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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Julie Zhuo
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January 26 - February 11, 2022
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.
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.
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.
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.
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),3 a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching.
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. For example, let’s say your vision is to get a lemonade stand on every block, starting first in your city and then expanding throughout the country. However, your employee Henry is under the impression that your stand ought to be a popular hangout spot for the neighbors. He’ll start doing things that you think are unimportant or wasteful, like buying a bunch of lawn chairs or trying to serve pizza along with
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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?
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.
Do I Find It More Motivating to Achieve a Particular Outcome or to Play a Specific Role?
I was afraid that if I stopped doing design work myself, I’d slowly lose my skills, which would make it harder for me to be an effective leader. Unfortunately, the mistake that I made—and that I see virtually every apprentice manager make—is continuing to do individual contributor work past the point at which it is sustainable.
What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities.1 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.
Mark Rabkin shared a tip with me that I love: strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward.3 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.
Too often, attempts to “help” aren’t actually helpful, even when served with the best of intentions. We all remember lectures that went in one ear and out the other because it was obvious the other party didn’t understand our real problem, or when unasked-for “help” feels indistinguishable from micromanaging or meddling.
“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,”
the main reasons why someone might not be doing great work: they aren’t aware of what “great” looks like, their aspirations aren’t a fit with what the role needs, they don’t feel appreciated, they lack the skills, or they bring others down.
Managers who pop in out of the blue and throw down new requirements can breed resentment with their team (just Google the term “Swoop and Poop.”) But managers who proactively lay out what they care about and how they want to engage in projects rarely encounter those tensions.
That was when I realized it was I who misunderstood: George had heard the feedback. The issue was that he didn’t see what was complicated about the way he explained things. And if he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t fix it. I might feel accomplished in pointing out the problem, but that’s not the point if it doesn’t actually help him. 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
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Make your feedback as specific as possible
Clarify what success looks and feels like.
Suggest next steps.
If you are delivering bad news about a decision—you decided to pick someone else for a coveted position, you’re pulling your report off the project, you no longer have a role for this person on your team, etc.—the decision should be the first thing out of your mouth when you both sit down. I’ve decided to go with somebody else to lead this initiative … Own the decision. Be firm, and don’t open it up for discussion.
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.
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?
SCENARIO: After completing an assignment, your manager gives you a few suggestions for improvement. FIXED MINDSET: Ugh, I really messed that up. My manager must think I’m an idiot. GROWTH MINDSET: I’m thankful my manager gave me those tips. Now all my future assignments are going to go better.
Triggers occupy the space between your growth area and somebody else’s—you could work on controlling your reactions, but the other person could also benefit from hearing your feedback.
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.
Be on the lookout for interruptions. If someone starts making a point but another loud voice cuts her off, provide cover by saying, “Hang on, Ann wasn’t finished.” As an added bonus, I’ve found that doing this also bolsters your own credibility. Similarly, if you see someone seeking to get a word in, you can help create an opening: “John looks like he wants to say something.” My colleague did this for me once in an executive review with twenty other people, and to this day I remember the rush of gratitude I felt.
SOME MEETINGS DON’T NEED YOU AND SOME DON’T NEED TO EXIST AT ALL
We might think we are good judges of character, but the evidence suggests otherwise. A few years ago, Google crunched the numbers on tens of thousands of interviews to see if there was a correlation between how high an interviewer rated the interaction and how well the candidate went on to perform. What they found was that there was “zero relationship” and that it was “a complete random mess.”
The next best thing is to dive deeply into their past work. When we interview designers, we put a strong emphasis on the “portfolio review,” where candidates come in and present a few projects of their choosing. By hearing them talk through their process and show us specific examples of their work, we learn a lot about their skills and their approach to problems.
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.
Be on the lookout for warning signs in interviews: bad-mouthing past employers (“My last manager was terrible”); blaming failures they were associated with on others (“The reason my last project didn’t succeed was because of internal politics”); insulting other groups of people (“The sales team were bozos”); asking what the company can do for them instead of the reverse (“This feels like a step up for my career”); and coming across with high arrogance or low self-awareness (“I was attracted to this position because it seems like you need someone really senior”).
The thing I learned, though, is that if you zoom out a little further, the recruiting progress can be simply understood as a funnel of numbers. When you are talking about dozens of candidates, that funnel stays relatively consistent. For example (and I am making up the numbers here), out of twenty emails you send, you might get interest back from ten. Out of ten initial meetings, four will move on to interview stage. Out of four interviews, one will result in an offer. And out of an offer, a candidate will decline 50 percent of the time.
Ever heard of the Pareto principle? Named after an Italian economist who observed an interesting pattern of wealth distribution in nineteenth-century Italy, it’s now more commonly known as the 80/20 principle thanks to a blockbuster book by Richard Koch written in 1998. The general idea is that the majority of the results come from a minority of the causes. The key is identifying which things matter the most.
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.4 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.”
When ownership isn’t clear, things slip through the cracks. This doesn’t just happen in meetings; every time you send an email to more than one person about an issue that requires a follow-up, the recipients may be confused about whom you are expecting to do what. Each might assume someone else is responsible.
Being great at making things happen means recognizing the pragmatic realities of the next day, week, or month as well as the direction you want to steer the ship in the next one, three, or ten years. It should be clear by now that management is all about the art of balance. When it comes to planning and execution, 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.
As a manager, part of your job will be the cultivation of such playbooks: how to run a team meeting, how to close a new hire, how to complete a project on time and on budget. 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. Another bonus of doing this: you can then pass the playbook to others to learn and execute.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, once said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice,13 for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
One of the biggest challenges of managing at scale is finding the right balance between going deep on a problem and stepping back and trusting others to take care of it.
There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if you’re not sure how.
A friend of mine gave me the gift of another clarifying question. He asked: “Assume the role was open. Would you rather rehire your current leader or take a gamble on someone else?”
But the point of being a manager is not to satisfy your own ego; it’s to improve the outcomes of your team.
Whenever we’re feeling tension with our coworkers—they have a habit that irritates us, we disagree about an important decision, or they do something that seems thoughtless—she encouraged us to sit down with the other person and discuss that tension openly. Because if you don’t, nothing will get better, and resentment will only grow.
People watch their bosses closely to understand the team’s values and norms. Our radars are fine-tuned to spot instances where someone in a position of authority says one thing and does another. This is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
Monday morning yoga sessions to promote mindfulness “Fail of the week,” where people share their mistakes in a safe forum to encourage authenticity and learning
