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

by Julie Zhuo

As a manager, your time is precious and finite, so guard it like a dragon guards its treasure stash. If you trust that the right outcomes will happen without you, then you don’t need to be there.

At a growing organization, hiring well is the single most important thing you can do.

The most important thing to remember about hiring is this: hiring is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization.

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.

Interview Qs

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.

We indeed had to evolve how we worked, including hiring for new types of talent, introducing more structured processes, and, yes, better supporting our growing user base by adopting tools like personas and sprints.

At the same time, if you’re dealing with knowledge work, hiring someone who seems to offer more than what the role needs right now means they can help you tackle bigger problems in the future.

As a manager, one of the smartest ways to multiply your team’s impact is to hire the best people and empower them to do more and more until you stretch the limits of their capabilities.

Jobs may be short, but careers are long.

Having a great bench means your lieutenants could take over for you if you’re unexpectedly called out of the office. It means you are not the single point of failure—fires won’t ignite, chaos won’t erupt, and work won’t grind to a halt if you’re not there.

It’s not about having the single, brilliant, lightning-flash insight that suddenly wins the game. Instead, it’s about consistent planning and execution—you try what seems like a good idea.

A good strategy understands the crux of the problem it’s trying to solve. It focuses a team’s unique strengths, resources, and energy on what matters the most in achieving its goals.

“If I could only achieve one goal, which would it be?” If you have five open roles to hire for, pour your energy into filling the one that’s most critical.

It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

When ownership isn’t clear, things slip through the cracks.

Have you ever heard of Parkinson’s law? Coined by Cyril Parkinson, a twentieth-century British historian and scholar, it states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

“Work contracts to fit the time we give it.” There is always a way to break down what seems like an impossible journey into a series of days, miles, and finally steps. By putting one foot in front of the other over and over again, eventually we’ll scale mountains.

Speed matters—a fast runner can take a few wrong turns and still beat a slow runner who knows the shortest path.

Here are some ways to tell if your team is executing well: Lists of projects or tasks are prioritized from most to least important, with the higher-up items receiving more time and attention. There is an efficient process for decision-making that everyone understands and trusts.

After a decision is made, everyone commits (even those who disagree) and moves speedily to make it happen. Without new information, there is no second-guessing the decision, no pocket vetoing, and no foot dragging.

When important new information surfaces, there is an expedient process to examine if and how current plans should change as a result. Every task has a who and a by when. Owners set and reliably deliver on commitments. The team is resilient and constantly seeking to learn. Every failure makes the team stronger because they don’t make the same mistake twice.

Use language that takes collective accountability instead of pointing fingers (“our process failed . . .” instead of “Leslie made a mistake . . .”), and set the tone that it’s okay for us to talk about and learn from our errors.

At the end of the day, a resilient organization isn’t one that never makes mistakes but rather one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.

Instead, any feat of complexity—whether it’s getting an airplane into the sky, delivering a premature baby, or trying to advance the football down the field—requires a playbook that lays out in clear detail what all the right steps are given the current variables. As a manager, part of your job will be the cultivation of such playbooks: how to run a team meeting, how to close a new hire, how to complete a project on time and on budget.

Another bonus of doing this: you can then pass the playbook to others to learn and execute.

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, once said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

Until one day, you wake up and realize the old ways no longer work.

As soon as I figured out a better process, a few more people would join and the gears would get clogged once more. The only way to stay effective was to constantly change and adapt.

This is why managers of growing teams eventually start to hire or develop managers underneath them. But this means you’re further removed from the people and the work on the ground. You’re still responsible for your team’s outcomes, but you can’t be in all the

One of the biggest challenges of managing at scale is finding the right balance between going deep on a problem and stepping back and trusting others to take care of it. More on that topic in a bit.

It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone refer to me as “kind of a big deal.” It was hard to compute. When did I become the kind of person who intimidated others? I’d always prided myself on my approachability.

Own your mistakes and remind your team that you are human, just like everyone else. Use language that invites discussion: “I may be totally wrong here, so tell me if you disagree. My opinion is . . .” You can also ask directly for advice: “If you were me, what would you do in this situation?”

More people meant that we could tackle more projects, which meant that my time broke into smaller and smaller fragments. Ten emails would come into my inbox about ten completely different topics. Back-to-back meetings required me to immediately shed the past discussion and get mentally prepared for the next one.

What are the most important topics for you to pay attention to, and where are you going to draw the line? Perfectionism is not an option. It took me a long time to get comfortable operating in a world where I had to pick

and choose what mattered the most, and not let the sheer number of possibilities overwhelm me.

At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background.

hiring exceptional leaders, building self-reliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.

One-on-ones aren’t for the manager’s benefit; they should be about what’s helpful for the other person. Also, it’s unrealistic to expect that you should know all the details of your report’s day-to-day, especially as your team grows and your reports are managers juggling their own long lists of responsibilities.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has been attributed as saying, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Lastly, are your reports establishing healthy processes for their teams? Whether it’s advice on how to pitch new ideas, best practices for communicating important updates, discussions on meeting dos and don’ts—my reports tell me that whenever we talk about how to best get things done, it always feels like a valuable use of time.

The best managers I know all agree on one thing: growing great teams means that you are constantly looking for ways to replace yourself in the job you are currently doing.

The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.

No matter if you are the CEO or a front-line manager, building a great team is one of the most important things you can do.

Because it’s not just about my relationship to the team. It’s also about their relationships with each other, and with the group as a whole.”

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 describ...

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 ...