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

by Julie Zhuo

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.

The next important bucket that managers think about is people, otherwise known as the who. Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated to do great work?

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

We need to establish common values within our team for how we make decisions and respond to problems. For managers, important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.

when people say they are interested in management, I try to understand what they find appealing about it and whether that matches what would be their actual day-to-day job.

If you’re not sure that management is the right path for you, there are things you can do to get a better feel for it, like mentoring other folks on the team, taking on an intern, or interviewing managers who have recently transitioned to understand what their experiences were like.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT

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.

“What makes a good leader is that they eschew the spotlight in favor of spending time and energy to do what they need to do to support and protect their people,” writes Simon Sinek in Leaders Eat Last. In return, “We offer our blood and sweat and tears and do everything we can to see our leader’s vision come to life.”

to be a great manager, one must certainly be a leader. A leader, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be a manager. Anyone can exhibit leadership, regardless of their role.

Leadership is a quality rather than a job.

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.

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

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

“You must trust people, or life becomes impossible,” the writer Anton Chekhov once said. This is true of all relationships—friendships, marriages, partnerships—and the manager–report relationship is no different.

How can you achieve stellar 1:1s? The answer is preparation. It’s rare that an amazing conversation springs forth when nobody has a plan for what to talk about. I tell my reports that I want our time together to be valuable, so we should focus on what’s most important for them. 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?

“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. “The job of a manager . . . is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.”

The mark of a great coach is that others improve under your guidance. Maybe you’d like to see your reports dream bigger, accomplish more, or overcome the barriers that get in their way. The question that should always be in the back of your mind is: Does my feedback lead to the change I’m hoping for?

When you give feedback or make a decision, your report may not agree with it. That’s okay. Keep in mind that some decisions are yours to make. You are the person ultimately held accountable for the output of your team, and you may have more information or a different perspective on the right path forward.

The first part in understanding how you lead is to know your strengths—the things you’re talented at and love to do. This is crucial because great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses. There are some useful frameworks for understanding your strengths, like StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath or StandOut by Marcus Buckingham. If you want to do a quick version, jot down the first thing that comes to mind when you ask yourself the following questions: How would the people who know and like me best (family, significant other, close friends) describe me in three words? MY ANSWER: thoughtful, enthusiastic, driven What three qualities do I possess that I am the proudest of? MY ANSWER: curious, reflective, optimistic When I look back on something I did that was successful, what personal traits do I give credit to? MY ANSWER: vision, determination, humility What are the top three most common pieces of positive feedback that I’ve received from my manager or peers? MY ANSWER: principled, fast learner, long-term thinker

The second part of getting to an honest reckoning with yourself is knowing your weaknesses and triggers. Right beneath your list of strengths, answer the following: Whenever my worst inner critic sits on my shoulder, what does she yell at me for? MY ANSWER: getting distracted, worrying too much about what others think, not voicing what I believe If a magical fairy were to come and bestow on me three gifts I don’t yet have, what would they be? MY ANSWER: bottomless well of confidence, clarity of thought, incredible persuasion What are three things that trigger me? (A trigger is a situation that gets me more worked up than it should.) MY ANSWER: sense of injustice, the idea that someone else thinks I’m incompetent, people with inflated egos What are the top three most common pieces of feedback from my manager or peers on how I could be more effective? MY ANSWER: be more direct, take more risks, explain things simply

In the same way that you gather feedback for your reports, you can learn about yourself through the following tactics: Ask your manager to help you calibrate yourself through the following two questions: What opportunities do you see for me to do more of what I do well? What do you think are the biggest things holding me back from having greater impact? What skills do you think a hypothetical perfect person in my role would have? For each skill, how would you rate me against that ideal on a scale of one to five?

Pick three to seven people whom you work closely with and ask if they’d be willing to share some feedback to help you improve. Even if your company already has a process for 360-degree feedback, it helps to be specific about what you want to know and to provide reassurances that you’re looking for honesty, not just pats on the back. Take the example below. Hey, I value your feedback and I’d like to be a more effective team member. Would you be willing to answer the questions below? Please be as honest as you can because that’s what will help me the most—I promise nothing you say will offend me. Feedback is a gift, and I’m grateful for your taking the time.

Examples of specific asks: On our last project together, in what ways did you see me having impact? What do you think I could have done to have more impact? With my team, what am I doing well that you’d like to see me do more of? What should I stop doing? One of the things I’m working on is being more decisive. How do you think I’m doing on that? Any suggestions on how I can do better here?

Ask for task-specific feedback to calibrate yourself on specific skills. For example, if you’re not sure how good of a public speaker you are, follow up with a few people after you give a presentation and say, “I’m hoping to improve my speaking skills. What do you think went well with my presentation? What would have made it twice as good?”

Even if you’re afraid of the answer, confronting reality is always better than spinning disaster in your head.

Brain imaging studies show that when we picture ourselves doing something, the same parts of our brain are engaged as if we were actually doing that activity. Why does this matter? Because we can trick ourselves into getting some of the benefits of an activity simply by closing our eyes and imagining it in our heads.

Imagine yourself succeeding wildly at something you’re nervous about.

