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

by Julie Zhuo

Great Managers Are Made, Not Born

Everyone knows this conversation is the equivalent of Harry Potter getting a visit from Hagrid on a dark and stormy night, the first step in an adventurous and fulfilling career. I wasn’t about to turn down that kind of invitation.

I’d heard Facebook was founded by some Harvard dropouts, but I didn’t know much about start-ups until I took a class my senior year about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. And then I understood: Oh, this was the land of hungry, foolish dreamers who were given the chance to build their version of the future with a little help from venture capitalist fairy godparents. This was the land of innovations borne from a mix of smart minds, iron resolve, lucky timing, and a whole lot of duct tape.

Because we were a start-up, nobody thought it was weird that I was suddenly showing my own design proposals for new features. We were all wearing many hats then, tackling problems as we saw them, diving in and out of code and pixels and back to code again. And so, rather by accident than by any masterful plan, I added a new hat to my rotation: designer. Three years later, after that fateful conversation with my manager, my role shifted again. Our design team had almost doubled in size since I’d started. Having made it through my first few years at a hyper-growth start-up, I thought I was used to change. I was no stranger to dealing with the firsts or rolling with the punches. Still, I was unprepared for just how much the new manager role would stretch me. For one thing, I was managing product designers, a discipline I didn’t even know existed before I arrived at the company. For another, the responsibilities of managing people and the way they worked together felt like an enormous leap from creating user interfaces or writing code. In those early months and years, everything felt new and uncomfortable.

I remember my three primary emotions navigating the choppy waters of my new role: fear, doubt, and am I crazy for feeling this way? Everyone else around me seemed to be doing just fine. Everyone else made it look easy. I never thought managing was easy. I still don’t. Today, nearly ten years after I started on that path, my team has grown by a few orders of magnitude. We design the experience that more than two billion people see when they tap the blue f icon on their phones. We think through the details of how people share what’s on their minds, keep up with their friends, interact through conversations and thumbs-ups, and create communities together. If we do our jobs well, then people all over the world—from Belgium to Kenya, from India to Argentina—will feel closer to one another. 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. I’m by no means a management expert. I’ve learned largely by doing, and despite my best intentions, I’ve made countless mistakes. But this is how anything in life goes: You try something. You figure out what worked and what didn’t. You file away lessons for the future. And then you get better. Rinse, repeat. I’ve had plenty of help, too, in the form of some amazing leadership training courses (Crucial Conversations is my favorite), articl...

like Alice, “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

There are plenty of management books out there written by top CEOs and leadership experts. Countless resources exist for executives who want to become even more effective through learning about the latest organizational research or business trends. But most managers are not CEOs or senior executives. Most lead smaller teams, and sometimes not even directly. Most are not featured in the pages of Forbes or Fortune. But they are managers all the same, and they share a common purpose: helping a group of people achieve a common goal. These managers may be teachers or principals, captains or coaches, administrators or planners.

Running a team is hard because it ultimately boils down to people, and all of us are multifaceted and complex beings. Just like how there is no one way to go about being a person, there is no one way to go about managing a group of people. And yet, working together in teams is how the world moves forward. We can create things far grander and more ambitious than anything we could have done alone. This is how battles are won, how innovation moves forward, how organizations succeed. This is how any remarkable achievement happens. I believe this as deeply as I believe anything: Great managers are made, not born. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager.

understand the whys of management, because only when you’ve bought into the whys can you truly be effective in the hows. Why do managers even exist?

much of the daily work of managers—giving feedback, creating a healthy culture, planning for the future—is universal.

A MANAGER’S JOB IS TO . . . have meetings with reports to help them solve their problems, share feedback about what is or isn’t going well, and figure out who should be promoted and who should be fired. Fast-forward three years. Having done the job now, I’m a bit wiser. My revised answer would look like the following. 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. As you can see, my answers evolved from basic, day-to-day activities (having meetings and giving feedback) to longer-term goals (building teams and supporting career growth). The new answers sound smarter and more grown-up. Go, me! Except . . . they’re still not quite right. You might be thinking, Well, what’s wrong with these answers? Great managers certainly do all the things on both lists. True, but the problem is that these answers are still an assortment of activities. If I asked you, “What is the job of a soccer player?” would you say that it’s to attend practices, pass the ball to their teammates, and attempt to score goals? No, of course not. You’d tell me why those activities matter in the first place. You’d say, “The job of a soccer player is to win games.” So what is the job of a manager? Without understanding this deeply, it’s hard to know how to be good at it.

