The Making of a Manager
Manager builds team for better outcomes. Not doing their jobs yourself.
leadershipA 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.
AQ's take: Nailed why I quit micromanaging. Team goals beat solo heroics every time.
Jun 29, 2022This is 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.
AQ's take: Freed me from imposter syndrome. Don't need to know it all anymore.
Jun 29, 2022Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
AQ's take: Reminded me my old job judged busyness, not results. Wasted years.
Jun 29, 2022Andy Grove, founder and CEO of Intel and a legendary manager of his time, wrote that when it comes to evaluations, one should look at “the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).”
AQ's take: Andy Grove's output focus killed my activity-tracking addiction cold.
Jun 29, 2022You 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.
AQ's take: Ouch. Explains why my first team got labeled average despite my charm.
Jun 29, 2022Six years ago, I switched my reporting to a different manager, Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer. One of the earliest conversations I remember us having is when I asked him how he evaluates the job of a manager. He smiled and said, “My framework is quite simple.” 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? The first criterion looks at our team’s present outcomes; the second criterion asks whether we’re set up for great outcomes in the future.
AQ's take: Chris Cox's half-results metric? Brutal mirror to my vanity metrics.
Jun 29, 2022Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success: having a real team (one with clear boundaries and stable membership), a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching. My own observations are similar, and I’ve come to think of the multitude of tasks that fill up a manager’s day as sorting neatly into three buckets: purpose, people, and process.
AQ's take: Hackman's five conditions? Blueprint I wish I had building my first team.
Jun 29, 2022The 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. Getting everyone to understand and believe in your team’s purpose, whether it’s as specific as “make every customer who calls feel cared for” or as broad as “bring the world closer together,” requires understanding and believing in it yourself, and then sharing it at every opportunity—from writing emails to setting goals, from checking in with a single report to hosting large-scale meetings.
AQ's take: Purpose sharing hit home. My teams floundered without clear north stars.
Jun 29, 2022For managers, important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.
AQ's take: Processes saved my sanity. No more firefighting daily disasters.
Jun 29, 2022Your 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.
AQ's take: Multiplier effect woke me up. Solo maxed out at one person.
Jun 29, 2022I learned then one of my first lessons of management—the best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.
AQ's take: Inspiring beats dictating. Failed yelling orders; succeeded rallying dreams.
Jun 29, 2022Whenever a new manager joins my team, my favorite questions to ask a few months in are: “What turned out to be more challenging than you expected, and what was easier than you expected?”
AQ's take: New manager questions exposed my blind spots fast. Game-changer.
Jun 29, 2022What did you and your past manager discuss that was most helpful to you? What are the ways in which you’d like to be supported? How do you like to be recognized for great work? What kind of feedback is most useful for you? Imagine that you and I had an amazing relationship. What would that look like?
AQ's take: Career talk questions? Unlocked motivations I ignored for years.
Jun 29, 2022One tactic a friend of mine uses to buck this trend is to address the elephant in the room: “Since I’m new, you might not feel comfortable sharing everything with me right away. I hope to earn your trust over time. I’ll start by sharing more about myself, including my biggest failure ever . . .” I love this anecdote because it’s the epitome of “show, don’t tell.” What better way to set the tone that it’s okay to talk about anything than by diving headfirst into revealing a personal vulnerability?
AQ's take: Sharing failures first built trust I faked for months.
Jun 29, 2022What leads people to do great work? It feels like a complicated question but it really isn’t, as Andy Grove points out in his classic High Output Management. He flips the question around and asks: What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities. 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.
AQ's take: Litmus test caught my 'fine' reports hiding disasters.
Jun 29, 2022One of my teammates shared with me a simple litmus test for assessing the health of her relationships: If she asks her report how things are going and the answer for multiple weeks is “Everything is fine,” she takes it as a sign to prod further. It’s much more likely that the report is shy about getting into the gory details than that everything is consistently rainbows and butterflies.
