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

by Julie Zhuo

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.

Andy Grove, founder and CEO of Intel and a legendary manager of his time, wrote that when it comes to evaluations, one should look at “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.

Six years ago, I switched my reporting to a different manager, Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer. One of the earliest conversations I remember us having is when I asked him how he evaluates the job of a manager. He smiled and said, “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? 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. My own observations are similar, and I’ve come to think of the multitude of tasks that fill up a manager’s day as sorting neatly into three buckets: purpose, people, and process.

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. Getting everyone to understand and believe in your team’s purpose, whether it’s as specific as “make every customer who calls feel cared for” or as broad as “bring the world closer together,” requires understanding and believing in it yourself, and then sharing it at every opportunity—from writing emails to setting goals, from checking in with a single report to hosting large-scale meetings.

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.

I learned then one of my first lessons of management—the best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.

Whenever a new manager joins my team, my favorite questions to ask a few months in are: “What turned out to be more challenging than you expected, and what was easier than you expected?”

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?

One tactic a friend of mine uses to buck this trend is to address the elephant in the room: “Since I’m new, you might not feel comfortable sharing everything with me right away. I hope to earn your trust over time. I’ll start by sharing more about myself, including my biggest failure ever . . .” I love this anecdote because it’s the epitome of “show, don’t tell.” What better way to set the tone that it’s okay to talk about anything than by diving headfirst into revealing a personal vulnerability?

What leads people to do great work? It feels like a complicated question but it really isn’t, as Andy Grove points out in his classic High Output Management. He flips the question around and asks: What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities. The first is that people don’t know how to do good work. The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.

One of my teammates shared with me a simple litmus test for assessing the health of her relationships: If she asks her report how things are going and the answer for multiple weeks is “Everything is fine,” she takes it as a sign to prod further. It’s much more likely that the report is shy about getting into the gory details than that everything is consistently rainbows and butterflies.

My reports would gladly work for me again. One of the truest indicators of the strength of your relationships is whether your reports would want you as their manager in the future if they were given the choice. When you see a manager taking on a new role and members of his former team also make the leap with him, that says a lot about his leadership. In anonymous surveys to track team health, some companies explicitly ask the question, “Would you work for your manager again?” If your organization doesn’t do this, simply reflecting on the question can be useful.

Even if you sit next to someone and see him every day, 1:1s let you discuss topics that may never come up otherwise—for example, what motivates him, what his long-term career aspirations are, how he’s generally feeling about his work, and more. One-on-ones should be focused on your report and what would help him be more successful, not on you and what you need. If you’re looking for a status update, use another channel.

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?

Here are some of my favorite questions to get the conversation moving: Identify: These questions focus on what really matters for your report and what topics are worth spending more time on. What’s top of mind for you right now? What priorities are you thinking about this week? What’s the best use of our time today? Understand: Once you’ve identified a topic to discuss, these next questions get at the root of the problem and what can be done about it. What does your ideal outcome look like? What’s hard for you in getting to that outcome? What do you really care about? What do you think is the best course of action? What’s the worst-case scenario you’re worried about? Support: These questions zero in on how you can be of greatest service to your report. How can I help you? What can I do to make you more successful? What was the most useful part of our conversation today?

“There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it,” says Buckingham, the renowned management consultant who has studied hundreds of organizations and leaders.

When you decide to let someone go, do it respectfully and directly. Don’t open it up to discussion (it isn’t one), and don’t regard it as a failure on the part of your report. (As Netflix’s former chief talent officer, Patty McCord, reflects, “Why do we call it ‘getting fired’? Are we shooting people?”)

The best feedback I ever got came from my former report Robyn. Once, when I asked him what I could be doing better, he took a deep breath and said, “Julie, sometimes I get the feeling that when I’m doing well, you’re on my side and the two of us are great. But when I’m not doing as well, our relationship suffers, and I don’t feel that you trust me as much.” He proceeded to share a few examples of things I had said that made him feel this way, delivered with kindness and honesty. This single piece of feedback transformed my entire perspective on management.