Top Takeaways: Steve Jobs' Coach's Playbook

1. Believe in your people more than they do in themselves. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will. Push your people to be courageous. Bill knew that the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful.?

How often do you find yourself thinking that your colleagues are not smart, or even worse, “stupid”? How can you shift your mindset to bring out the best instead of the worst in your people?

2. Most important thing in a relationship or company is TRUST. ?Academic research shows that not only is trust important, it is the first thing to create if you want a relationship to be successful. Trust means that you feel comfortable being vulnerable. Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions.? It means giving your people the benefit of the doubt (The Fabric of Trust: Invaluable).

Bill developed a circle of trust very quickly with his people.? He saw the world in different way - as network of people learning each others strengths and weakness and learning to trust each other as a primary means of building a business. What my friend Alicia Parr describes as “the conversion of people energy into economic value.”

How do you build relationships?? How much time does it take for people to trust you? For you to trust them?

3. Bring love to the workplace. Academic research bears out that an organization full of “companionate” love that Bill demonstrated (caring, affectionate) will have higher employee satisfaction and teamwork, lower absenteeism, and better team performance. Gallup’s extensive research shows that those who have a BFF@W are 7x more likely to be engaged at work (Do you have a best friend at work?).

How often do you jump into action items and tasks versus getting to know your team as people, as human beings?|? When was the last time you hugged a colleague? Bill was into hugs. He even taught Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to learn to hug.

4. Focus on building great managers. ?Bill liked to say, “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader; they claim that, not you.”

When he was advisor to CEO, Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google initiated Project Oxygen, conducting extensive research, analyzing data from performance reviews, employee surveys, and other feedback mechanisms.? This initiative focused on the importance of the soft side of management, the people side such as knowing what each of your team is interested in doing and how they are progressing in their careers. When you are intensely loyal to your people and have their backs, they reflect that back in loyalty and productivity.

Through their analysis, Google identified eight key behaviors that distinguish the best managers from the rest:

Being a good coach.

Empowering the team and not micromanaging

Expressing interest in and concern for team members' success and personal well-being

Being productive and results-oriented

Being a good communicator – listening and sharing information

Helping with career development

Having a clear vision and strategy for the team

Possessing key technical skills to help advise the team

Project Oxygen has had a significant impact on Google’s workplace culture and performance. It helped create a more supportive and effective management environment, which in turn has contributed to higher employee satisfaction, retention, and productivity.

5. Top person speaks last. As the top person, you may have the right answer, but by blurting it out, you rob the chance for your team to get to the solution together.

I learned this early in my career by watching Marc Belton , the general manager of Betty Crocker Snacks division and my sponsor at General Mills, at key cross-functional meetings.? What I, as the lowly assistant marketing manager straight out of business school, considered “career events”.? We were being judged by all the people who mattered in our promotion on our critical thinking skills and our talents in evaluating and moving the business forward. Marc would always ask me my point of view at these meetings, first. He didn’t want me to be tainted by more senior members’ voices and he also wanted to make sure that my voice was heard.

Bill gave this assignment to Marissa Mayer when she was at Google.? She didn’t like it, but it worked.? She gained new respect for her team and their ability to handle problems. How often in your meetings do the same people speak?? And the same people observe? How can you switch that around?

6. Letting people go is a failure of management, not the people leaving. Send them out with their heads held high and take care of them. Be generous, treat them well, and celebrate their accomplishments.?? Know how you treat the departing impacts the people staying.

7. Treat everyone equally.? No one likes to work for people who have favorites.? Not even the favorites - they live in fear of what others think of their being a favorite of the boss.

8. Identify tensions amongst teammates and work hard to resolve them.? It is much “easier” to ignore and to roll over them, but in the long term, this festers and will limit or prevent success.

9. Dare to be daring.? Within nine months of joining Apple, Bill was promoted to VP of Sales and Marketing and given the task of launching the Macintosh.? As a creative marketer, he led the team that came up with Apple’s ground breaking 1984 Super Bowl Ad. He ran it even though the board said not to.? It went on to be one of the most famous commercials of all time.

10. Make a decision. ?Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision.? There’s indecision in business all the time, because there is no perfect answer.? Do something, even if it’s wrong. Having a well run process to get to a decision is just as important as the decision itself because it gives the team confidence and keeps everyone moving.

11. Decide on first principles for your situation and let your decisions be guided by them.? If everyone is on board with your first principles, then the decision practically is made itself.? Define the “first principles” for the situation, the immutable truths that are the foundation for the company or product, and help guide the decision from those principles.? This will save a lot of time spent second guessing and waffling.

Now…what will you do?

Source: The Trillion Dollar Coach's Playbook, Happiness and Leadership@Work column by Grace Ueng: July 11, 2024.

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