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

by Julie Zhuo

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...