The Making of a Manager

Running a team is hard because it ultimately boils down to people, and all of us are multifaceted and complex beings. Just like how there is no one way to go about being a person, there is no one way to go about managing a group of people.

And yet, working together in teams is how the world moves forward. We can create things far grander and more ambitious than anything we could have done alone. This is how battles are won, how innovation moves forward, how organizations succeed. This is how any remarkable achievement happens.

I believe this as deeply as I believe anything: Great managers are made, not born. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager.

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.

If the job is defined as getting better outcomes from a group of people working together, then a great manager’s team will consistently achieve great outcomes.

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.

Time, however, always reveals the truth. The best employees don’t tend to stick around for years and years under a boss who treats them poorly or whom they don’t respect. And talented managers can typically turn around poor-performing teams if they are empowered to make changes.

Hackman’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.

To manage people well, you must develop trusting relationships with them, understand their strengths and weaknesses (as well as your own), make good decisions about who should do what (including hiring and firing when necessary), and coach individuals to do their best.

Traditionally, most advice you hear about management assumes a longer time frame where if you spend a little today, you’ll reap bountiful rewards in time. But that’s only true if your organization isn’t on fire. If it is, then all bets are off. At that point, you need to do whatever you can to extinguish the flames.

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a famous theory, known today as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, to explain human motivation. The basic idea is that certain needs trump others and you must satisfy lower-level needs before focusing on higher-level ones.

If you can’t breathe, for instance, it doesn’t matter if you are hungry, lonely, or unemployed. At the moment when your face starts turning blue, everything in your being will focus on how to fill your lungs with oxygen. But if you’re breathing fine, it doesn’t mean that life is perfect either. You’re simply now able to address the next most critical barrier to your survival: getting food into your stomach.

Once you’re able to breathe, your stomach is full, and you’re in a safe environment, then you can focus on the next levels up in the hierarchy, such as being part of a community that supports you or contributing something meaningful with your life—what Maslow called “self-actualization.”

Given that you’re reading this book and wondering how you can become a better manager, it’s probably safe to assume that your organization is not on the verge of imminent collapse. But if it is, then set this book down right now and figure out what you need to do to help your team turn things around. Can you rally the troops for a spectacular gambit? Can you brainstorm some MacGyver-esque tactics to get you out of your tricky bind? Can you roll up your sleeves and pitch in on making cold calls or selling glasses of lemonade?

When you are in survival mode, you do what it takes to survive.

When you’re beyond survival in your team’s hierarchy of needs, then you can plan for the future and think about what you can do today that will help you achieve more in the months and years ahead.

As a manager, you are judged on your team’s outcomes, so your job is to do whatever most helps them succeed. If your team is lacking key skills, then you need to spend your time training or hiring. If someone is creating problems for others, then you need to get him to stop. If people don’t know what they should be doing, then you need to construct a plan. A lot of this work is unglamorous. But because it’s important, it must be done, and if nobody else does it, then it falls to you.

This is why adaptability is a key trait of great managers. As your team changes—whether it’s goals shifting, people joining or leaving, or processes evolving—what you do every day will also change.

Nobody likes these tough situations, but some people are better than others at remaining steady and providing care and support through the bumps and dips of life. If you’re the friend whom others lean on in difficult times, who might be described as empathetic and undramatic, who can be counted on to defuse rather than escalate tensions, then you’ll be better equipped to deal with the range of emotionally charged scenarios that meet any manager’s path.

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.

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.

If you’re transitioning as an apprentice, work with your manager on a joint plan for getting started. Questions to discuss include:

• What will be my scope to start, and how do you expect it to change over time?

• How will my transition be communicated?

• What do I need to know about the people that I’ll be managing?

• What important team goals or processes should I be aware of and help push forward?

• What does success look like in my first three and six months?

• How can the two of us stay aligned on who does what?

A useful exercise to go through at the beginning of your transition is to sit down and make a list of all the things that are awesome about the current state of the world. Does everyone get along? Are your processes efficient? Is your team known for rigorous and high-quality work?

