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Similarly, in many tech companies today, roles like engineering or design offer parallel career paths once you reach a certain level of seniority—you can either grow as a manager or as an “individual contributor.” Both tracks afford equal opportunities for impact, growth, and compensation up to the C-level, which means that becoming a manager is not a promotion but rather a transition. In fact, in Silicon Valley, the “10x engineer”—someone whose output is the equivalent of ten typical engineers—is so sought after that he or she commands the same pay as directors and VPs managing dozens or hundreds of people.

ZhuoThe Making of a Manager
p.32

Related Quotes

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. 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.

ZhuoThe Making of a Manager
p.18-19

Leadership is a quality rather than a job. We are all leaders and followers at different points in our lives. Many aspects of this book should be useful to those looking to grow as leaders as well as managers, and great managers should cultivate leadership not just in themselves but also within their teams.

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.

ZhuoThe Making of a Manager
p.35

I finally realized that I had to give up wanting to be both a design manager and a designer, because in attempting to do both, I was doing neither well. Don’t learn this the hard way—at the point in which your team becomes four or five people, you should have a plan for how to scale back your individual contributor responsibilities so that you can be the best manager for your people.

ZhuoThe Making of a Manager
p.44

In each case, you’re giving someone an opportunity to grow in a way that speaks to their interests and strengths. “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. “The job of a manager . . . is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.

ZhuoThe Making of a Manager
p.72

At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. 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.

ZhuoThe Making of a Manager
p.223