative issues to light, discuss them and solve them, but don’t let the team wallow in them. Campbell liked to identify the elephant in the room, which was often a problem that nobody on the team wanted to talk about. He'd make the problem transparent, then challenge his team to tackle it and solve it. Then he'd quickly move everyone past the problem without assigning blame. A leader’s job is to keep the team focused on positive momentum.
Supporting research: Psychologists call this problem-focused coping as opposed to emotion-focused coping. It's more effective for problems that are solvable. Teams can get the emotional “venting” out of the way, then get to work on fixing the problem.
The principle: If you and your team are struggling, recommit to the cause. Your team needs a leader now more than ever. When times are tough, leaders need to show even greater loyalty, commitment, and decisiveness. Leaders must always strive to win. In sports, this technique is known as “positive coaching.” It means practicing a relentless optimism even when you have a losing record.
Example: At a critical point just before Google's initial public offering, CEO Eric Schmidt wanted to quit. His board had asked him to step down as chairman and CEO. They wanted to hire a new chairman and keep Schmidt as CEO only. Campbell knew that Schmidt's feelings were hurt, but he also knew that the best thing for Google would be to keep Schmidt in place as CEO. He knew he had to appeal to Schmidt's loyalty to the company.
Campbell suggested that Schmidt agree to step down temporarily as chairman and remain as CEO, and Campbell would see to it that he would later be reinstated. He convinced Schmidt to push down his pride and hurt feelings and work toward a bigger goal—to do what was best for his team and for Google. Schmidt obliged, and three years later, he was reinstated as chairman.
Love isn't a word that's usually applied to business relationships. Studies have shown that people often view warm and friendly employees as incompetent and workers who are more rigid and stiff as competent. Employees often learn they are rewarded for behaving more like robots than people. They are taught to separate personal emotions from the business environment.
But Campbell believed that the workplace becomes more joyful and teams become more effective when leaders break down the walls between the human persona and the professional persona. Chapter 5 outlines principles that can help bring empathy and compassion into the workplace:
The principle: Humanize your organization and you'll build a stronger team. Most companies tout the idea that they genuinely care about their employees. But many workplaces are dehumanizing, especially if high-performance expectations create a stressful, competitive environment.
Campbell encouraged executives to talk to their employees about their personal lives, learn about their families, and care about them as people, not just employees. Campbell practiced this himself and was known for digging far beyond the superficial. He learned everybody's names, their hobbies, and their interests. Instead of saying, “How are the kids?” Campbell would say, “How was Hannah's last soccer game?” and then “Has she started looking at colleges yet?”
Campbell's caring attitude wasn't just for show. When Steve Jobs was dying from cancer, Campbell visited him at home or in the hospital nearly every day. Even though he and Jobs no longer had a business relationship, Campbell prioritized his days around these important visits to his gravely ill colleague. His loyalty to Jobs didn’t end in the workplace; he cared about him as a whole person.
Supporting research: Employees who work at organizations where “companionate love” is common—feelings of compassion and caring for others—have higher job satisfaction and more success working in teams. A 2004 study states that compassion at the individual level—a single manager or leader showing compassion toward employees—often translates into compassion at the organizational level. One executive's generosity can legitimize empathy within the entire company.
Additionally, studies have shown that when teams have leaders that care only about achievements, employee engagement and retention are lower, work quality is poor, and business results decline. On the flip side, feeling emotionally supported by colleagues and higher-ups is a stronger predictor of job satisfaction than the work itself.
Example: When Ruth Porat was hired as Google's CFO, she had to commute to Silicon Valley from New York. Campbell constantly asked her how her husband was handling the arrangement. He wanted to make sure that not just his CFO was happy, but also her husband.
Another classic Campbell story occurred when Brad Smith was hired at Intuit in 2003. He attended a meet-and-greet to get to know the other company executives. Campbell introduced himself by giving Smith a giant bear hug and saying words along the lines of “Welcome to the team, you SOB.” Smith had just been introduced to Campbell's signature style, which fell far outside the norms of corporate culture: warm hugs and friendly profanity.
The Google executives who authored Trillion Dollar Coach admit they aren't huggers like Campbell—they're more inclined to shake hands. And they don't go as deep into employees' family lives as Campbell did. But they have adopted many of Campbell's habits, like learning people's names, looking at an employee's family photos and learning about their spouses and children, and asking questions about their lives outside of work.