Now, next to that, create a list of all the things that could be better. Is your team cagey about deadlines? Does it seem like priorities are always shifting? Is there that one really long weekly meeting nobody wants to attend?

These two lists give you the start of a plan for what you should and shouldn’t change. You don’t need to fix what isn’t broken, but neither should you feel like you’re stuck in a time machine of this is how it was always done. After all, that’s why you got the job! Taking the time to reflect on the biggest opportunities for improvement helps you understand how to best act as a multiplier for your team.

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.

One of the biggest mistakes new bosses make is thinking they need to jump in and exert their opinions right away to show that they are capable.

Actually, that approach tends to backfire. Few things are more annoying than a new person wasting everyone else’s time because they are trying to prove they know something when their opinion isn’t actually informed.

Remember our definition of management? A manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together through influencing purpose, people, and process.

With a small team, maintaining a shared sense of purpose is straightforward. You don’t get many crossed wires when your team can still fit around one table. That leaves people and process to focus on. Of those two, people are by far the most important.

The first step to addressing any concerns about lackluster work is diagnosing the people issues behind it. Is it a matter of motivation or skill? This doesn’t have to be complicated. You can understand this through a series of conversations with your report. First, discuss whether your expectations are aligned—does “great work” mean the same thing for both of you? Then discuss whether it’s a matter of motivation. If both of those don’t resolve your concerns, then dive in to whether the issue is with skills.

You must trust people, or life becomes impossible,” the writer Anton Chekhov once said. This is true of all relationships—friendships, marriages, partnerships —and the manager–report relationship is no different.

Sounds obvious, right? But it is easier said than done, especially when you’re the one holding more of the chips at the table. No matter how you slice it, you are your reports’ boss. You have more impact on their day-to-day than they have on yours. This means that the responsibility of building a trusting relationship lies more with you than with them.

You can avoid being blindsided by developing a relationship founded on trust, in which your reports feel that they can be completely honest with you because they have no doubt that you truly care about them. You’ve accomplished this if the following three statements are true.

My reports regularly bring their biggest challenges to my attention. A hallmark of a trusting relationship is that people feel they can share their mistakes, challenges, and fears with you. If they’re struggling through an assignment, they tell you right away so you can work through it together.

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.

My report and I regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally. If your report does work that you don’t think is great, are you comfortable saying that directly? Similarly, would your report tell you if he thinks you’ve made a mistake?

My friend Mark Rabkin shared a tip with me that I love: strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward. Why? Because the most important and meaningful conversations have that characteristic. It isn’t easy to discuss mistakes, confront tensions, or talk about deep fears or secret hopes, but no strong relationship can be built on superficial pleasantries alone.

My 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.

If you take nothing else away from today,” he told us, “remember this: managing is caring.

What caring does mean, however, is doing your best to help your report be successful and fulfilled in her work. It means taking the time to learn what she cares about. It means understanding that we are not separate people at work and at home—sometimes the personal blends into the professional, and that’s okay.

Another nuance of respect is that it must be unconditional because it’s about the person as a whole rather than what she does for you. I’ve never encountered a manager who wasn’t a bastion of support for individuals they considered top performers. It’s easy to like and have a great relationship with someone who is kicking ass. The harder test is, what happens when she struggles?

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.

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.

Here 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?

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. She has more context than you on the problems she’s dealing with, so she’s in the best position to uncover the solution. Let her lead the 1:1 while you listen and probe.

Here 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?

To this day, it’s hard to describe the power those simple words had. He could have said dozens of other things to make me feel better—“You’ll find a way through this,” “It’s not as bad as you think,” or “Here are some things to try.” But what he said instead was specific to me, and something I felt he genuinely believed. It didn’t mean my opinions were always right, but his vote of confidence that they came from a principled place restored some of the confidence I had lost. By recognizing a strength of mine, Chris gave me a renewed sense of motivation.

