The Making of a Manager – by Julie Zhuo
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 1/7/21.
The best resource that I’ve read to date for individual contributors who have recently been thrust into the world of management (which requires an entirely different skill set). Zhuo provides an honest assessment of the fears and concerns that come along with venturing into a new world of management. But the bulk of the book provides insightful strategic and tactical advice for new managers. Zhuo emphasizes the primary focus on purpose, people, and process. She also provides frameworks and specific advice on how to evaluate your own performance as a manager, how to delegate, how to run meetings, how to run one-on-one’s, how to provide great feedback, how to articulate a vision, and why focus matters—to name a few.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
What is your job as a manager?
Your job is not to be the best at everything or know how to do everything yourself: “Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.” JZ
Three areas of focus in your day to day:
Purpose: Outcome your team is trying to achieve. Ensure your team knows what success looks like and cares. This is the why.
People: Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated? This is the who.
Process: What principles govern decision making, how does your team work together? This is the how.
Evaluating your own performance as a manager:
What did the team achieve? Did we hit our goals?
Did I do a good job hiring and developing individuals? Was team engaged and working well together?
Delegation:
If you do every job yourself and are unable to delegate and coach, you’re doing work that is additive, not multiplicative.
Delegation: “Spend your time and energy on the interaction of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.” JZ
Supporting your team:
Support and respect your reports unconditionally. If this is based on performance and you only demonstrate support or respect when things are going well, it will make things difficult for a report to be honest with you when things get tough.
“We are more than the output of our work on a particular team at a particular moment in time, and true respect reflects that.” JZ
One-on-ones:
Focus on your report and what they need/how you can help them be more successful. Not what you need or status updates.
Discuss top priorities
Calibrate on what great looks like
Share feedback
Reflect on how things are going
Listen and ask questions that allow your report to uncover the answer on their own: “Your job isn’t to dole out advice or ‘save the day’—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.” JZ
“Remember that your job is to be a multiplier for your people. If you can remove a barrier, provide a valuable new perspective, or increase their confidence, then you’re enabling them to be more successful.” JZ
Potential questions for great 1:1’s:
Identify what matters for your report and what’s worth spending time on:
What’s top of mind for your right now?
What priorities are you thinking about this week?
Understand and seek to gain context and find the root of the problem:
What does your ideal outcome look like?
What’s hard for you in getting to that outcome?
What do you think is the best course of action?
What’s the worst-case scenario you’re worried about?
Support by determining how you can be of service to your report:
How can I help you?
What can I do to make you more successful?
Feedback:
Always ask yourself, “Does my feedback lead to the change I’m hoping for?”
You’re probably not giving feedback often enough. Start by doing it more, then dial in the type of feedback you’re giving.
Make feedback as specific as possible, clarify what success looks/feels like, suggest next steps.
Pointer for critical feedback: “When I heard/observed/reflected on your action/behavior/output, I felt concerned because…” or “I’d like to understand your perspective and talk about how we can resolve this.”
Meetings:
Decision-making meetings:
Good: get the decision made, includes people directly affected by the decision, clear decision-maker, presents all credible options objectively, give equal airtime to opinions, and makes people feel heard.
Bad: people feel their side wasn’t presented well so they don’t trust the resulting decision, decisions take a long time to make (think about reversibility here), decisions keep flip-flipping, too much time is spent trying to get a group to consensus rather than escalating to decision-maker, time is wasted on rehashing the same argument.
Informational meetings:
Good: group feels like they learned something, conveys key messages clearly, keeps the audience’s attention (storytelling, interactivity), evokes intended emotion.
Feedback meetings:
Good: everyone on the same page for what success looks like, honestly represents the current status of work, clearly frames open questions, key decisions, or concerns, ends with agreed-upon next steps.
Who should you invite to a meeting: Which people are necessary to make your desired outcome happen?
“As a manager, your time is precious and finite, so guard it like a dragon guards its treasure stash. If you trust that the right outcomes will happen without you, then you don’t need to be there.” JZ
Process:
“Process isn’t inherently good or bad. Process is simply the answer to the question, ‘What actions do we take to achieve our goals?’…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.” JZ
Team vision:
To define your vision for the team, ask yourself the following…
What do you hope will be different in 2-3 years compared to now?
How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? How far off is it from where things are today?
What unique superpowers does your team have? When you’re at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like to be twice 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?
Portfolio approach: a third of team works on projects that can be completed on the order of weeks, a third works on medium-term projects that may take months, another third works on innovative, early-stage ideas whose impact won’t be known for years.
Focus:
“Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.” Richard Koch
Facebook’s original photo upload feature was pretty basic and was competing against incumbents like Flickr which had more features (navigation shortcuts, search capabilities, full-screen displays). But what allowed Facebook to win was focusing on one feature, photo tagging. Triggered a network effect and drew upon the insight that the most valuable part of photos to most people are the people in those photos.
“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.” JZ
Build, measure, learn: “Our goal is to build simple, conclusive tests that help us understand which things we should double down on and which things we should cut from the list.” JZ
Decision making:
“Most decision should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Jeff Bezos