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

by Julie Zhuo

Admitting your struggles and asking for help is the opposite of weakness—in fact, it shows courage and self-awareness. You are saying that you care more about getting yourself to a good place than you do about your ego.

You can’t do your best work unless you physically feel your best, so take care of yourself.

Remember to ask for both task-specific and behavioral feedback. The more concrete you are about what you want to know, the better. If you lead with, “Hey, how do you think my presentation went?” you’ll probably hear responses like “I think it went well,” which aren’t particularly helpful. Instead, probe at the specifics and make it easy for someone to tell you something actionable. “I’m working on making sure my point is clear in the first three minutes. Did that come across? How can I make it clearer next time?”

In the last few minutes of a meeting, get into the habit of asking, “So before we break, let’s make sure we agree on next steps …” After the meeting, send out a recap to the attendees with a summary of the discussion, a list of specific action items and who is responsible for each, and when the next check-in will

Bad process is heavy and arbitrary. It feels like a series of hoops to jump through. But good process is what helps us execute at our best. We learn from our mistakes, move quickly, and make smarter decisions for the future.

To help you get started, ask yourself the following: Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly. What do you hope will be different in two to three years compared to now? How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? What do you hope will be your team’s reputation in a few years? How far off is that from where things are today? What unique superpower(s) does your team have? When you’re at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like for your team to be twice as good? Five times as good? If you had to create a quick litmus test that anyone could use to assess whether your team was doing a poor job, a mediocre job, or a kick-ass job, what would that litmus test be?

Heuristics for Defining vision

while many people on our team can, that doesn’t mean we should. It’s not our core competency, and we’ll probably end up spending double the time for 80 percent the quality of what a specialized team could do.

Steve Jobs, creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.4 But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

Treat big projects like a series of smaller projects.

Every time you see a good script result in a bad movie, a pioneering company lose business to a less innovative competitor, or a genius professor do a poor job of teaching students, you’re seeing a failure of execution. 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.

How do you imagine people will get value out of your work? Based on that, what are the most important priorities for the team now?

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. If you find yourself doing a similar thing over and over again, chances are good that it can be codified into an instruction manual or checklist that can make the task go smoother in the future. Another bonus of doing this: you can then pass the playbook to others to learn and execute.

Good idea is to make a recording of you doing the task and narrating your thought process

Emphasize that you welcome dissenting opinions and reward those who express them. Own your mistakes and remind your team that you are human, just like everyone else. Use language that invites discussion: “I may be totally wrong here, so tell me if you disagree. My opinion is …” You can also ask directly for advice: “If you were me, what would you do in this situation?”

Context Switching All Day, Every Day

No value in this chapter. Just says that you’re gonna have a lot of work basically

Perfectionism is not an option.

GIVING PEOPLE BIG PROBLEMS IS A SIGN OF TRUST

What are the biggest priorities right now for our team?

Are we aligned in how we think about people, purpose, and process?

talking about the purpose with your reports makes it more vivid in everyone’s minds. When the vision is clear, the right actions tend to follow.

“Assume the role was open. Would you rather rehire your current leader or take a gamble on someone else?”

Heuristic to better understand your attitude towards a colleague

growing great teams means that you are constantly looking for ways to replace yourself in the job you are currently doing.

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.

At Facebook, we have a saying immortalized in posters all across campus: Nothing at Facebook Is Somebody Else’s Problem.

your actions reinforce what the company values.

The key is to find the intersection between what your team does well and what you hope the team values. When you have an hour or so, grab a pen and jot down your answers to the following questions: UNDERSTANDING YOUR CURRENT TEAM What are the first three adjectives that come to mind when describing the personality of your team? What moments made you feel most proud to be a part of your team? Why? What does your team do better than the majority of other teams out there? If you picked five random members of your team and individually asked each person, “What does our team value?” what would you hear? How similar is your team’s culture to the broader organization’s culture? Imagine a journalist scrutinizing your team. What would she say your team does well or not well? When people complain about how things work, what are the top three things that they bring up? UNDERSTANDING YOUR ASPIRATIONS Describe the top five adjectives you’d want an external observer to use to describe your team’s culture. Why those? Now imagine those five adjectives sitting on a double-edged sword. What do you imagine are the pitfalls that come from ruthless adherence to those qualities? Are those acceptable to you? Make a list of the aspects of culture that you admire about other teams or organizations. Why do you admire them? What downsides does that team tolerate as a result? Make a list of the aspects of culture that you wouldn’t want to emulate from other teams or companies. Why not? UNDERSTANDING ...

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.

As a leader, nurturing culture may not be the first thing on your mind. You may be dreaming about the changes you want to create in the world or sketching out the master strategy that will get you there. But success or failure aren’t usually the results of a few sweeping decisions. Rather, how far you get will be the sum of the millions of actions taken by your team during the small, quotidian moments.