Running a $1.92 trillion company isn’t for the faint of heart, according to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Most of his job relies around making high-stakes decisions and solving problems other people have been unable to fix, Pichai said at a Stanford Business School speaking event in April 2022. Whenever he needs to cope with stress at work, he remembers a simple two-part mantra he learned as a graduate student, he said.
First, making any decision is better than wasting time ruminating on the options. And second, most choices aren’t permanent, and you can learn from your mistakes if you make one, said Pichai.
If someone at Google comes to him with a problem — which often happens when his team is divided between two solutions — he pushes himself to choose one of those options in an efficient manner, he said. The alternative usually involves letting the pressure get to you, which could slow down the team or, sometimes, the company as a whole, he added.
“You making that decision is the most important thing you can do [to move forward],” Pichai said at the event. “It may feel like a lot rides on [your choice], but you look later, and realize, it wasn’t that consequential,” said Pichai.
Learning how to cope with pressure at work can help you be happier and more productive at work, some experts say. If deadlines, a high-profile project or a micromanaging boss stress you out, try to view the hurdles as opportunities to rise to a challenge, rather than a threat to your career or livelihood, University of Pennsylvania burnout researcher
“When we’re faced with a stressor out of our control, we create stories in our head to address the unknown, which can lead to a lot of self-criticism and catastrophic thinking,” said Wiens. “But resilient, successful people challenge their assumptions, they’re able to interrupt the negative thinking loop and ask themselves: ‘What is true here, and what assumptions am I making about the situation?’”
Pichai said he first learned how to help teams solve problems quickly from his mentor Bill Campbell — a former Intuit CEO and Apple board director — while studying material science and engineering at Stanford University, Pichai said at the Stanford Business School event.
Campbell, who coached other prominent tech leaders like Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, emphasized that leaders need to know how to be an effective tiebreaker for a deadlocked team, said Pichai.
“Every week [Campbell] would see me, he would ask me, ‘What ties did you break this week?’” Pichai said, adding that it taught him to be comfortable having the final word. “It’s always stuck with me.”
