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

by Julie Zhuo

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

What's a better outcome? Better than sum of individuals?

then a great manager’s team will consistently achieve great outcomes.

If the outcome you care about is building a thriving lemonade business, then a great manager’s team will turn a higher profit than a mediocre manager’s team. A bad manager’s team loses money.

If the outcome you care about is getting amazing design, then a great manager’s team will consistently deliver concepts that wow. A mediocre manager’s team will produce work that gets the job done but doesn’t stand out. A bad manager’s team will regularly suggest proposals that make you think, Surely we can do better than this.

“the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).”

You can be the smartest, most well-liked, most hardworking manager in the world, but if your team has a long-standing reputation for mediocre outcomes, then unfortunately you can’t objectively be considered a “great” manager.

On the flip side, a bad manager might achieve a few quarters of amazing results because she inherited a talented team or set high-pressure ultimatums that had people burning the midnight oil.

“My framework is quite simple.” 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?

help your team achieve great outcomes.

“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have,”

having a real team (one with clear boundaries and stable membership), a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching.

purpose, people, and process.

your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.

A great manager constantly asks herself how she can influence these levers to improve her team’s outcomes.

If I spend all my time personally selling lemonade, then I’m contributing an additive amount to my business, not a multiplicative one. My performance as a manager would be considered poor because I’m actually operating as an individual contributor.

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.

In that case, it’s far more important for me to sell as much lemonade as I can myself so that my debt doesn’t spiral out of control.

When you are in survival mode, you do what it takes to survive.

When you’re beyond survival in your team’s hierarchy of needs, then you can plan for the future and think about what you can do today that will help you achieve more in the months and years ahead.

If, instead, there is a specific activity that you love too much to give up—whether it’s seeing patients, teaching students, writing code, or designing products—then you may find your personal goals at odds with what the team needs most.

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

Manager is a specific role, just as elementary school teacher and heart surgeon are specific roles. As we discussed a few pages ago, there are clear principles outlining what a manager does and how his success is measured. Leadership, on the other hand, is the particular skill of being able to guide and influence other people.

This is an important distinction because while the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.

I finally realized that I had to give up wanting to be both a design manager and a designer, because in attempting to do both, I was doing neither well.

you should have a plan for how to scale back your individual contributor responsibilities so that you can be the best manager for your people.

How do I make decisions? What do I consider a job well done? What are all the responsibilities I took care of when it was just me? What’s easy or hard about working in this function? What new processes are needed now that this team is growing?

She’s the only one of her kind! As a pioneer, you continually find yourself alone in new, unfamiliar terrain.

other managers in your organization who support related functions, and managers in your area of expertise outside your organization.

Managing a small team is about mastering a few basic fundamentals: developing a healthy manager–report relationship and creating an environment of support.

A manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together through influencing purpose, people, and process.

people don’t know how to do good work. The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.

right skills for the job. If you needed your house painted and you hired an accountant, you shouldn’t be surprised if the

One possible answer is that he doesn’t have a clear picture of what great work looks

Another possibility is that the role doesn’t speak to his aspirations; he can, but he’d rather be doing something else.

series of conversations with your report. First, discuss whether your expectations are aligned—does “great work” mean the same thing for both of you?

constructive conversations together. No matter the work you do or the size of your team, knowing how to diagnose and solve problems with your reports is critical to your shared success.