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.

The rising stars on your team may not be clamoring for your attention, but if you help them to dream bigger and become more capable leaders, you’ll be amazed at how much more your team can do as a whole.

Call it what you want—fit, motivation, chemistry—but the things a person cares about must also be what the team (and company) cares about. If not, then that person might find themselves in frequent misalignment with what they want for their own career.

If the fit just isn’t right on a particular team, sometimes a move within the same organization solves the issue—a new environment plus a different problem to noodle on is often exactly what’s needed. If that doesn’t work, then perhaps the fit is with the company as a whole, in which case parting ways may be the best outcome for everyone.

Even if they have the exact skills that I’m looking for, it’s better not to try to fit a round peg into a square hole. Each of us ought to be working in an environment that we love with the people who share our passions. And if along the way we realize that we’re meant to do something else, let’s celebrate that instead of seeing it as a failure.

A good question to ask is: If this person were not already at the organization, would I recommend that another team hire him or her knowing what I know? Sarah, the employee who struggled with operating independently, was not somebody who I could see being successful anywhere within the company.

Caring about people means owning that your relationship is a two-way street.

Firing someone can be emotional and challenging not just for the person being fired but also for you and the team. Be compassionate in examining the past, but focus on the future and don’t prolong the breakup. Help your report get on the best possible path toward the next chapter, and use the experience to become a better manager.

For 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.

Think of the best feedback you’ve ever received. Why was it so meaningful to you?

I’m willing to bet that the reason you remember it is because the feedback inspired you to change your behavior, which resulted in your life getting better.

Set Clear Expectations at the Beginning.

Imagine that you decide to hire a trainer to improve your workouts. Does she immediately ask you to do some push-ups before giving you any pointers?

No. The first thing she’ll do after introductions is sit down with you to discuss your goals. Then, she’ll tell you what you should expect from training and how you can make the most of it. Though her advice won’t yet be specifically tailored to you, it’s what she thinks you need to know given her experience training others.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the feedback process should begin before any work does. At that point, you should agree on what success looks like— whether for a given project or for a given time period—get ahead of any expected issues, and lay the foundation for productive feedback sessions in the future. It’s like starting a journey with a well-marked map versus blindly walking a few miles and then asking if you’re on track.

Give Task-Specific Feedback as Frequently as You Can.

As the name “task-specific” implies, you provide this kind of feedback about something that someone did after the fact. For example, after your report presents an analysis, tell her what you thought she did well and what could go better in the future. Be as precise and as detailed as you can.

This 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.

Share Behavioral Feedback Thoughtfully and Regularly

When you zoom out and look at many examples of task-specific feedback for a report, what themes emerge? Does he make decisions quickly or slowly? Is he a process wizard or an unconventional thinker? Does he gravitate toward pragmatic or idealistic solutions?

Asking this question about themes helps you reflect on your report’s unique strengths or areas of development as shown in his patterns of behavior.

Behavioral feedback is useful because it provides a level of personalization and depth that is missing from task-specific feedback. By connecting the dots across multiple examples, you can help people understand how their unique interests, personalities, and habits affect their ability to have impact.

Collect 360-Degree Feedback for Maximum Objectivity

Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree feedback is feedback aggregated from multiple perspectives, which means it tends to be a more complete and objective view of how someone is doing. For example, if your report led a brainstorming session, instead of sending just your task-specific feedback, you might collect and share what the rest of the room thought as well. Or if it’s time for your report’s annual performance review, instead of relying on just your own observations, getting behavioral feedback from the handful of colleagues she works closest with will result in better insights.

She was right. If Albert were to get a rude shock next month, he’d have three possible explanations for what happened, none of which are good.

1. The review isn’t fair. If things really were so dire, why hasn’t this come up until now? This must be a mistake.

2. The review is fair, but my manager was negligent and didn’t realize I was underperforming until the end of the half.

3. The review is fair, but my manager wasn’t honest in sharing feedback with me along the way, so I didn’t have a chance to improve.