Imagine a time in the past when you took on a hard challenge and knocked it out of the park.

Imagine a room full of your favorite people telling you what they love about you.

I started a journal called Little Wins. Every day, I’d jot down something I did that I was proud of, even if it was small. Sometimes, I’d celebrate a 1:1 where I gave someone helpful advice. Other days, I gave myself credit for running a productive meeting. Once, on a particularly tough day, I wrote down that I had managed to respond promptly to a few emails.

Studies show that if you write down five things you’re grateful for every night, you’ll feel happier in the long run. When you need to build your confidence, remember to do the same by focusing on all the things that you are doing well.

Management is a highly personal journey. We are all at different points on our path. Some of us start out stronger at certain skills than others.

One of the biggest barriers I’ve found is that people shy away from asking their managers for help. I know that feeling well; for years, I held the mental model that my boss—like my teachers and professors of the past—was someone in a position of authority who took note of what I did and passed judgment on it. As such, how I interacted with my manager could be summarized in one neat statement: Don’t mess it up. I considered it a failure if my manager had to get involved in something I was responsible for. It felt to me like the equivalent of a blinking neon sign that read, Warning: employee not competent enough to take care of task on her own. But we know by now that a manager’s job is to help her team get better results. When you do better, by extension, she does better. Hence, your manager is someone who is on your side, who wants you to succeed, and who is usually willing to invest her time and energy into helping you. The key is to treat your manager as a coach, not as a judge.

engage your manager for feedback. Ask, “What skills do you think I should work on in order to have more impact?”

Nobody wants to be asked, “Will you be my mentor?” because it sounds needy and time-consuming. But ask for specific advice instead, and you’ll find tons of people willing to help.

When you invest in your personal learning and growth, you’re not just investing in your own future but also the future of your team. The better you are, the more you’re able to support others.

New managers sometimes ask me, “A decade into the job, what’s something you’re still continuing to learn?” My answer is, “How to be the best leader I can while staying true to who I am.” Managers so often think of the role as being in service to something else—the mission of the organization, the goals of the team, the needs of others—that it’s easy to forget about the most important character in your management journey: you. Learning how to be a great leader means learning about your superpowers and flaws, learning how to navigate the obstacles in your head, and learning how to learn. With these tools comes the confidence that you’re meant to be here just as you are—no masks or pretenses needed—and that you’re ready for whatever challenges lie ahead.

Think of all the bad meetings you have attended—the room argued in circles; you went in for clarity and left with confusion; the attendees felt disengaged; the content shared was repetitive; the group veered sharply off course from the agenda; an individual or two dominated the room and nobody else could get a word in; and so on. On the other hand, good meetings are simple and straightforward. You leave them feeling the same way every time: The meeting was a great use of my time. I learned something new that will help me be more effective at my job. I left with a clearer sense of what I should do next. Everyone was engaged. I felt welcomed.

“But wait a minute,” you might say. “The two sides disagree, so any decision made is going to leave someone unhappy.” I challenge that notion. Everyone on a team ultimately shares the same goals. In this case, both designers and engineers want to ship a great experience as soon as possible. While people may have different opinions about the best path to take, part of working well together is placing trust in decision-makers and in a fair process. As 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

Here are some examples of bad outcomes to avoid: People feel that their side wasn’t presented well, so they don’t trust the resulting decision. Decisions take a long time to make, which delays progress. While important and hard-to-reverse decisions deserve deep consideration, be wary of spending too much time on small, easy-to-reverse decisions. Decisions keep flip-flopping back and forth, which makes it hard to trust and act on them. Too much time is spent trying to get a group to con...

A great informational meeting accomplishes the following: Enables the group to feel like they learned something valuable Conveys key messages clearly and memorably Keeps the audience’s attention (through dynamic speakers, rich storytelling, skilled pacing, interactivity) Evokes an intended emotion—whether inspiration, trust, pride, courage, empathy, etc.

A great feedback meeting achieves the following: Gets everyone on the same page about what success for the project looks like Honestly represents the current status of the work, including an assessment of how things are going, any changes since the last check-in, and what the future plans are Clearly frames open questions, key decisions, or known concerns to get the most helpful feedback Ends with agreed-upon next steps (including when the next milestone or check-in will be)

Preparation and good facilitation is key. A great generative meeting does the following: Produces many diverse, nonobvious solutions through ensuring each participant has quiet alone time to think of ideas and write them down (either before or during the meeting) Considers the totality of ideas from everyone, not just the loudest voices Helps ideas evolve and build off each other through meaningful discussion Ends with clear next steps for how to turn ideas into action

A great team-bonding meeting isn’t about the number of hours spent together or the lavishness of the event. Instead, it enables the following: Creates better understanding and trust between participants Encourages people to be open and authentic Makes people feel cared for

these are my favorite all-purpose questions: 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. 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.

When you make a great leadership hire, the impact on your team is enormous for years to come. Don’t approach it willy-nilly—it pays to do your research.

Conventional wisdom says that success comes from working hard and persevering through difficulties. That’s sage advice, but it overlooks how important focus is. As Koch writes, “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

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.”