Public sector organizations require good management. While Trillion Dollar Coach isn’t necessarily a must-read book in public policy, it’s definitely valuable and should probably be added to the list. The bestselling book was written by Google leaders Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle. The book is about management lessons from Bill Campbell, the business executive and coach of some of the most brilliant and influential minds in Silicon Valley. In this blog I share my three takeaways and how they can be applied in the public sector.
Brief summary
Bill Campbell was a football player and coach, turned into an extraordinary business executive. He also mentored visionaries like Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. Campbell, known as ‘the Coach’, helped to build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies – including Google, Apple and Intuit – and to create over a trillion dollars in market value. According to the authors, Campbell was not only a business genius and great mentor, but an extraordinary human being.
The Coach left a legacy of growing companies, successful people, respect, friendship and love after his death in 2016. This book is the authors’ tribute to their mentor. The book is based on interviews with over 80 people that knew and loved Bill Campbell, along with the author’s personal experience with him. Trillion Dollar Coach explains Campbell’s principles and illustrates them with stories from the people and companies with which he worked. Those valuable lessons also apply to the public sector. These are my three takeaways.
It’s all about the people
People are the foundation of any company’s success. In the book, you can see this as a common denominator in all the chapters. The same principle applies to public sector organizations. Campbell believed managers create this environment through: i) support, giving people the tools, information, training and coaching needed to succeed; ii) respect, being sensitive to people’s unique career and goals; and iii) trust, knowing people want to do well and believing that they will.
The top priority of any manager should be the well-being and success of its people. The Coach always said that ‘to care about people, you have to care about people’. According to the authors he had a natural and authentic way to do it. While they say no one could be like Bill Campbell, he taught them to ‘practice loving your colleagues until it becomes natural’. Talk to them, get to know them, their families, their interests. When things get rough, show up. Always make the time to build communities inside and outside of work. He argued that you can’t separate your human and working selves. While love is not a common word in business books, it was part of Campbell’s secret to success.
Get the team right
Get the team right and you will get the issue right. ‘Work the team, not the problem’. For Campbell, a team with the required skills and abilities will figure out a solution to any problem. He trusted his people and let them excel at what they were good. Part of getting the team right is knowing your players, their strengths and weaknesses. Successful executives learn how to hire great people, how to evaluate them and give them feedback, and they reward them well.
Pick the right players. Hire people smarter than yourself. They have to be better than you at that role. I found fascinating that when he was hiring someone, he wouldn’t ask them what they did in a previous role, but why. He was interested in understanding how a candidate for a position approached problems. Bill had a list of qualities that made a good player. They have to be smart but also a good person. Work hard, have high integrity and grit – which he referred to as having the passion and perseverance to get up and try again after being knocked out. Also, they need to have the ability to learn fast, be empathetic and have a team-first attitude. When you hire someone be mindful of how that will affect the team’s composition.
Peer relationships are essential for a company to thrive. The authors mention different strategies the Coach used to achieve this purpose. For example, he would pair people to be responsible for a specific job to incentivize collaboration. In the 1:1 meetings, one of the things we would always ask was how are things going with their peers. He emphasized that what your peers think of you is more important than what your supervisors think. In case of a conflict, he would let the two people most closely involved in the issue decide the best solution. If there was no agreement, he would break the tie. For Campbell, ‘getting the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is as important’.
Leadership
‘Be a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you’, as Campbell would say. Your role as a manager is to make sure you have a strong operating plan to accompany the strategy. I loved his passion for excellence and for delivering results. Campbell fostered a culture where anything less than operational excellence wouldn’t be tolerated. ‘Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team’. If anything, this is even more important in the public sector. Leadership in the public sector is always about something bigger: the wellbeing of citizens.
To be a good manager you have to be a good coach. For Campbell, the most important thing a manager does is to help people be more effective, and to grow and develop. In other words, making them better. ‘Believe in your people more than they believe in themselves. Push them to be courageous’. For the authors he was the representation of tough love. The Coach would always give honest and authentic feedback, keeping people’s respect and loyalty in the process. He suggested practicing active listening and genuinely engaging in your conversations. The power of coaching is the ability to offer a different perspective, one that is not affected by being part of the game.
Does all of this apply to the public sector?
Obviously, not all the advice in the book is transferable to the public sector. It’s more challenging to manage an environment where you don’t have absolute control. Public organizations are regulated by responsibilities and procedures that could limit its capacity to adapt and innovate. However, the principles that made the Coach successful do apply. Even if you feel you can’t change the whole organization, you can start with your own team. Yes, even if it’s small.
I recommend reading the book. There are some great tips on how to improve the performance of a team and successfully manage an organization. Something I would love to see in the public sector, for example, are coaching programs for mid-level and senior managers to help them reach their potential and improve their performance. While I was reading the book, I was imagining the impact someone like Campbell could have if he was mentoring senior public servants.
Photo credit: Joshua Hibbert on Unsplash
