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

by Julie Zhuo

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.

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. It’s from this simple definition that everything else flows.

“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 purpose is the outcome your team is trying to accomplish, otherw...

The next important bucket that managers think about is people, otherwise known as the who.

Finally, the last bucket is process, which describes how your team works together.

In a team setting, it’s impossible for a group of people to coordinate what needs to get done without spending time on it. The larger the team, the more time is needed.

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.

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.

great managers are made, not born. But there is one caveat, and that caveat is this: you have to enjoy the day-to-day of management and want to do it.

Your path here probably took one of the four routes below: Apprentice: Your manager’s team is growing, so you’ve been asked to manage a part of it going forward. Pioneer: You are a founding member of a new group, and you’re now responsible for its growth. New Boss: You’re coming in to manage an already established team, either within your existing organization or at a new one. Successor: Your manager has decided to leave, and you are taking his place.

at the point in which your team becomes four or five people, 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.

In your first few months, your primary job is to listen, ask questions, and learn.

New managers often ask me, “How long will it take to feel like I know what I’m doing?” I reply quite honestly, “It took me about three years.”

Managing a small team is about mastering a few basic fundamentals: developing a healthy manager–report relationship and creating an environment of support. In this chapter, we’ll dive in to the specifics of those skills.

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.

My reports regularly bring their biggest challenges to my attention.

My report and I regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally.

My reports would gladly work for me again.

“If you take nothing else away from today,” he told us, “remember this: managing is caring.”

For a leader, giving feedback—both when things are going well and when they aren’t—is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job.