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

by Julie Zhuo

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?

What would be different about the world if your team were wildly successful?

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?

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

For managers, important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.

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.

Remember what I said before: great managers are made, not born. But there is one caveat, and that caveat is this: you have to enjoy the day-to-day of management and want to do it.

This is why adaptability is a key trait of great managers. As your team changes—whether it’s goals shifting, people joining or leaving, or processes evolving—what you do every day will also change.

then one of my first lessons of management—the

best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.

If you can pinpoint a problem and motivate others to work with you to solve it, then you’re leading.

Whenever a new manager joins my team, my favorite questions to ask a few months in are: “What turned out to be more challenging than you expected, and what was easier than you expected?”

“Every day feels like a week.” His answer was a variation on the most common thing I hear—there’s so much to learn and you feel overwhelmed

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?

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?

One tactic a friend of mine uses to buck this trend is to address the elephant in the room: “Since I’m new, you might not feel comfortable sharing everything with me right away. I hope to earn your trust over time. I’ll start by sharing more about myself, including my biggest failure ever …” I love this anecdote because it’s the epitome of “show, don’t tell.”

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.

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.

Even if you sit next to someone and see him every day, 1:1s let you discuss topics that may never come up otherwise—for example, what motivates him, what his long-term career aspirations are, how he’s generally feeling about his work, and more.

If you can remove a barrier, provide a valuable new perspective, or increase their confidence, then you’re enabling them to be more successful.

Why questions? Because a coach’s best tool for understanding what’s going on is to ask.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,

When we are going through tough times, the thing that’s often the most helpful isn’t advice or answers but empathy.

Brené Brown, research expert in courage, shame, and empathy, begs to differ. She proposes that there is enormous power in expressing vulnerability: “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.4 Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”

“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 feedback inspired you to change your behavior, which resulted in your life getting better.

feedback doesn’t have to be critical. Praise is often more motivating than criticism. And for another, you don’t always have to start with a problem.

Whenever you find yourself deeply disappointed, or disappointing someone else, ask yourself: Where did I miss out on setting clear expectations, and how might I do better in the future?

If you find that your frequency of feedback is low, one tactic I’ve found helpful is to devote a single 1:1 every month to just discussing behavioral feedback and career goals.

recognizing what’s going well is more likely to change behavior than only pointing out mistakes.

Don’t engage when you are upset. We regret the things we say in anger, and while bridges take months or years to build, they can be burned in an instant.

“Feedback is a gift.”

You must actually go through the real thing in order to gain the experience you need.

Management isn’t an innate skill.

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.

In her influential book Mindset,3 pioneering psychologist Carol Dweck describes how the two different mindsets—which she calls fixed and

growth—make a huge difference in our performance and personal happiness. Observe the difference:

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 tho...

admit that you’re feeling bad. I’ll take out a Post-it note and write, “I am super stressed out about X.” That little act shifts my mindset from worrying about my worries to simply declaring them.

The stories we tell ourselves from a few scant pieces of evidence are often flat-out wrong, especially when we’re in the Pit.

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

Not only can visualization improve your outcomes, it can also help you find confidence when you’re in the Pit.