The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

by Julie Zhuo

Everyone knows this conversation is the equivalent of Harry Potter getting a visit from Hagrid on a dark and stormy night, the first step in an adventurous and fulfilling career. I wasn’t about to turn down that kind of invitation. So I said yes.

Good design at its core is about understanding people and their needs in order to create the best possible tools for them. I’m drawn to design for a lot of the same reasons that I’m drawn to management—it feels like a deeply human endeavor to empower others.

Running a team is hard because it ultimately boils down to people, and all of us are multifaceted and complex beings. Just like how there is no one way to go about being a person, there is no one way to go about managing a group of people.

I believe this as deeply as I believe anything: Great managers are made, not born. It doesn’t matter who you are.

A MANAGER’S JOB IS TO . . . build a team that works well together, support members in reaching their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently.

This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself.

Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.

Half of what he looked at was my team’s results—did we achieve our aspirations in creating valuable, easy-to-use, and well-crafted design work? The other half was based on the strength and satisfaction of my team—did I do a good job hiring and developing individuals, and was my team happy and working well together? The first criterion looks at our team’s present outcomes; the second criterion asks whether we’re set up for great outcomes in the future.

Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success: having a real team (one with clear boundaries and stable membership), a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching.

The first big part of your job as a manager is to ensure that your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.

The next important bucket that managers think about is people, otherwise known as the who. Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated to do great work?

For managers, important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.

Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.

the best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.

In your early days as a manager, what matters most is transitioning gracefully into the role and nailing the essentials of leading a small team. Only when you have built trust with your reports will you have the credibility to help them achieve more together.

In your first few one-on-one meetings, ask your reports the following questions to understand what their “dream manager” looks like. What did you and your past manager discuss that was most helpful to you? What are the ways in which you’d like to be supported? How do you like to be recognized for great work? What kind of feedback is most useful for you? Imagine that you and I had an amazing relationship. What would that look like?

In your first few months, your primary job is to listen, ask questions, and learn. New managers on my team tell me that the thing they most want to understand is how to calibrate their expectations around “what’s normal.” One effective way to do that is to look at specific scenarios together with your own manager. Questions to ask include: What does it mean to do a great job versus an average or poor job? Can you give me some examples? Can you share your impressions of how you think Project X or Meeting Y went? Why do you think that? I noticed that Z happened the other day. . . . Is that normal or should I be concerned? What keeps you up at night? Why? How do you determine which things to prioritize?

How can you achieve stellar 1:1s? The answer is preparation. It’s rare that an amazing conversation springs forth when nobody has a plan for what to talk about. I tell my reports that I want our time together to be valuable, so we should focus on what’s most important for them. Here are some ideas to get started: Discuss top priorities: What are the one, two, or three most critical outcomes for your report and how can you help her tackle these challenges? Calibrate what “great” looks like: Do you have a shared vision of what you’re working toward? Are you in sync about goals or expectations? Share feedback: What feedback can you give that will help your report, and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as a manager? Reflect on how things are going: Once in a while, it’s useful to zoom out and talk about your report’s general state of mind—how is he feeling on the whole? What’s making him satisfied or dissatisfied? Have any of his goals changed? What has he learned recently and what does he want to learn going forward?

Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton described this phenomenon in his now famous book The No Asshole Rule. He defines an asshole as someone who makes other people feel worse about themselves or who specifically targets people less powerful than him or her.

(As Netflix’s former chief talent officer, Patty McCord, reflects, “Why do we call it ‘getting fired’? Are we shooting people?”)

The best way to make your feedback heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re saying it because you care about her and want her to succeed.

The best way to give critical feedback is to deliver it directly and dispassionately. Plainly say what you perceive the issue to be, what made you feel that way, and how you’d like to work together to resolve the concern. Both number three (I’m concerned about the quality of work that I’ve been seeing from you recently) and four (Your last few deliverables weren’t comprehensive enough to hit the mark) accomplish that, although number four gets a slight edge because it’s more specific in describing the concern.

I set up multiple “prepare for bed” alarms at 10:00 p.m., 10:15 p.m., and 10:30 p.m. so that my head can hit the pillow at 11:00 p.m. sharp. I exercise for ten to fifteen minutes in the morning right after I wake up. It’s not much, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment that anchors the rest of the day. I schedule half an hour of “daily prep” into my calendar so I can study my day and visualize how I want each meeting or work task to go. I make an effort to become friends with my colleagues and learn about their lives outside of work. I schedule “thinking time” blocks on my calendar so I can sort through and write down my thoughts on big problems. Twice a year, I look back on the past six months and reflect on what I’ve gotten better at. Then, I set new learning goals for the next six months.

these are my favorite all-purpose questions: What kinds of challenges are interesting to you and why? Can you describe a favorite project? This tells me what a candidate is passionate about. What do you consider your greatest strengths? What would your peers agree are your areas of growth? This question gets both at a candidate’s self-awareness and what his actual strengths and weaknesses might be. Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now? This lets me understand the candidate’s ambitions as well as how goal oriented and self-reflective she is. What was the hardest conflict you’ve had in the past year? How did it end, and what did you learn from the experience? This gives me a sense of how the candidate works with other people and how he approaches conflict. What’s something that’s inspired you in your work recently? This sheds light on what the candidate thinks is interesting or valuable.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR CURRENT TEAM What are the first three adjectives that come to mind when describing the personality of your team? What moments made you feel most proud to be a part of your team? Why? What does your team do better than the majority of other teams out there? If you picked five random members of your team and individually asked each person, “What does our team value?” what would you hear? How similar is your team’s culture to the broader organization’s culture? Imagine a journalist scrutinizing your team. What would she say your team does well or not well? When people complain about how things work, what are the top three things that they bring up?

UNDERSTANDING YOUR ASPIRATIONS Describe the top five adjectives you’d want an external observer to use to describe your team’s culture. Why those? Now imagine those five adjectives sitting on a double-edged sword. What do you imagine are the pitfalls that come from ruthless adherence to those qualities? Are those acceptable to you? Make a list of the aspects of culture that you admire about other teams or organizations. Why do you admire them? What downsides does that team tolerate as a result? Make a list of the aspects of culture that you wouldn’t want to emulate from other teams or companies. Why not?

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE On a scale from one to nine, with nine being “we’re 100 percent there” and one being “this is the opposite of our team,” how close is your current team from your aspirations? What shows up as both a strength of your team as well as a quality you value highly? Where are the biggest gaps between your current team culture and your aspirations? What are the obstacles that might get in the way of reaching your aspirations? How will you address them? Imagine how you want your team to work in a year’s time. How would you describe to a report what you hope will be different then compared to now?