I was at risk of falling into bucket three. Luckily, I still had time to put the lesson into action. The sooner that Albert internalized he was not meeting expectations, the quicker he could potentially turn things around, and the smoother our future performance conversations would go.

Here, setting expectations helps with both problems. At the beginning of the project, let 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.

The best way to make your feedback heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re saying it because you care about her and want her to succeed. If you come off with even a whiff of an ulterior motive—you want to be right, you’re judging her, you’re annoyed or impatient—the message won’t get through.

How do you ensure that your feedback can be acted upon? Remember these three tips.

1. Make your feedback as specific as possible. When I told George, “Your presentation was complicated and people had a hard time understanding it,” I was assuming that his definition of complicated and mine were the same. This is rarely the case, so my feedback ended up sounding vague. Which aspects were complicated? What was said, exactly, that led to people being confused? Use clear examples that get at the why so it’s easier for the recipient to know what you mean.

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1. Clarify what success looks and feels like. Even if your feedback is specific, heard, and understood, it can still be hard for the other person to have a clear picture of what they should aspire to.

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1. Suggest next steps. Often the easiest way to help your report translate your feedback into action is to share what you think the next steps should be. Be clear about whether you’re setting an expectation or merely offering a suggestion. Also, beware of overdoing this—if you’re always dictating what should happen next, you’re not empowering your team to learn to solve problems on their own. A softer approach is to ask your report, “So what do you think the next steps should be?” and let them guide the discussion.

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

The second reason is that you are constantly put in the position of doing things you haven’t done before. For example, say you have to fire someone. How do you prepare yourself for such a task? It’s not like improving your skills in drawing or writing, where you can invest time on nights and weekends to sketch or compose short stories. You can’t just snap your fingers and say, “I’m going to practice firing a lot of people this month.” You must actually go through the real thing in order to gain the experience you need.

Management isn’t an innate skill. There is no such thing as an “all-around great manager” who can transition effortlessly between different leadership roles. We must look at the specific context.

The first part in understanding how you lead is to know your strengths—the things you’re talented at and love to do. This is crucial because great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses. There are some useful frameworks for understanding your strengths, like StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath or StandOut by Marcus Buckingham. If you want to do a quick version, jot down the first thing that comes to mind when you ask yourself the following questions:

• How would the people who know and like me best (family, significant other, close friends) describe me in three words? MY ANSWER: thoughtful, enthusiastic, driven

• What three qualities do I possess that I am the proudest of? MY ANSWER: curious, reflective, optimistic

• When I look back on something I did that was successful, what personal traits do I give credit to? MY ANSWER: vision, determination, humility

• What are the top three most common pieces of positive feedback that I’ve received from my manager or peers? MY ANSWER: principled, fast learner, long-term thinker.

Like mine, your responses will likely cluster around a few themes. Here, you can see that my strengths are dreaming big, learning quickly, and remaining upbeat. Whatever yours are, remember them and hold them dear. You’ll be relying on them time and time again.

The second part of getting to an honest reckoning with yourself is knowing your weaknesses and triggers. Right beneath your list of strengths, answer the following:

• Whenever my worst inner critic sits on my shoulder, what does she yell at me for? MY ANSWER: getting distracted, worrying too much about what others think, not voicing what I believe

• If a magical fairy were to come and bestow on me three gifts I don’t yet have, what would they be? MY ANSWER: bottomless well of confidence, clarity of thought, incredible persuasion

• What are three things that trigger me? (A trigger is a situation that gets me more worked up than it should.) MY ANSWER: sense of injustice, the idea that someone else thinks I’m incompetent, people with inflated egos

• What are the top three most common pieces of feedback from my manager or peers on how I could be more effective? MY ANSWER: be more direct, take more risks, explain things simply

Again, you may see some themes emerging. The biggest barriers that get in my way are self-doubt, a tendency to complexify, and not being clear and direct enough.

