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

by Julie Zhuo

See the crowd attentive and nodding along as someone asks a hard question and you answer it confidently. The key to successful visualization is to make the scene as specific as possible.

Whether it’s with your family, your best friend, a coach, or a group of trusted colleagues, find your support group. Use them as your cheerleaders and sounding board. No (wo)man is an island, and our community can light a path and lend a hand for us in our climb out of the Pit.

Set boundaries by carving out time for the other important aspects of your life—spending time with loved ones, pursuing hobbies, exercising, giving back to your community, etc.

You can’t do your best work unless you physically feel your best, so take care of yourself. It’s always worth it.

if there is a secret sauce to self-improvement, it’s to ask for feedback from other people all the time

Remember to ask for both task-specific and behavioral feedback. The more concrete you are about what you want to know, the better.

Always thank people for feedback. Even if you don’t agree with what’s said, receive it graciously and recognize that it took effort to give.

Leo Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the statement “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is fond of saying, sometimes you have to “disagree and commit” for the sake of moving forward quickly.

A great decision-making meeting does the following: Gets a decision made (obviously) Includes the people most directly affected by the decision as well as a clearly designated decision-maker Presents all credible options objectively and with relevant background information, and includes the team’s recommendation if there is one Gives equal airtime to dissenting opinions and makes people feel that they were heard

For a week, I made a note of every meeting I attended and how I felt at the end of it. Did I participate? Was I critical to the outcome? Did I get something meaningful out of being there in person?

One exercise I do every January is to map out where I hope my team will be by the end of the year. I create a future org chart, analyze gaps in skills, strengths, or experiences, and make a list of open roles to hire for. You can do something similar by asking yourself the following questions:

our ideal candidate would have experience working at both a design agency as well as a tech company because that combination often produces a healthy balance of vision and pragmatic know-how.

Reject Anyone Who Exhibits Toxic Behavior

Prioritizing diversity means that you actively seek out candidates who offer something different. It means not just promoting from within but also hiring from the outside.

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.

What I learned is that hiring is not dissimilar to tackling a design problem. When you start, you don’t know what the answer is or how long it will take. But you trust in the process. If you put in the time and energy—if you come up with ten different design options, say, or if you talk to ten candidates—eventually you will find the best solution. You always do.

Jobs may be short, but careers are long. Perhaps we didn’t have the right opportunity at the right moment or they weren’t ready to do something new yet. One day that could change, and when it does, I want them to think of us.

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” said Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of history’s top generals and the orchestrator of D-day during World War II. Though surprises happen and not everything is within our control, it’s through the process of planning that we make sense of our situation and plot our best shot at success.

When emergencies do arise, a solid strategy provides the foundation for us to quickly adapt our plans instead of going back to the chaos of square one.

“Designers draw and animate, right?” I explain that while many people on our team can, that doesn’t mean we should. It’s not our core competency, and we’ll probably end up spending double the time for 80 percent the quality of what a specialized team could do.

Just like you wouldn’t send an army’s cavalry on a spying mission, you shouldn’t create a plan that doesn’t match what your team is well suited for.

The plan that is smartest for your team is the one that acknowledges your relative strengths and weaknesses.

Effort doesn’t count; results are what matter.

In the words of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” Define

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.”

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”

if you only think about the next three months, you might make shortsighted decisions that create problems down the road. On the flip side, if you’re always thinking many years out, you might struggle with speedy day-to-day execution.

Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”

My colleague makes sure that a third of her team works on projects that can be completed on the order of weeks, another third works on medium-term projects that may take months, and finally, the last third works on innovative, early-stage ideas whose impact won’t be known for years.

“No customer complaints should take more than three days to close out.” It’s a fine goal to set, but don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s an approximation of what you really care about, which is providing the best customer service.

If you find yourself doing a similar thing over and over again, chances are good that it can be codified into an instruction manual or checklist that can make the task go smoother in the future.

scanning through my calendar every morning and preparing for each meeting, developing a robust note-taking and task-management system, finding pockets for reflection at the end of every week.

It’s a game of numbers, after all. The more you look after, the more likely it is that something under your purview isn’t going as well as it could be.

no CEO is an expert across sales and design, engineering and communications, finance and human resources. And yet, she is tasked with building and leading an organization that does all of these things.

At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. Success becomes more and more about mastering a few key skills: hiring exceptional leaders, building self-reliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.

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.”

growing great teams means that you are constantly looking for ways to replace yourself in the job you are currently doing.

“Try to double your leadership capacity every year.”

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.

Couldn’t we do more to build community? What about events like group lunches, show-and-tell learning sessions, or mentorship circles?

A Back button might be at the top of the page in some instances but at the bottom in others. This had the effect of making our product feel harder to use because there weren’t predictable patterns that people could rely on.

Make sure your leaders know to quickly escalate to you whenever two goals come into conflict or when the priorities aren’t clear.

I’ve found that the more frequently and passionately I talk about what’s important to me—including my missteps and what I’ve learned through them—the more positively my team responds.

Imagine an engineering team whose bonuses are determined every six months based on how many new features they’ve released. The manager has to decide between working on a number of lower-impact features or tackling the most-requested customer feature, which will take a year to build. The incentives suggest that she should pick the lower-impact features.

Personal prompts (like “Favorite childhood movie” or “Best gift you ever received at Christmas”)

“Fail of the week,” where people share their mistakes in a safe forum to encourage authenticity and learning

The Journey Is 1% Finished.