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

by Julie Zhuo

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.

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.

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. 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 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.

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

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.

Here are some ideas to get started: Discuss top priorities: What are the one, two, or three most critical outcomes for your report and how can you help her tackle these challenges? Calibrate what “great” looks like: Do you have a shared vision of what you’re working toward? Are you in sync about goals or expectations? Share feedback: What feedback can you give that will help your report, and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as a manager? Reflect on how things are going: Once in a while, it’s useful to zoom out and talk about your report’s general state of mind—how is he feeling on the whole? What’s making him satisfied or dissatisfied? Have any of his goals changed? What has he learned recently and what does he want to learn going forward?

Here are some of my favorite questions to get the conversation moving: Identify: These questions focus on what really matters for your report and what topics are worth spending more time on. What’s top of mind for you right now? What priorities are you thinking about this week? What’s the best use of our time today? Understand: Once you’ve identified a topic to discuss, these next questions get at the root of the problem and what can be done about it. What does your ideal outcome look like? What’s hard for you in getting to that outcome? What do you really care about? What do you think is the best course of action? What’s the worst-case scenario you’re worried about? Support: These questions zero in on how you can be of greatest service to your report. How can I help you? What can I do to make you more successful? What was the most useful part of our conversation today?

We’ve already discussed 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.

Nothing good comes out of accusing someone of being a screwup. Charged language or declarations that are personal (“you’re thoughtless” instead of “your action was thoughtless”) immediately puts the other person on the defensive. Suddenly you’re a threat they’re protecting themselves from, and it’s unlikely they’re going to sit down and listen to what you have to say after that.

The best way to give critical feedback is to deliver it directly and dispassionately. Plainly say what you perceive the issue to be, what made you feel that way, and how you’d like to work together to resolve the concern.

No matter what obstacles you face, you first need to get deep with knowing you—your strengths, your values, your comfort zones, your blind spots, and your biases. When you fully understand yourself, you’ll know where your true north lies.

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? What skills do you think a hypothetical perfect person in my role would have? For each skill, how would you rate me against that ideal on a scale of one to five?

When you think about formal training, the question to ask isn’t Is this worth doing right now given all the other things on my plate (or all the other things I could spend money on), but rather One year from now, will I be happy I did this? When framed that way, the choice tends to be clearer.

Today, our design organization gets together periodically to highlight important work we’re doing, share new tools and processes, and discuss lessons we’ve learned. Unlike my discontinued status meeting, this one works because there is a lot more preparation behind it to ensure the content is interesting.

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

At the end of the day, you are the person who ultimately owns the team you build. Successful hiring managers form close partnerships with the recruiting team to identify, interview, and close the best people. A great recruiter brings her network as well as her knowledge of the recruiting process—how to source and pitch candidates, how to guide them through interviews, and how to negotiate offers. A great hiring manager brings her understanding of the role—what it needs and why it’s exciting—as well as her time to personally connect with candidates.

But if you’re looking for a starting point on what to ask, 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.

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.

“Few people take objectives really seriously.3 They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

From your target date, work backward and figure out who needs to do what every week. Ask people to set and publicly commit to their weekly goals—this creates accountability. Periodic reviews can also be a good way to sustain momentum. I know a team who uses this technique expertly, sometimes even hosting two meetings a week to review progress and discuss urgent priorities. If your team is juggling a number of different tasks, order those by what matters most—which ones are “critical path” and which are “nice to have”? Always tackle “critical path” first.

The most brilliant plans in the world won’t help you succeed if you can’t bring them to life. Executing well means that you pick a reasonable direction, move quickly to learn what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments to get to your desired outcome. Speed matters—a fast runner can take a few wrong turns and still beat a slow runner who knows the shortest path.

Here are some ways to tell if your team is executing well: Lists of projects or tasks are prioritized from most to least important, with the higher-up items receiving more time and attention. There is an efficient process for decision-making that everyone understands and trusts. The team moves quickly, especially with reversible decisions. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.8 If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” After a decision is made, everyone commits (even those who disagree) and moves speedily to make it happen. Without new information, there is no second-guessing the decision, no pocket vetoing, and no foot dragging. When important new information surfaces, there is an expedient process to examine if and how current plans should change as a result. Every task has a who and a by when. Owners set and reliably deliver on commitments. The team is resilient and constantly seeking to learn. Every failure makes the team stronger because they don’t make the same mistake twice.

This is why it’s so important to remind people of what really matters. Describe over and over again the world you’d like to see. Try to connect every task, project, decision, or goal with the organization’s higher-level purpose. If everyone understands the dream, then the team’s actions will be aligned in making it a reality.

One of the most useful tools for improving process is the practice of doing debriefs (also called retrospectives or postmortems). You can do this at the completion of a project, on a periodic basis, or anytime an unexpected event or error occurs. Here’s how it works: You invite the team to come together for an hour or two to reflect on what happened. What went well, what didn’t go well, and what would the team do differently next time? The process is both cathartic and instructive. There is something to learn even if the outcome was positive (how can we take away best practices for other projects?). If the outcome wasn’t good, debriefs help you avoid the same mistakes in the future.

At the end of the day, a resilient organization isn’t one that never makes mistakes but rather one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.

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.

At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. Success becomes more and more about mastering a few key skills: hiring exceptional leaders, building self-reliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.

The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else. From this, you can extrapolate that anything your report can do just as well or better than you, you should delegate.

A manager I admire once told me that an organization’s culture is best understood not from reading what’s written on its corporate website but from seeing what it’s willing to give up for its values. For example, many teams say that they care about their employees fully owning problems. Nobody’s going to admit, “Actually, we like to shirk responsibility and blame mistakes on others.”

If you say something is important to you and you’d like the rest of your team to care about it, be the first person to live that value. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when nobody else does either.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, “Why Group Brainstorming Is a Waste of Time,” Harvard Business Review, March 25, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time.