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

by Julie Zhuo

Keep in mind the planning fallacy:6 our natural bias to predict that things will take less time and money than they actually do.

“Work contracts to fit the time we give it.”7 There is always a way to break down what seems like an impossible journey into a series of days, miles, and finally steps. By putting one foot in front of the other over and over again, eventually we’ll scale mountains.

The best plans don’t matter if you can’t achieve them accurately or quickly enough to make a difference.

“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.

Throughout your career, you will make countless mistakes. The most frustrating will be the ones where you don’t learn anything because it’s not clear whether the issue is with strategy or execution.

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 pl...

Every task has a who and a by when. Owners set and reliably del...

The team is resilient and constantly seeking to learn. Every failure makes the team stronger because they don...

You don’t make any future investments (like upgrading your equipment) because it’s costly in the short term. Meanwhile, your competitors do, and in two years, they’re making stuff faster and cheaper than you.

In other words, start by understanding the bigger picture. What problems are you hoping to solve with what you’re doing? 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?

Bug picture. Not instaneously the wish or suggestion at hand

What we can achieve is bounded only by the limits of our imagination.

What went well, what didn’t go well, and what would the team do differently next time?

Debriefs on every roadmapmeeting?

The goal of a debrief is not judgment. Don’t treat it as a trial—that’s the fastest way to kill the practice.

After a retrospective, it’s a good idea to write down the learnings and share them widely. A team growing hardy from its own successes and missteps is great, but when they can also help others improve or avoid similar errors, that’s even better.

one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.

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.

“Why didn’t you write about my project in the weekly update? Did you not think it was important?”

So I came up with a new idea: ask my team to send me what they wanted to highlight for the note.

In it, I listed the goals of the digest, what made for a good highlight, and tips to keep in mind while writing.

This book itself is the latest iteration of my personal playbook, the culmination of years of failing, succeeding, and trying in the endeavor known as management. I’m writing it for you, but I’m also writing it for myself—so that I can remember the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve tucked away for the future.

Playbooks. Something to have for myself too

Take a moment to reflect on what you’ve learned and how you might plan that next crossing.

As soon as I figured out a better process, a few more people would join and the gears would get clogged once more. The only way to stay effective was to constantly change and adapt.

Setting a vision, hiring leaders, delegating responsibility, and managing communication become the key skills needed to bridge the gap.

But empowering your leaders is a necessity. One of the biggest challenges of managing at scale is finding the right balance between going deep on a problem and stepping back and trusting others to take care of it. More on that topic in a bit.

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.

You can’t do everything, so you must prioritize. What are the most important topics for you to pay attention to, and where are you going to draw the line? Perfectionism is not an option. It took me a long time to get comfortable operating in a world where I had to pick and choose what mattered the most, and not let the sheer number of possibilities overwhelm me.

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.

Great managers, in my mind, were like my grandmother—they took on the biggest burdens of the team to spare their reports.

often the best thing you can do is to believe in them.

you can extrapolate that anything your report can do just as well or better than you, you should delegate.

As long as you continue to be motivated by your purpose, as long as your aspirations extend beyond what your team is currently capable of, as long as you can see new challenges on the horizon, then there’s opportunity for you to have more impact.

When you value something deeply, don’t shy away from talking about it. Instead, embrace telling people why it’s important to you.

I’ve found that the more frequently and passionately I talk about what’s important to me—including my missteps and what I’ve learned through them—the more positively my team responds.

If you’re not willing to change your behavior for a stated value, then don’t bring it up in the first place.

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.

There is power in rituals. Beyond slogans or speeches, they create actions around which team members can bond.

Pay attention to your own actions—the little things you say and do—as well as what behaviors you are rewarding or discouraging. All of it works together to tell the story of what you care about and how you believe a great team should work together.

We will build something that will outlast us, that will be made stronger by all who become a part of it.

“disagree and commit”: Jeff Bezos, “2016 Letter to Shareholders,” About Amazon (blog), Amazon.com, April 17, 2017, https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t

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