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

by Julie Zhuo

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.

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.

The second part of getting to an honest reckoning with yourself is knowing your weaknesses and triggers.

the next part is calibration, which is making sure that the view we have of ourselves matches reality.

(There’s even a term to describe the cognitive bias where people who aren’t actually very skilled have a tendency to think they’re better than they are: the Dunning-Kruger effect.2)

To develop our self-awareness and to calibrate our strengths and weaknesses, we must confront the truth of what we’re really like by asking others for their unvarnished opinions.

Ask for task-specific feedback to calibrate yourself on specific skills.

The perspective you have changes everything. With a fixed mindset, your actions are governed by fear—fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of being found out as an imposter. With a growth mindset, you’re motivated to seek out the truth and ask for feedback because you know it’s the fastest path to get you where you want to go.

Beyond strengths and weaknesses, the next part of understanding yourself is knowing which environments help you to do your best work and which situations trigger a negative reaction. This helps you design your day-to-day to respond to your needs.

What separates triggers from normal negative reactions is that they have an outsize effect on you specifically.

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.

That’s what a mentor is—someone who shares her expertise to help you improve.

Set Aside Time to Reflect and Set Goals

good meetings are simple and straightforward.

being crystal clear about the outcome you’re shooting for is the first step to running great meetings.

Making a Decision In a decision meeting, you’re framing the different options on the table and asking a decision-maker to make a call.

Success here is both getting to a clear decision and everyone leaving with a sense...

Providing Feedback Often known as a “review,” the purpose of a feedback meeting is for stakeholders to understand and give input on work in progress.

Generating Ideas You might hear this referred to as a “brainstorming meeting” or a “working session” where a group of people get together to come up with proposed solutions to a problem.

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).

Because the presenters knew their material forward and back, they experienced what social psychologists call “the curse of knowledge”—the cognitive bias that makes it difficult for them to remember what it’s like to be a beginner seeing the content for the first time.

The most important thing to remember about hiring is this: hiring is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization.

DESIGN YOUR TEAM INTENTIONALLY

The solution to both a healthier diet and a better team is to plan ahead.

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

Describe Your Ideal Candidate as Precisely as You Can

Write the job description yourself and be specific about the skills or experiences you are looking for.

Deliver an Amazing Interview Experience

Show Candidates How Much You Want Them

The best—though still imperfect—predictor for how someone will do in the future is to understand how they’ve done in the past on similar projects in similar environments.

Whenever we open up a new role, the first thing I do is make sure my entire team knows we’re hiring.

When evaluating references, keep in mind two things. The first is that people typically improve their skills over time, so discount negative feedback that isn’t recent.

The second thing is that you might not get a diverse pool of candidates if you’re only sourcing within your existing network, so go back to your definition of the ideal person for the role and make sure you’re casting the net wide enough.

The best interviews happen when you show up with a clear sense of what you want to learn about the person.

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.

Hire People Who Are Capable of More

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.

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.

The job your team does shouldn’t be static—as the group becomes capable of more, your ambitions should also grow.

START WITH A CONCRETE VISION

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.

Create a Believable Game Plan

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.

“Plans are worthless,2 but planning i...

What makes for a good strategy? First, it must have a realistic shot at working.

A good strategy understands the crux of the problem it’s trying to solve. It focuses a team’s unique strengths, resources, and energy on what matters the most in achieving its goals.