AQ's take: Repeat-work indicator? Gold for spotting real team loyalty.
Jun 29, 2022My reports would gladly work for me again. One of the truest indicators of the strength of your relationships is whether your reports would want you as their manager in the future if they were given the choice. When you see a manager taking on a new role and members of his former team also make the leap with him, that says a lot about his leadership. In anonymous surveys to track team health, some companies explicitly ask the question, “Would you work for your manager again?” If your organization doesn’t do this, simply reflecting on the question can be useful.
AQ's take: 1:1s revealed motivations status updates buried. Wish I'd started sooner.
Jun 29, 2022Even if you sit next to someone and see him every day, 1:1s let you discuss topics that may never come up otherwise—for example, what motivates him, what his long-term career aspirations are, how he’s generally feeling about his work, and more. 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.
AQ's take: Priorities calibration prevented my goal misfires.
Jun 29, 2022Here are some ideas to get started: 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? 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?
AQ's take: Top-of-mind questions surfaced issues I bulldozed over.
Jun 29, 2022Here are some of my favorite questions to get the conversation moving: Identify: These questions focus on what really matters for your report and what topics are worth spending more time on. 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: Once you’ve identified a topic to discuss, these next questions get at the root of the problem and what can be done about it. 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: These questions zero in on how you can be of greatest service to your report. How can I help you? What can I do to make you more successful? What was the most useful part of our conversation today?
AQ's take: Wasted years cloning myself. This screams amplify uniques or fail.
Jun 29, 2022“There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it,” says Buckingham, the renowned management consultant who has studied hundreds of organizations and leaders.
AQ's take: Dragged a firing once. Turned mutual torture. Direct mercy next time.
Jun 29, 2022When you decide to let someone go, do it respectfully and directly. Don’t open it up to discussion (it isn’t one), and don’t regard it as a failure on the part of your report. (As Netflix’s former chief talent officer, Patty McCord, reflects, “Why do we call it ‘getting fired’? Are we shooting people?”)
AQ's take: Ouch. My 'support' hid distrust. Robyn exposed my blind spot.
Jun 29, 2022The best feedback I ever got came from my former report Robyn. Once, when I asked him what I could be doing better, he took a deep breath and said, “Julie, sometimes I get the feeling that when I’m doing well, you’re on my side and the two of us are great. But when I’m not doing as well, our relationship suffers, and I don’t feel that you trust me as much.” He proceeded to share a few examples of things I had said that made him feel this way, delivered with kindness and honesty. This single piece of feedback transformed my entire perspective on management.
AQ's take: Vague hints killed projects. Clear feedback? Game-changer I ignored.
Jun 29, 2022For a leader, giving feedback—both when things are going well and when they aren’t—is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job. Mastering this skill means that you can knock down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work—unclear expectations and inadequate skills—so that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target.
AQ's take: Defined great early? Saved my teams from endless guessing games.
Jun 29, 2022What a great job looks like for your report, compared to a mediocre or bad job What advice you have to help your report get started on the right foot Common pitfalls your report should avoid
AQ's take: Started with tasks, not nukes. Wish I'd eased into feedback habit.
Jun 29, 2022This is the easiest type of feedback to give because it’s focused on the what rather than the who, so it feels less personal. If you find yourself struggling to get into the habit of giving feedback, start with this category.
AQ's take: Quarterly 360s? My annual bombs felt like betrayals.
Jun 29, 2022Many companies run a 360-feedback process once or twice a year. If it’s not formally done, you can gather the feedback yourself. Every quarter, for each report, I send a short email to a handful of his or her closest collaborators asking: a) What is X doing especially well that X should do more of?, and b) What should X change or stop doing?
AQ's take: Annual reviews as nukes? Destroyed trust. Early flags save souls.
Jun 29, 2022“If the first time he hears that he’s not meeting expectations is during his performance review, it’s going to feel terrible,” she said. She went on to explain that because our reviews are meant to summarize performance from the past six months, if Albert was indeed not meeting expectations for most of that time, I should have told him that much earlier.
