The Making of a Manager – Julie Zhuo

A Managers 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.

A manager is a specific role. Leadership is the particular skill of being able to guide and influence other people. While the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.

Being a great manager is a highly personal journey, and if you don’t have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

The three jobs of a manager

• Ensure that your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.
• Understand people. Are the members of your team set up to succeed? Do they have the right skills? Are they motivated to do great work?
• Develop great team processes. How your team works together.

The Difference Between Leadership and Management

• A manager is a specific role. Leadership is the particular skill of being able to guide and influence other people. Leadership is a quality rather than a job.
• This is an important distinction because while the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.
• A manager who doesn’t know how to influence others isn’t going to be particularly effective at improving the outcomes of her team. So 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.
• Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

Questions for one-on-ones

Identify:

• 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: 

• 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:

• How can I help you? 
• What can I do to make you more successful? 
• What was the most useful part of our conversation today?

Defining Management

Management is a deeply human endeavour to empower others.

Most managers are not CEOs or senior executives. Most lead smaller teams, and sometimes not even directly. All managers share a common purpose: helping a group of people achieve a common goal.

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

The 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.

Managing Yourself: Imposter Syndrome

Being a great manager is a highly personal journey, and if you don’t have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.

No matter what obstacles you face, you first need to get deep with knowing yourself—your strengths, your values, your comfort zones, your blind spots, and your biases.

Imposter syndrome is what makes you feel as though you’re the only one with nothing worthwhile to say when you walk into a room full of people you admire.

When the sailing gets rocky, the manager is often the first person others turn to, so it’s common to feel intense pressure to know what to do or say. When you don’t, you naturally think: Am I cut out for this job?

The crux of management

It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together. It’s from this simple definition that everything else flows.

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. Never forget what you’re ultimately here to do: help your team achieve great outcomes.

Get Great work from your team

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?

Triggers

Triggers occupy the space between your growth area and somebody else’s—you could work on controlling your reactions, but the other person could also benefit from hearing your feedback. 

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? 

Ask for feedback

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?”

Success Indicators for Managers

Managers can be deemed successful if they are able to say this to themselves:

• My reports regularly bring their biggest challenges to my attention.
• My report and I regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally.
• My reports would gladly work for me again.

Great managers are made, not born.

How To Do Great One-On-Ones

• Have no less than a weekly 1:1 with every report for thirty minutes, and more time if needed.
• One-on-ones should be focused on your report and what would help him be more successful, not on you and what you need.
• If you’re looking for a status update, use another channel.
• Rare one-on-one face time is better spent on topics that are harder to discuss in a group or over email.
• The ideal 1:1 leaves your report feeling that it was useful for her. If she thinks that the conversation was pleasant but largely unmemorable, then you can do better.
• 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? 

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.

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