Once I understood those facts [what enables me the most], I was able to change a few habits to make it easier for me to operate in my ideal environment. Here are some examples:

• I set up multiple “prepare for bed” alarms at 10:00 p.m., 10:15 p.m., and 10:30 p.m. so that my head can hit the pillow at 11:00 p.m. sharp.

• I exercise for ten to fifteen minutes in the morning right after I wake up. It’s not much, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment that anchors the rest of the day.

• I schedule half an hour of “daily prep” into my calendar so I can study my day and visualize how I want each meeting or work task to go.

• I make an effort to become friends with my colleagues and learn about their lives outside of work.

• I schedule “thinking time” blocks on my calendar so I can sort through and write down my thoughts on big problems.

• Twice a year, I look back on the past six months and reflect on what I’ve gotten better at. Then, I set new learning goals for the next six months.

If you’re not sure what your ideal environment looks like, ask yourself the following:

• Which six-month period of my life did I feel the most energetic and productive? What gave me that energy?

• In the past month, what moments stand out as highlights? What conditions enabled those moments to happen, and are they re-creatable?

• In the past week, when was I in a state of deep focus? How did I get there?

The more interesting question is: What are the things that push your buttons, but maybe not someone else’s? That’s when you’re most at risk of being seen as irrational.

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?

• What’s an example of a time when I’ve overreacted and later regretted it? What made me so worked up in that moment?

Knowing what lifts you up or brings you down is enormously valuable. Like how athletes have structured diet and exercise regimens to keep them competing in peak condition, the work you do to help yourself operate at your best will lead to many more winning days on the job.

The stories we tell ourselves from a few scant pieces of evidence are often flat-out wrong, especially when we’re in the Pit. Nine times out of ten, the other person is not out to get you. Your coworkers don’t think you’re an idiot. And, yes, you deserve this job.

When a negative story takes hold of you, step back and question whether your interpretation is correct. Are there alternative views you’re not considering? What can you do to seek out the truth?

Brain imaging studies show that when we picture ourselves doing something, the same parts of our brain are engaged as if we were actually doing that activity. Why does this matter? Because we can trick ourselves into getting some of the benefits of an activity simply by closing our eyes and imagining it in our heads.

Imagine a time in the past when you took on a hard challenge and knocked it out of the park. Now step through that entire experience in vivid detail. Remember how daunting that challenge first seemed? Walk through how you approached the problem. Recall the moment you realized you were going to be fine. Linger in particular on that feeling of success at the very end—the pride you felt, the compliments you received, the confidence you gained.

Imagine a room full of your favorite people telling you what they love about you. Picture them gathered in a circle, each person going turn by turn and pouring out their love and admiration for you. I like to go back to the speeches from family and friends on my wedding day, remembering how wonderful it felt to bask in their affection.

In study after study, high workplace stress has been shown to inhibit creativity, whereas “when people were feeling more positive, they were more likely to be creative,” says Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Progress Principle.

A study from Harvard Business School shows that we learn more when we couple our experiences with periodic reflections. Even though people prefer to learn by doing, “participants who chose to reflect outperformed those who chose additional experience.

Take Advantage of Formal Training. If you have the opportunity to get formal training, take it. This might mean signing up for a company seminar, attending an industry conference, participating in a roundtable discussion, hearing experts on a panel, or engaging in a hands-on workshop.

It might seem obvious that formal training is helpful, but it also rarely feels urgent or necessary. Besides costing time, it also tends to cost money, which means we engage in a classic back-and-forth with ourselves: Is it worth it? Especially in the middle of a hectic week, is it really a good idea to step away for a two-day workshop or to give up a relaxing evening at home for a lecture?

The answer is usually yes. If spending ten hours being trained helps you be even 1 percent more efficient at your job, then it’s a good return on investment (1 percent of time saved per year is about twenty hours).

When you think about formal training, the question to ask isn’t Is this worth doing right now given all the other things on my plate (or all the other things I could spend money on), but rather One year from now, will I be happy I did this? When framed that way, the choice tends to be clearer.