The management aspect has nothing to do with employment status and everything to do with the fact that you are no longer trying to get something done by yourself.

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.

Time, however, always reveals the truth. The best employees don’t tend to stick around for years and years under a boss who treats them poorly or whom they don’t respect. And talented managers can typically turn around poor-performing teams if they are empowered to make changes.

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. I’ve gone on to adopt this framework for assessing managers on my own team. Being awesome at the job means playing the long game and building a reputation for excellence. Through thick or thin, in spite of the hundreds of things calling for your attention every day, never forget what you’re ultimately here to do: help your team achieve great outcomes.

J. Richard Hackman, the leading scholar of teams, spent forty years trying to answer this question. He studied the ways professionals work together in hospitals, in symphony orchestras, and inside the cockpits of commercial airliners. One of his conclusions is that making a team function well is harder than it looks. “Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have,” he says. “That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.” 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, otherwise known as the why. Why do you wake up and choose to do this thing instead of the thousands of other things you could be doing? Why pour your time and energy into this particular goal with this particular group of people? What would be different about the world if your team were wildly successful? Everyone on the team should have a similar picture of why does our work matter? If this purpose is missing or unclear, then you may experience conflicts or mismatched expectations.

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.

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?

To manage people well, you must develop trusting relationships with them, understand their strengths and weaknesses (as well as your own), make good decisions about who should do what (including hiring and firing when necessary), and coach individuals to do their best.

the last bucket is process, which describes how your team works together. You might have a superbly talented team with a very clear understanding of what the end goal is, but if it’s not apparent how everyone’s supposed to work together or what the team’s values are, then even simple tasks can get enormously complicated. Who should do what by when? What principles should govern decision-making?

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. As talented as we are, mind reading is not a core human competency. 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. Purpose, people, process. The why, the who, and the how. A great manager constantly asks herself how she can influence these levers to improve her team’s outcomes. As the team grows in size, it matters less and less how good she is personally at doing the work herself. What matters more is how much of a multiplier effect she has on her team. So how does this work in practice?

But no matter what you choose, the principles of success remain the same. 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.

ask yourself these three questions. Do I Find It More Motivating to Achieve a Particular Outcome or to Play a Specific Role?

which is why you see leaders with vastly different strengths and temperaments helming companies. What they have in common is that their number one priority is making their team successful, and they are willing to adapt to become the leaders that their organizations need.

Do I Like Talking with People?

Can I Provide Stability for an Emotionally Challenging Situation?

The truth is, while managers do get to make a number of calls, those decisions must be in the interest of the team, otherwise they will lose trust and be rendered ineffective. No leader gets free rein without accountability—if their decisions turn out to be bad, they are held to task. Owners see their businesses flounder; CEOs of public companies get fired by their board.

My first hint that something wasn’t right was when I checked in on the work a few days later. Progress was slow. People interpreted the sketch in different ways, and hours were lost in circular debate about the proposal’s core features. Thinking I hadn’t explained myself well, I clarified what I was looking for. Another week passed; unfortunately, the results weren’t much better. That was when I realized the root problem: None of the designers were truly sold on my idea. They didn’t think it was going to succeed. And because of that, the work trudged along, lacking heart and soul. 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.

When I first started the job, I considered manager and leader to be synonyms. Managers lead, and leaders manage, right? Nope, wrong. 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.

No matter how you’ve arrived at your new role, congratulations are in order because this much is true: Somebody—more likely many people—believed in you and your potential to lead a team.

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.

Questions to discuss include: What will be my scope to start, and how do you expect it to change over time? How will my transition be communicated? What do I need to know about the people that I’ll be managing? What important team goals or processes should I be aware of and help push forward? What does success look like in my first three and six months? How can the two of us stay aligned on who does what?

Apprentice

The manager–report relationship is different than the peer relationship. You are now responsible for the outcome of your team, including all the decisions that are made within it. If something is getting in the way of great work happening, you need to address it swiftly and directly. This may mean giving people difficult feedback or making some hard calls. The sooner you internalize that you own the outcomes of your team, the easier it becomes to have these conversations.

