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

by Julie Zhuo

I’ve learned largely by doing, and despite my best intentions, I’ve made countless mistakes. But this is how anything in life goes: You try something. You figure out what worked and what didn’t. You file away lessons for the future. And then you get better. Rinse, repeat.

Running a team is hard because it ultimately boils down to people, and all of us are multifaceted and complex beings.

We can create things far grander and more ambitious than anything we could have done alone.

Great managers are made, not born. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager.

This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone.

Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.

Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).”

at any given point in time, it can be hard to accurately judge.

Time, however, always reveals the truth.

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?

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.

The next important bucket that managers think about is people, otherwise known as the who.

the last bucket is process, which describes how your team works together.

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

As the team grows in size, it matters less and less how good she is personally at doing the work herself.

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.

you have to enjoy the day-to-day of management and want to do it.

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

“What makes a good leader is that they eschew the spotlight in favor of spending time and energy to do what they need to do to support and protect their people,”6 writes Simon Sinek in Leaders Eat Last.

to be a great manager, one must certainly be a leader. A leader, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be a manager.

great managers should cultivate leadership not just in themselves but also within their teams.

leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.

You can be someone’s manager, but if that person does not trust or respect you, you will have limited ability to influence him.

the mistake that I made—and that I see virtually every apprentice manager make—is continuing to do individual contributor work past the point at which it is sustainable.

Now that you’re coming in fresh, you have a chance to form new ties and reset your identity.

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.

It’s much more likely that the report is shy about getting into the gory details than that everything is consistently rainbows and butterflies.

strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward.

with a bedrock of trust, the conversations become easier.

“What are the qualities of a perfect manager for you?”

supporting and caring for someone doesn’t mean always agreeing with them or making excuses for their mistakes.

a coach’s best tool for understanding what’s going on is to ask.

these people are not who you want on your team no matter how talented they are. Instead of a multiplier effect, you get a divider effect: the presence of this person makes the rest of your team less effective.

protecting low performers only increases the damage when, inevitably, a manager is forced to let them go.

the feedback inspired you to change your behavior, which resulted in your life getting better.

For one, feedback doesn’t have to be critical. Praise is often more motivating than criticism.

Behavioral feedback helps people understand the reality of how others see them, which may be different than how they see themselves.

Does my feedback lead to the change I’m hoping for?

1. Make your feedback as specific as possible.

2. Clarify what success looks and feels like.

3. Suggest next steps.

Don’t engage when you are upset. We regret the things we say in anger, and while bridges take months or years to build, they can be burned in an instant.

When I [heard/observed/reflected on] your [action/behavior/output], I felt concerned because …

Own the decision. Be firm, and don’t open it up for discussion.

great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses.

What are the things that push your buttons, but maybe not someone else’s?

If something doesn’t seem fair, my blood pressure rises and my heart starts to pound.

Always thank people for feedback. Even if you don’t agree with what’s said, receive it graciously and recognize that it took effort to give.

Feedback meetings don’t exist to pass or receive judgment but rather to get to the best outcome.