New managers sometimes ask me, “A decade into the job, what’s something you’re still continuing to learn?” My answer is, “How to be the best leader I can while staying true to who I am.”

Managers so often think of the role as being in service to something else—the mission of the organization, the goals of the team, the needs of others—that it’s easy to forget about the most important character in your management journey: you.

My status meeting had a purpose—keep everyone informed about the team’s weekly progress. It still ended up lousy because I didn’t ask myself, What does a great outcome look like?

A great decision-making meeting does the following:

• Gets a decision made (obviously)

• Includes the people most directly affected by the decision as well as a clearly designated decision-maker

• Presents all credible options objectively and with relevant background information, and includes the team’s recommendation if there is one

• Gives equal airtime to dissenting opinions and makes people feel that they were heard

A great informational meeting accomplishes the following:

• Enables the group to feel like they learned something valuable

• Conveys key messages clearly and memorably

• Keeps the audience’s attention (through dynamic speakers, rich storytelling, skilled pacing, interactivity)

• Evokes an intended emotion—whether inspiration, trust, pride, courage, empathy, etc.

But going back to the primary goal of the review, it was so I and other managers could give helpful feedback on projects in midflight. Having so many other observers made that harder. The atmosphere felt formal and high pressure. The presenters were starting to spend too much time tweaking the details of their Keynote decks. And as a reviewer, I felt I needed to choose my words carefully in front of such a big crowd, which meant I couldn’t be as casual and direct as I would have liked.

Because the presenters knew their material forward and back, they experienced what social psychologists call “the curse of knowledge”—the cognitive bias that makes it difficult for them to remember what it’s like to be a beginner seeing the content for the first time. That’s why they assumed the room could quickly grasp all the salient points as they flipped from slide to slide.

But if the goal of the meeting is to make decisions or give feedback, it can be tough for stakeholders to understand the material well enough in the span of a single meeting to arrive at thoughtful conclusions.

The solution is to help everyone come prepared. The change we made to our decision and review meetings was to ask the organizers to send out any presentations or documents the day before so that everyone got the chance to process the information in advance. This meant that I could spend as much time as I needed to understand all the charts and graphs, which allowed me to be a better contributor in the meeting.

If a company-wide meeting attended by five hundred employees isn’t engaging or memorable, then the company will have wasted five hundred people-hours—ten thousand dollars if you assume a twenty-dollar-per-person hourly wage. Spending even five hours of five people’s time (five hundred dollars total) to prepare for that meeting is undoubtedly worth it. Even one recurring weekly meeting with a handful of attendees can translate to thousands of dollars of wasted productivity over the course of a year if that time together isn’t well spent.

After the meeting, the follow-ups need to be treated with as much care as the preparation. A single meeting is not an end unto itself; it is a stepping-stone in the much longer path of creating something valuable for the world. In the last few minutes of a meeting, get into the habit of asking, “So before we break, let’s make sure we agree on next steps . . .” After the meeting, send out a recap to the attendees with a summary of the discussion, a list of specific action items and who is responsible for each, and when the next check-in will be.

If a decision was made, then that should be communicated to the right people. If feedback was given, then that should be acted upon. If ideas were generated, then the meeting organizer should clarify what the process is to take those to the next stage. These follow-ups can then anchor the agenda for when the group reconvenes.

It’s not always comfortable to interrupt others and manage the flow of conversation in this manner, but it sends a strong signal that you believe better outcomes come from hearing a diversity of perspectives.

At a growing organization, hiring well is the single most important thing you can do. At this point, I’ve interviewed and helped bring in hundreds of people— more than the entirety of the company when I started! Those people have, in turn, gone on to bring in many more. If you had told me when I joined that I’d be one of the reasons why thousands of my coworkers are here today, I’d have thought you were crazy.

The most important thing to remember about hiring is this: hiring is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization.