To be successful, you’ll need to unearth all the values and know-how in your head and pass them along to others. In the early days, make sure that you’re spending time calibrating with your new team on what your group’s goals, values, and processes ought to be. Some questions to ask yourself in preparation: How do I make decisions? What do I consider a job well done? What are all the responsibilities I took care of when it was just me? What’s easy or hard about working in this function? What new processes are needed now that this team is growing?

Pioneer

You get to build the team that you want. One of the privileges of being a pioneer is that you’re able to choose the people you want to work with and how you want to work with them. Instead of inheriting a team, you get to create a brand-new one. Be deliberate about the people and culture you’re setting up, and ask yourself: What qualities do I want in a team member? What skills does our team need to complement my own? How should this team look and function in a year? How will my own role and responsibilities evolve?

Pioneer

In your first few one-on-one meetings, ask your reports the following questions to understand what their “dream manager” looks like. 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?

New boss

In your first few months, your primary job is to listen, ask questions, and learn. New managers on my team tell me that the thing they most want to understand is how to calibrate their expectations around “what’s normal.” One effective way to do that is to look at specific scenarios together with your own manager. Questions to ask include: What does it mean to do a great job versus an average or poor job? Can you give me some examples? Can you share your impressions of how you think Project X or Meeting Y went? Why do you think that? I noticed that Z happened the other day. . . . Is that normal or should I be concerned? What keeps you up at night? Why? How do you determine which things to prioritize?

“Our last manager left big shoes to fill, and while I’ll do my best, I expect I’ll go through a few bumps along the way. I want to ask you for your help and support during this period.” Setting the stage explicitly like that lets others understand what you’re going through and offer aid as you adjust to your new scope.

Remember the well-known adage: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” You will be far more successful aspiring to be the leader you want to be and playing to your strengths than trying to live up to some other ideal.

When a beloved manager on my team, Robyn Morris, left after many years to pursue a different passion, I was talking with one of his successors about how much we all missed him and deeply felt his absence. She said to me, “No one person can entirely replace Robyn, and that’s okay. More of us will just need to step up to grow into the gaps that he left behind.” Sure enough, a year later, the team was thriving, and the ways that this manager and others blossomed as leaders have been amazing to watch.

Your first three months as a new manager are a time of incredible transition. By the end of it, the day-to-day starts to feel familiar—you’re adapting to new routines, you’re investing in new relationships, and you may begin to have a sense of how you can best support your team. But time isn’t a substitute for comfort. That new-kid-at-school feeling may linger for months or years longer. 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.”

The team would discuss and debate. We’d offer up new ideas to explore in the spirit of making the experience better. We’d bring up similar examples to learn from. We’d connect the dots on projects that different designers were working on. At its best, critique was honest, creative, and deeply collaborative. At the end, the presenter would emerge with a list of clear next steps. We’d move on to the next designer, and the process would repeat until everyone had a chance to present and get feedback.

Managing a small team is about mastering a few basic fundamentals: developing a healthy manager–report relationship and creating an environment of support.

With a small team, maintaining a shared sense of purpose is straightforward. You don’t get many crossed wires when your team can still fit around one table. That leaves people and process to focus on. Of those two, people are by far the most important.

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.

TRUST IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT “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. Sounds obvious, right? But it is easier said than done, especially when you’re the one holding more of the chips at the table. No matter how you slice it, you are your reports’ boss. You have more impact on their day-to-day than they have on yours. This means that the responsibility of building a trusting relationship lies more with you than with them.

strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward. Why? Because the most important and meaningful conversations have that characteristic. It isn’t easy to discuss mistakes, confront tensions, or talk about deep fears or secret hopes, but no strong relationship can be built on superficial pleasantries alone.

Imagine you go shopping with your best friend and she comes out in an unflattering green-and-yellow sweater. “How do I look?” she asks you. “Like a caterpillar,” you say. You’re not worried about insulting her because she’s your best friend and she’ll know you said it out of affection rather than spite. You’d think twice about directing that same line toward a stranger because you don’t have any shared history and you might offend them. It takes repeated good experiences to build up to a level of trust where you can be vulnerable and compassionately critical with each other.