How Leaders Can Build Winning
COACHING CULTURES BY ASH SEDDEEK
Engaging in five key steps, including reviewing your talent acquisition strategy and long-term business vision, can lay a solid foundation for your coaching efforts. On April 26, 2019, I sat in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., listening to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki interview Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chairman and current chair of Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Jonathan Rosenberg, former senior vice president of Google, chief operating officer of Motorola, and current advisor at Alphabet, and Alan Eagle, Google’s director of communication. The three are the authors of a book called Trillion Dollar Coach (Harper Business, 2019). The book features management lessons from coach and business executive Bill Campbell, who the authors say helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value through his mentoring of entrepreneurs and executives. From the interview, it was obvious how much impact Campbell, who also coached and was a close friend of Steve Jobs, had on Schmidt, Rosenberg, and Eagle and the organizations they work for. In their book, they talk about how the Google leadership team came to see that the best
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path to success in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form highperforming teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things. According to them, a critical component of these high-performing teams is a leader who is a very good manager and, more important, a “caring coach.” There is a lot to learn from the work Campbell did with Silicon Valley luminaries and high-performing teams, teaching leaders to not only manage their teams but also coach them along the way. I asked Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit (Page Two, 2016), about the key action steps leaders should take to build a coaching culture and how this culture ties in to high-performing organizations. According to Stanier, while many organizations strive to create a coaching culture, they struggle to do so. There are two things organizations need to do.
