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

by Julie Zhuo

The best idea generation comes from understanding that we need both time to think alone (because our brains are most creative when we’re by ourselves) and time to engage with others (because hearing different perspectives creates sparks that lead to even better ideas). 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

Practice clarity and ruthless efficiency with your meetings,

What does a great outcome look like?

After the meeting, the follow-ups need to be treated with as much care as the preparation. A single meeting is not an end unto itself; it is a stepping-stone in the much longer path of creating something valuable for the world.

Another tactic I like is the “Post-it note” opening. Before launching into a discussion about a complex topic (for example, what our marketing goals should be or what success looks like three years from now), give everyone a pad of Post-it notes and ask them to write down their thoughts on the topic. Then, have the room work in quiet concentration for about ten to fifteen minutes. Afterward, each participant puts his or her notes up on the board and talks through their thinking. Similar ideas are clumped together, and after the very last note has been added, the room discusses the various “clumps.” By encouraging people to get their own thoughts down on paper before sharing them, the barrier to participation is lowered.

Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School and her colleagues surveyed 182 senior managers from a diverse set of companies. They found that 65 percent said meetings prevented them from completing their own work, 71 percent found their meetings unproductive and inefficient, and 64 percent said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. As a result of my audit, I went on a deep calendar cleanse. I purged myself of meetings I wasn’t really contributing to. When I wanted to stay in the loop about relevant decisions, I asked the meeting organizers to include me on pre- and post-meeting notes. With the time I regained, I was able to get to a healthier balance and focus on doing a better job on the things I cared about. 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.

Be on the lookout as well for meetings that don’t seem valuable for anyone. They should be canceled or revamped. Research by Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock and her colleagues found a direct connection between well-planned meetings (where the right people are invited, the agenda is organized, and the interactions are useful) and outcomes like team performance and employee well-being. Bad meetings can “leave employees feeling frustrated, and can also trigger employee exhaustion and potential burnout,” Lehmann-Willenbrock says, whereas “good meetings can boost employee morale.”

Life’s too short to be wasted in subpar meetings. Aim to make every single one you are a part of useful, awesome, and energizing so that your team can achieve more together.

hiring is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization.

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: How many new people will I add to our team this year (based on company growth, expected attrition, budget, priorities, etc.)? For each new hire, what level of experience am I looking for? Which specific skills or strengths do we need in our team (for example, creative thinking, operational excellence, expertise in XYZ, etc.)? Which skills and strengths does our team already have that new hires can stand to be weaker in? What traits, past experiences, or personalities would strengthen the diversity of our team?

Since every hire is already a gamble, reject any weak hires. While they’re not likely to bomb, they’re also not likely to add much. If you’re going to make a bet, bet on someone with a passionate advocate behind her. If a candidate gets mixed reviews but all the interviewers that said hire are adamant about wanting to work with her, it’s usually a sign that she brings something highly valued to the table.

Look for Passionate Advocates Rather Than Consensus

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.

But time always reveals the truth. It turns out that as we grew, having managers in our midst who knew what to do when we went from 50 to 250 people was a tremendous asset. Bit by bit, I started to appreciate that their strengths were my weaknesses. 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. Prioritizing diversity isn’t just a poster or a slogan. It’s the belief that diversity in all aspects—from gender to race to work history to life experiences—leads to better ideas and better results. The science supports this: A 2014 report of hundreds of public companies found that those with the greatest ethnic and racial diversity in their management ranks were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns higher than average.

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. And it means recognizing that every single person, you and me included, comes with his or her own bag of beliefs that should be challenged by others. The power of diversity helps our team avoid biases, make better decisions, and think more creatively.

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.

“If I told you that hiring well was the only thing that mattered, would you do anything differently?”

Your success depends on how well you operate. Break the problem down into smaller and smaller pieces, and ask your entire staff to play a role in helping the team grow and thrive.

That’s why attracting the best people is a long-term investment. Pay attention to the rising stars of your field and get to know them through conferences, mixers, and other events. Continuously build your network. And develop your team’s reputation as well, whether through participating in the community, contributing new learnings to your field, telling your story in the press, or simply through being known as a class act. Even with the many, many declined offers I’ve gotten over the years, I’ve come to realize that they weren’t for nothing. Many of the leaders on my team today only joined after saying no once or twice before. Nowadays, I tell people who turn us down that I hope our paths cross again. 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.

Build a Great Bench One of the scenarios I play out with the leaders on my team is what I call the “extended vacation” test. (Others have used the term “hit by the bus,” but that’s just morbid.) It goes like this: If you were to hike some distant mountains or sunbathe on a remote island for a few months, how much would your own manager need to step in to ensure that everything ran smoothly? If the answer is “not much,” then congratulations! You’ve got a great bench. If the answer is, “Hmm, my manager would need to do a lot,” then that’s a sign your next layer of leadership could use some shoring up. 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. Having a great bench is one of the strongest signs of stellar leadership because it means the team you’ve built can steer the ship and thrive, even if you are not at the helm. “But wait,” I hear people say. “That sounds nice in theory, but if your team can be successful without you, doesn’t that mean you’re not actually valuable?” Excellent question. But ask yourself: Can even the best leaders be coached to even better performance? The answer is absolutely yes, so you should still see your job as being a multiplier for your people. More important, a strong bench frees up a manager to tackle the next big hill on the horizon. W...

you have the chance to establish a culture that outlasts you and carries forth your values at a broader scale. To do this, pay close attention to how you set the tone for hiring. Coach your leaders to treat team building with the utmost care, and ensure that they dedicate enough time and attention to connecting with remarkable candidates. Repeatedly talk about your values so that everyone understands what great talent looks like. And, above all, make it clear that building the team isn’t just one person’s job, it’s everyone’s job.

The origin story of every great company reveals a common theme: The path to success is never a straight line. 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. You do it quickly. You keep your mind open and curious. You learn. Then you scrap what failed and double down on what’s working. You rinse and repeat, maybe over and over and over again. This process is what makes things happen. Process. Many people think of it as a bad word because it conjures up images of filling out paperwork or waiting in line. But process isn’t inherently good or bad. Process is simply the answer to the question “What actions do we take to achieve our goals?” Even if that answer isn’t written down anywhere, it still exists. Bad process is heavy and arbitrary. It feels like a series of hoops to jump through. But good process is what helps us execute at our best. We learn from our mistakes, move quickly, and make smarter decisions for the future. How can you establish effective processes for your team?

An inspiring vision is bold. It doesn’t hedge. You know instantly whether you’ve hit it or not because it’s measurable. And it’s easily repeated, from one person to the next to the next. It doesn’t describe the how—your team will figure that out—it simply describes what the outcome will be. I tell my team that I’ll know they did a good job describing their vision if I randomly ask five people who’ve heard it to repeat it to me and they all say the exact same thing. As a manager, it’s important to define and share a concrete vision for your team that describes what you’re collectively trying to achieve.

To help you get started, ask yourself the following: Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly. What do you hope will be different in two to three years compared to now? How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? What do you hope will be your team’s reputation in a few years? How far off is that from where things are today? What unique superpower(s) does your team have? When you’re at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like for your team to be twice as good? Five times as good? If you had to create a quick litmus test that anyone could use to assess whether your team was doing a poor job, a mediocre job, or a kick-ass job, what would that litmus test be?

Let’s say you have a concrete vision and you know what success looks like. What then? Now you have to figure out a plan—also known as creating a strategy—to make those outcomes real.

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.

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,”

When forming a new team, managers try to hire the leaders or “anchors” before the rest of the group.

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.”