One exercise I do every January is to map out where I hope my team will be by the end of the year. I create a future org chart, analyze gaps in skills, strengths, or experiences, and make a list of open roles to hire for. You can do something similar by asking yourself the following questions:

• How many new people will I add to our team this year (based on company growth, expected attrition, budget, priorities, etc.)?

• For each new hire, what level of experience am I looking for?

• Which specific skills or strengths do we need in our team (for example, creative thinking, operational excellence, expertise in XYZ, etc.)?

• Which skills and strengths does our team already have that new hires can stand to be weaker in?

• What traits, past experiences, or personalities would strengthen the diversity of our team?

Having a thoughtful, one-year-out organizational plan lets you stay ahead of hiring needs and gives you a handy framework for evaluating candidates so that you won’t fall into the trap of saying yes to the next person who comes along.

At the end of the day, you are the person who ultimately owns the team you build. Successful hiring managers form close partnerships with the recruiting team to identify, interview, and close the best people. A great recruiter brings her network as well as her knowledge of the recruiting process—how to source and pitch candidates, how to guide them through interviews, and how to negotiate offers. A great hiring manager brings her understanding of the role—what it needs and why it’s exciting—as well as her time to personally connect with candidates.

Since every hire is already a gamble, reject any weak hires. While they’re not likely to bomb, they’re also not likely to add much. If you’re going to make a bet, bet on someone with a passionate advocate behind her. If a candidate gets mixed reviews but all the interviewers that said hire are adamant about wanting to work with her, it’s usually a sign that she brings something highly valued to the table.

Hiring a manager or senior contributor onto your team is a big investment, and bad leadership hires are disproportionately more disruptive because they affect more people. If you bring on a new manager whose values aren’t aligned with yours, he will hire people that you may not think are a good fit. If he turns out to be a crummy collaborator, you’ll be dealing with a line of complaints out the door.

It’s wise not to rush into leadership hires, and instead make sure you know what an ideal applicant looks like. The easiest way to do that is to talk with as many prospective candidates as you can, including those who may not want the job but know the role well. Especially if you’re hiring for an unfamiliar position, you need to do your homework to understand what the bar should be.

The lesson: Recruiting top talent is all about the relationships you build. Good, seasoned leaders aren’t short of options, because everybody wants to hire them. When they’re looking for their next role, they tend to choose opportunities that they already know to be great.

Repeatedly talk about your values so that everyone understands what great talent looks like. And, above all, make it clear that building the team isn’t just one person’s job, it’s everyone’s job.

Process is simply the answer to the question “What actions do we take to achieve our goals?” Even if that answer isn’t written down anywhere, it still exists.

To help you get started, ask yourself the following:

• Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly. What do you hope will be different in two to three years compared to now?

• How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? What do you hope will be your team’s reputation in a few years? How far off is that from where things are today?

• What unique superpower(s) does your team have? When you’re at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like for your team to be twice as good? Five times 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?

A good strategy understands the crux of the problem it’s trying to solve. It focuses a team’s unique strengths, resources, and energy on what matters the most in achieving its goals.

Just as your management style reflects who you are and what you’re good at, so too should your plans take into account your team’s unique capabilities.

In the words of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Have you ever heard of Parkinson’s law? Coined by Cyril Parkinson, a twentieth-century British historian and scholar, it states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

For my second draft, I wised up. Instead of treating the entire book as one humongous project with a far-out deadline, I broke it down and promised my editors I would revise one chapter a week.

Suddenly, I became far more disciplined. If I wanted to hit my goal, I had to edit about two pages a night. Translated into these smaller milestones, it was easy to see that missing even a night’s worth of writing was a big deal because I’d have to make up for it to stay on track. I made good on my word—my efficiency tripled on the second draft.

Nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Every big dream is the culmination of thousands of tiny steps forward.

The most brilliant plans in the world won’t help you succeed if you can’t bring them to life. 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. Speed matters—a fast runner can take a few wrong turns and still beat a slow runner who knows the shortest path.