AQ's take: Mapped promotion gaps upfront. Stopped blocking dreams cold.
Jun 29, 2022Instead, if you say right away, “I understand that you’d like to work toward a promotion, but here are the gaps I’m seeing . . . ,” you’re showing that you want to help her reach her goal. Spell out what your promotion criteria are. Over the next few months, coach her and give her frequent feedback on how she’s doing relative to those expectations. That way, she’ll never have to wonder.
AQ's take: Swoop and poop guilty. Explicit involvement kills resentment.
Jun 29, 2022let your report know how you’re planning to be involved. Be explicit that you’d like to review the work twice a week and talk through the most important problems together. Tell him which decisions you expect to make, and which he should make. Managers who pop in out of the blue and throw down new requirements can breed resentment with their team (just Google the term “Swoop and Poop.”) But managers who proactively lay out what they care about and how they want to engage in projects rarely encounter those tensions.
AQ's take: ADHD gold. Chunks beat distant finish lines every time.
Jun 29, 2022Thinking only about the finish line of a long race can be discouraging because it seems miles and miles away. You might wonder if anything you do today can really make a difference. But if you divide your plan up into smaller chunks and focus on your next milestone—finishing the task at hand, preparing for that next meeting, getting through two pages—success suddenly seems entirely within your reach. And the sense of urgency becomes real.
AQ's take: Buggy launches taught me. Plans flop without execution speed.
Jun 29, 2022The best plans don’t matter if you can’t achieve them accurately or quickly enough to make a difference. For example, say you had a crystal ball that could tell you the exact industry-disrupting new idea to build. If your end product is slow and buggy compared to the competition, or if you fail to get to market fast enough, you’ll still lose the game.
AQ's take: 70% Bezos rule. My perfection waits murdered momentum.
Jun 29, 2022The 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. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”
AQ's take: Wandered into dead ends. Yogi's map obsession hits home.
Jun 29, 2022Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
AQ's take: Outlet hell without blueprints. Big picture first, always.
Jun 29, 2022My manager Chris often reminds us, “It’s not a good idea to design where your kitchen outlets should go when you haven’t yet settled on the floor plan.” 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?
AQ's take: Rigid plans bombed. Heraclitus explains my constant pivots.
Jun 29, 2022Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, once said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
AQ's take: People first. Wrong teams sank my best projects.
Jun 29, 2022Chris said, “So there’s a lot going on, but what I’m most interested in is the team. Do we feel like we have the right people on the right problems?” His question cut through the noise and reminded us of what mattered most. People trump projects—a great team is a prerequisite for great work.
AQ's take: Ordered wood, bred hate. Yearning beats commands.
Jun 29, 2022Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has been attributed as saying, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
AQ's take: Let mistakes cost customers? Grove burned me on that.
Jun 29, 2022Andy Grove: “The subordinate did poor work. My associate’s reaction: ‘He has to make his own mistakes. That’s how he learns!’ The problem with this is that the subordinate’s tuition is paid by his customers. And that is absolutely wrong.”
AQ's take: Rehire test? Exposed my deadweight leaders instantly.
Jun 29, 2022A friend of mine gave me the gift of another clarifying question. He asked: “Assume the role was open. Would you rather rehire your current leader or take a gamble on someone else?”
AQ's take: Gut ignored that bad hire. Dragged team down for months. Fire on instinct next time.
Jun 29, 2022Change is hard, but trust your instincts. Would you hire this person again if the role were open? If the answer is no, make the move.
AQ's take: 'Not my problem' killed my last team. Ownership posters? Genius. Wish I had them.
Jun 29, 2022At Facebook, we have a saying immortalized in posters all across campus: Nothing at Facebook Is Somebody Else’s Problem.
AQ's take: Micromanaged once, team rebelled. Every word I say shapes them. Brutal lesson.
Jun 29, 2022Pay 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.
Jun 29, 2022