The principle: Be generous with your time, money, and connections. Campbell was fond of doing favors for others. If he could pull a few strings, he would. Businessman Adam Rifkin calls this kind of generosity the “five-minute favor,” as detailed in Adam Grant’s book Give and Take. Five-minute favors require very little of the giver but mean an awful lot to the recipient.
(Shortform note: To learn more about the benefits of doing five-minute favors, read our summary of Adam Grant’s Give and Take.)
But most of us think of favors differently depending on who the recipient is. A favor for your best friend? Of course you'd do that. But a favor for a colleague at work? Well, you might need to see if it's okay with your boss, or what the human resources department thinks about it. What if other employees think you're doling out special treatment? That's not fair to everybody, right? And so on.
Campbell would say, just do the favor—regardless of company protocol.
The principle: Always respect and protect the founders, the people with the most vision and passion for the company. Running a company is an operational job, but it requires more than bean-counting. It requires vision. The founders of the company created the vision—the heart that makes the company beat—and they should always be rewarded for that. They took the huge risk of starting the company, utilizing their passion and courage. They may not have been the best accountants, salespeople, or marketing gurus—and they had to hire others to take on these important roles—but they had the vision. Campbell believed that a company should always revere its founders and keep them engaged in operations in a meaningful way.
Example: Campbell was around when John Sculley came in as CEO of Apple. Sculley eventually forced out Steve Jobs, the company's founder. Many years later, Jobs returned to Apple, and he asked Campbell to help him pull the company out of bankruptcy. Campbell knew that Jobs could be a difficult man and had many limitations as a leader, but he also recognized that Jobs cared about Apple more than anyone else because he founded it.
Example: When Dick Costolo became CEO of Twitter, Campbell instructed him to collaborate with the company's three founders, to work alongside them and not against them. Campbell gently reminded Costolo that although today Costolo was the CEO and they were the founders, at some future time he would be the ex-CEO and they would still be the founders.
The principle: Caring for your colleagues takes practice. As noted earlier, Campbell was an extrovert who loved people, but not every team leader or manager is wired this way. If you're an introvert, you'll need a lot of practice to develop the level of “people skills” that Campbell was famous for. It may not seem natural at first, but these skills can be learned. Start with small steps: Take a moment to stop and chat with people in the hallway, elevator, or cafeteria. Ask simple, open-ended questions, like “How's that project going?” or “What are you working on?”
Don’t underestimate the significance of small exchanges, like making eye contact when you walk in the office and genuinely asking a coworker how her day is going. Daily interactions build relationships, which make up the fabric of a company’s culture.
The principle: Don't just build teams at work, build community. Campbell was obviously an extrovert who loved people, but he was also a strategist. His goal: to build community. He believed there was power in making long-lasting connections between people both inside and outside of the workplace.
Supporting research: Sociologists call this “creating social capital.” By creating strong emotional bonds between people, a community, institution, or company automatically becomes much stronger.
Example: Campbell formed a Super Bowl group, a bunch of friends who would travel together to attend the Super Bowl each year, wherever it was held. Occasionally someone would have to cancel at the last minute and he would wind up with extra tickets. He would always give them away to strangers. Campbell's Super Bowl gatherings mattered so much to him that when he was dying, he created an endowment to keep the trips going. He did the same with other trips he and his friends took each year—a golf trip to Cabo San Lucas, a fishing trip to Montana. He was famous for picking up the tab for both large and small events. He even invested his money in an aging sports bar in Palo Alto, which became a popular Friday afternoon hangout for anybody who walked in. Campbell often paid the bar bill for friends and strangers alike.
The principle: The team should be a team for life. The highest achievers often feel the loneliest. By being in a position of power, high achievers often feel a sense of separation from others. They may have a big ego from all their successes and achievements, but that is often coupled with big insecurities and fears. They may want to feel appreciated, but there's no one higher up in the company to thank them for their efforts. They don't always know if people want to be their friends because of their position or because they are genuinely loved. When it's time to retire or step away from their positions, they grapple with loss and uncertainty.
Example: In 2017, Eric Schmidt announced he was stepping down from the board of Google. Campbell was no longer alive to be his coach and mentor, and his teammates at Google feared that he would struggle with the transition to a new life outside of Google (after 19 years with the company—first as CEO, later as chairman of the board, and still later as board member). So they rallied around him to help create a plan for the next stage in his career. Schmidt didn't make his final exit until 2020, but his team made sure he didn’t walk that road alone.