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

by Julie Zhuo

Great managers are made, not born.

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.

I would add that supporting teammates in general is part of the job. Not only their career. Also being able to take the responsibility for the mistakes of the team, making the final decisions, resolving conflicts, managing stakeholder expectations. one liner - Leading the team to achieve their goals

You can be the smartest, most well-liked, most hardworking manager in the world, but if your team has a long-standing reputation for mediocre outcomes, then unfortunately you can’t objectively be considered a “great” manager.

I asked him how he evaluates the job of a manager. He smiled and said, “My framework is quite simple.” 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.

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

Purpose, people, process. The why, the who, and the how.

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.

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

to be a great manager, one must certainly be a leader. A leader, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be a manager. Anyone can exhibit leadership, regardless of their role.

“What turned out to be more challenging than you expected, and what was easier than you expected?”

In the early days, make sure that you’re spending time calibrating with your new team on what your group’s goals, values, and processes ought to be. Some questions to ask yourself in preparation: How do I make decisions? What do I consider a job well done? What are all the responsibilities I took care of when it was just me? What’s easy or hard about working in this function? What new processes are needed now that this team is growing?

Be deliberate about the people and culture you’re setting up, and ask yourself: What qualities do I want in a team member? What skills does our team need to complement my own? How should this team look and function in a year? How will my own role and responsibilities evolve?

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?

how to calibrate their expectations around “what’s normal.” One effective way to do that is to look at specific scenarios together with your own manager. Questions to ask include: What does it mean to do a great job versus an average or poor job? Can you give me some examples? Can you share your impressions of how you think Project X or Meeting Y went? Why do you think that? I noticed that Z happened the other day.… Is that normal or should I be concerned? What keeps you up at night? Why? How do you determine which things to prioritize?

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.” What better way to set the tone that it’s okay to talk about anything than by diving head-first into revealing a personal vulnerability?

New managers often ask me, “How long will it take to feel like I know what I’m doing?” I reply quite honestly, “It took me about three years.”

as Andy Grove points out in his classic High Output Management. He flips the question around and asks: 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.

The first step to addressing any concerns about lackluster work is diagnosing the people issues behind it. Is it a matter of motivation or skill? This doesn’t have to be complicated. You can understand this through a series of conversations with your report. First, discuss whether your expectations are aligned—does “great work” mean the same thing for both of you? Then discuss whether it’s a matter of motivation. If both of those don’t resolve your concerns, then dive in to whether the issue is with skills.

If your report feels that your support and respect are based on her performance, then it will be hard for her to be honest with you when things are rocky.

How can you achieve stellar 1:1s? The answer is preparation.

we should focus on what’s most important for them. 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?

Let her lead the 1:1 while you listen and probe. 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?

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

when I don’t have the answers or when I’m working through my own personal challenges. I’ll say things like the following: “I don’t know the answer. What do you think?” “I want to come clean and apologize for what I did/said the other day.…” “One of my personal growth areas this half is …” “I’m afraid I don’t know enough to help you with that problem. Here’s someone you should talk to instead.…”

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.” Similarly, good investors know that helping to identify and grow a single start-up into the next billion-dollar company is worth dozens of other investments that lose money.

Interesting idea - invest your time in the strongest teammates and dont spend too much time on less performing ones. Reminds me of the 80/20. At the same time this might lead to a compounding effect from the "weaker" employees where they.become team detractors. Then you have to fire them most likely becase unless its an easy fix ypu just made the performance worse by actively showing your values to the less performing employee.

Call it what you want—fit, motivation, chemistry—but the things a person cares about must also be what the team (and company) cares about.

“What I think is brutal and ‘false kindness’7 is keeping people around who aren’t going to grow and prosper. There’s no cruelty like waiting and telling people late in their careers that they don’t belong.” You have two options at this point: help someone find a new role in your organization or let him or her go.

A good question to ask is: If this person were not already at the organization, would I recommend that another team hire him or her knowing what I know?

“Perhaps it’s you who shouldn’t be his manager, not the other way around.” Perhaps you made the call to hire him when his skills weren’t what the team needed. Or perhaps you put him on projects that weren’t a good match. Caring about people means owning that your relationship is a two-way street.

Consider

For a leader, giving feedback—both when things are going well and when they aren’t—is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job. Mastering this skill means that you can knock down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work—unclear expectations and inadequate skills—so that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target.

During this phase, make sure you address the following: What a great job looks like for your report, compared to a mediocre or bad job What advice you have to help your report get started on the right foot Common pitfalls your report should avoid

During the first phase of discussing the feedback process with the employee

When you zoom out and look at many examples of task-specific feedback for a report, what themes emerge?

When you give behavioral feedback, you are making a statement about how you perceive that person, so your words need to be thoughtfully considered and supported with specific examples to explain why you feel that way. It’s best discussed in person so the receiver can ask questions and engage in a back-and-forth with you. Behavioral feedback helps people understand the reality of how others see them,

If Albert were to get a rude shock next month, he’d have three possible explanations for what happened, none of which are good. The review isn’t fair. If things really were so dire, why hasn’t this come up until now? This must be a mistake. The review is fair, but my manager was negligent and didn’t realize I was underperforming until the end of the half. The review is fair, but my manager wasn’t honest in sharing feedback with me along the way, so I didn’t have a chance to improve.

Giving feedback late creates big risks to damage the relationship and trust between you and your report

setting expectations helps with both problems. At the beginning of the project, let your report know how you’re planning to be involved. Be explicit that you’d like to review the work twice a week and talk through the most important problems together. Tell him which decisions you expect to make, and which he should make.

When giving the lead on a project to a report

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?

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.

The question that should always be in the back of your mind is: Does my feedback lead to the change I’m hoping for?

At the end of a conversation, when you’re not sure whether you’ve been heard, there are a few things you can do.

1. Confirm verbally and ask to repeat/summarize 2. Send a written summary 3. Keep coming back to the topic

Does My Feedback Lead to Positive Action?

Make it specific. Clarify what success looks like. Specify Next steps

Be clear about whether you’re setting an expectation or merely offering a suggestion.

“Feedback is a gift.”

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 biggest barriers that get in my way are self-doubt, a tendency to complexify, and not being clear and direct enough.

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? Pick three to seven people whom you work closely with and ask if they’d be willing to share some feedback to help you improve. Even if your company already has a process for 360-degree feedback, it helps to be specific about what you want to know and to provide reassurances that you’re looking for honesty, not just pats on the back. Take the example below. 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. Examples of specific asks: On our last project together, in what ways did you see me having impact? What do you think I could have done to have more impact? With my team, what am I doing well that you’d like to see me do more of? What should I stop doing? One of the things I’m working on is being more decisive. How do you think I’m doing on that? Any suggestions on how I can do better here? Ask for task-specific feedback to calib...

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.

UNDERSTAND YOURSELF AT YOUR BEST AND WORST 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.

Write these down and develop the good ones into habits

If you’re not sure what your ideal environment looks like, ask yourself the following: Which six-month period of my life did I feel the most energetic and productive? What gave me that energy? In the past month, what moments stand out as highlights? What conditions enabled those moments to happen, and are they re-creatable? In the past week, when was I in a state of deep focus? How did I get there?

To figure out what your triggers are, ask yourself the following questions: When was the last time someone said something that annoyed me more than it did others around me? Why did I feel so strongly about it? What would my closest friends say my pet peeves are? Who have I met that I’ve immediately been wary of? What made me feel that way? What’s an example of a time when I’ve overreacted and later regretted it? What made me so worked up in that moment?