Trillion Dollar Coach (Book Summary)

Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle

Foreword by Adam Grant

• To be a great manager, you have to be a great coach.
• Start treating teams, not individuals, as the fundamental building block of the organization.
• Google’s Project Aristotle identified 5 factors that matter most to team effectiveness (in order of importance):
  • Psychological safety: Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. This requires treating everyone you meet with dignity and respect and taking the time to show a sincere interest in the lives of your team
  • Dependability: Team members get things done and meet the company’s high bar for excellence.
  • Structure & Clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals.
  • Meaning: Work is personally important to team members.
  • Impact: Team members think their work matters and creates change.

Chapter 1 The Caddie and the CEO

• It’s not that he told us what to do — far from it. If Bill had opinions about product and strategy, he usually kept them to himself. But he made sure the team was communicating, that tensions and disagreements were brought to the surface and discussed, so that when the big decisions were made, everyone was on board, whether they agreed or not.
• He was nice to every single person.

Chapter 2 Your Title Makes You a Manager. Your People Make You a Leader

• [People like] being managed, as long as their manager [is] someone from whom they [can] learn something, and someone who [helps] make decisions.
• If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader.
• The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop.
• Managers create [the right] environment through support, respect, and trust.
  • Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coaching they need to succeed.
  • Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices.
  • Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions.
• When business decisions were being discussed, Eric [Schmidt] wanted everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area or not.
• “Get the 1:1 right “and “get the staff meeting right” are tops on the list of [Bill’s] most important management principles.
• Staff meetings should be a forum for the most important issues and opportunities. Use meetings to get everyone on the same page, get to the right debate, and make decisions.
• BILL’S FRAMEWORK FOR 1:1s AND REVIEWS
  • He always started with the “small talk.”
  • Next [align on the] top-five list of things to discuss.  In teaching his management seminar at Google, Bill advocated that each person should put his or her list on the board — a simultaneous reveal.
  • PERFORMANCE ON JOB REQUIREMENTS
  • RELATIONSHIP WITH PEER GROUPS: Pay attention to input from [your] peers. What do your teammates think of you? That’s what’s important!
  • MANAGEMENT/LEADERSHIP: Are you guiding/coaching your people? He always wanted to know, were we setting a clear direction for them, and constantly reinforcing it?
  • INNOVATION (BEST PRACTICES): Are you constantly moving ahead… thinking about how to continually get better? Were we making space for it on our teams?
• Eric liked to use a management technique he called the “rule of two.“ He would get the two people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution.
• Bill encouraged ensembles and always strived for a politics-free environment. A place where the top manager makes all decisions leads to just the opposite, because people will spend their time trying to convince the manager that their idea is the best.
• If the problem or decision at hand is more functional in nature (for example, primarily a marketing or finance decision), then the discussion should be led by the person with that functional expertise. When it is a broader decision cutting across multiple functional areas, then the team leader owns the discussion. Regardless, it should involve everyone’s point of view.
• Getting to the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is just as important.
• Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision.
• Bill wasn’t a fan of media attention and mistrusted the motivation of people who sought too much of it.
• [Bill took a holistic view.] “How do we make things better for [our company, our people], our [partners], and the [customer]?
• Bill’s questions [not about the nuts-and-bolts of how things worked but rather] were all about how we can move faster.”
• if you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can.
• One day, Bill was at a meeting with one of those product managers, who presented his engineers with a list of features he wanted them to build. Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has. You give them context on who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features.
• Treating departing people well is important for the morale and well-being of the remaining team.
• The CEO manages the board and board meetings, not the other way around.
• Ensure that operations reviews include a thorough [honest & transparent] set of highlights and lowlights.

Chapter 3 Build an Envelope of Trust

• Creating a culture where anything less than operational excellence wouldn’t be tolerated.
• Trust means you keep your word. Trust means loyalty. Trust means integrity/honesty. Trust means discretion.
• He started relationships by getting to know the person, beyond their résumé and skill set.
• He only coached the coachable. Then, if you passed that test, he listened intently, practiced complete candor, believed that his coachees could achieve remarkable things, and was intensely loyal.
• In a coaching session with Bill, you could expect that he would listen intently. People perceive the best listeners to be those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.
• Bill was uplifting. No matter what we discussed, I felt heard, understood, and supported.
• Bill was always 100 percent honest (he told the truth) and candid (he wasn’t afraid to offer a harsh opinion).
• Never embarrass someone publicly.
• Don’t tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it.
• It’s a manager’s job to push the team to be more courageous.
• Be the person who gives energy, not one who takes it away.
• He built his message on your capabilities and progress. Encouragement must be credible.
• Bill encouraged people to be themselves at work.

Chapter 4 Team First

• 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.
• His job was team building, assessing people’s talents, and finding the doers.
• 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: WHEN FACED WITH A PROBLEM OR OPPORTUNITY, THE FIRST STEP IS TO ENSURE THE RIGHT TEAM IS IN PLACE AND WORKING ON IT.
• When change happens, the priority has to be what is best for the team.
• “I learned an incredibly important lesson,” [Sheryl Sandberg] says. “It’s not what you used to do, it’s not what you think, it’s what you do every day.”
• If you are creating a high-performing team and building for the future, you need to hire for potential as well as experience.
• 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.
• Peer feedback survey
  • CORE ATTRIBUTES – For the past 12 months, to what extent do you agree/disagree that each person:
    • Displayed extraordinary in-role performance.
    • Exemplified world-class leadership.
    • Achieved outcomes that were in the best interest of both Google as a whole and his/her organization.
    • Expanded the boundaries of what is possible for Google through innovation and/or application of best practices.
    • Collaborated effectively with peers (for example, worked well together, resolved barriers/issues with others) and championed the same in his/her team.
    • Contributed effectively during senior team meetings (for example, was prepared, participated actively, listened well, was open and respectful to others, disagreed constructively).
  • 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:
    • Product Vision
    • Product Quality
    • Product Execution
  • OPEN-TEXT QUESTIONS
    • What differentiates each SVP and makes him/her effective today?
    • What advice would you give each SVP to be more effective and/or have greater impact?
• Win as a team (not as individuals) and win ethically.
• 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.
• He invariably led off the meetings by talking about personal stuff. What was going on with [the person’s] family? What motivated him? Bill’s approach was to make the human connection first, then approach the work with that understanding.
• 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.

Chapter 5 The Power of Love

• Most companies and executives truly do care about their people. Perhaps just not the whole person.
• When you have a friend who is injured or ill or needs you in some way, you drop everything and just go.
• If you don’t naturally have as big a heart as Bill’s, faking it won’t work.
• CHEER DEMONSTRABLY FOR PEOPLE AND THEIR SUCCESSES.

Chapter 6 The Yardstick

• Executive teams must have a coach if they want to perform at their best. The best person to be the team’s coach is the team’s manager.
• “If you’ve been blessed, be a blessing.”