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

by Julie Zhuo

“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

Good CEOs know that they should double down on the projects that are working and put more people, resources, and attention on those rather than get every single project to the point of “not failing.”

If this person were not already at the organization, would I recommend that another team hire him or her knowing what I know?

What a great job looks like for your report, compared to a mediocre or bad job

One manager I know takes it even further—whenever he gets feedback about one of his reports from someone else, he always asks that person, “Would you be comfortable sharing that feedback directly with X?” He reasons that there will be less of a distortion effect if he removes himself as a middleman and that the feedback will be more clearly heard and internalized.

When I [heard/observed/reflected on] your [action/behavior/output], I felt concerned because … I’d like to understand your perspective and talk about how we can resolve this.

“Feedback is a gift.”

Hey, I value your feedback and I’d like to be a more effective team member. Would you be willing to answer the questions below? Please be as honest as you can because that’s what will help me the most—I promise nothing you say will offend me. Feedback is a gift, and I’m grateful for your taking the time.

In the next meeting, I opened with this: “I’m here to do a Q&A because it’s really important to me that we can have real talk about all the things happening on our team. But to be honest, I don’t get the sense that I’m hearing all of your top concerns. So I want to say this up front: Hard questions are good! Get them off your chest! I promise to be as transparent as I can.”

Define Who Is Responsible for What

“We can either spend the next few weeks debating which ideas are the best or we can try to learn as quickly as possible by doing. Our goal is to build simple, conclusive tests that help us understand which things we should double down on and which things we should cut from the list. If an idea works, we’ll expand upon it in the next sprint.”

“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.”

“If you don’t know where you are going,9 you might wind up someplace else.”

“It’s not a good idea to design where your kitchen outlets should go when you haven’t yet settled on the floor plan.”

My colleague makes sure that a third of her team works on projects that can be completed on the order of weeks, another third works on medium-term projects that may take months, and finally, the last third works on innovative, early-stage ideas whose impact won’t be known for years.

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.

Another bonus of doing this: you can then pass the playbook to others to learn and execute.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,13 for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

my ability to context switch also needed to keep pace. I discovered a few techniques to make this easier: scanning through my calendar every morning and preparing for each meeting, developing a robust note-taking and task-management system, finding pockets for reflection at the end of every week.

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 art of knowing when to dive in yourself and when to step back and entrust others.”

Here I was, worried about dozens of details—how Raphael would feel, whether or not I was giving him enough feedback, the thrash everyone else would go through—when the most important question was, What’s going to make the team more successful over the next few years?

“Try to double your leadership capacity every year.”

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.

As for what you shouldn’t delegate, consider the unique value you’re able to add when it comes to the organization’s top priorities.

“If you delegated everything you did today to someone else, do you think there’d be no more problems left for you to solve?”