It should be clear by now that management is all about the art of balance. When it comes to planning and execution, if you only think about the next three months, you might make shortsighted decisions that create problems down the road. On the flip side, if you’re always thinking many years out, you might struggle with speedy day-to-day execution.

Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

This is why it’s so important to remind people of what really matters. Describe over and over again the world you’d like to see. Try to connect every task, project, decision, or goal with the organization’s higher-level purpose. If everyone understands the dream, then the team’s actions will be aligned in making it a reality.

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. At the end of the day, a resilient organization isn’t one that never makes mistakes but rather one whose mistakes make it stronger over time.

Resilient processes also try to create repeatable best practices. Most of the work needed to make something happen in today’s world is staggeringly complex. Just imagine the number of steps it takes to get a plane to take off—the cabin must be cleaned from the previous flight, the jet must be refueled, passengers must be checked in, luggage must be loaded, safety checks must be done, and so forth. It’s near impossible to remember all the steps in your head, let alone try to improvise them in the moment.

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.

At first, this can feel disorienting, like you’re losing control. 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.

What I learned is that it didn’t matter how I saw myself. When people don’t know you well and see that you’re in a position of authority, they’re less likely to tell you the ugly truth or challenge you when they think you’re wrong, even if you’d like them to. They might think it’s your prerogative to call the shots. They might not want to disappoint you or have you think badly of them. Or they might be trying to make your life easier by not burdening you with new problems or imposing on your time.

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.

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.

There are two major errors with that line of thinking. The first is overestimating what you, the manager, are capable of. Yes, it may be within your power to solve a wide variety of issues, but as a single individual, you can’t solve that many of them. The best work comes from those who have the time to live and breathe a problem fully, who can dedicate themselves to finding the best solution.

The second error is assuming that nobody wants to take on hard problems. In fact, the most talented employees aren’t looking for special treatment or “easy” projects. They want to be challenged. There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if you’re not sure how.

Change 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.

The best managers I know all agree on one thing: growing great teams means that you are constantly looking for ways to replace yourself in the job you are currently doing.

I ended up delegating it accidentally. During my parental leave, I asked a few of my teammates to sub for me while I was out. When I came back, the meeting was running better than I’d left it. The presenters came in more prepared, the content was better organized, and even our introductions felt more fun.

That was when I realized my mistake. I should have handed off that meeting a long time ago. I felt tied to it because it had become habitual, even a part of my identity. And yet, in my absence, the organizers breathed new life into it. They were excited for the challenge, and I was able to focus on other priorities. Everybody won.

The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.

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

For the things that you do better than your reports, unless it falls into the “most important priorities” bucket or you don’t believe they are set up to succeed, you should still try to delegate as much as possible and coach them along the way.

As for what you shouldn’t delegate, consider the unique value you’re able to add when it comes to the organization’s top priorities. Some of that flows from your personal strengths. For example, I’m a good writer, so over the years I’ve used that skill to help our team document and share its values—from authoring career guidelines and interview playbooks to putting out internal notes on lessons we’ve learned in building products. One of my colleagues is an amazing operator, so he’s responsible for running our design team’s most complex processes, such as recruiting. My manager Chris is one of the most inspiring speakers I know, so he’s the first person to greet new employees at orientation and tell them about Facebook’s mission and values.

Identifying and communicating what matters. Your role has broader scope, which means that you’re able to see across a wider variety of work and spot patterns that your reports might miss.

No matter if you are the CEO or a front-line manager, building a great team is one of the most important things you can do.

Make sure your leaders know to quickly escalate to you whenever two goals come into conflict or when the priorities aren’t clear.

Your team’s culture is like its personality. It exists whether or not you think about it. If you’re not satisfied with how your team works together—maybe the vibe feels hostile instead of helpful, maybe it takes a long time to get things done, or maybe there’s constant drama—it’s worth examining why this might be and what you can do about it.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR CURRENT TEAM

• What are the first three adjectives that come to mind when describing the personality of your team?

• What moments made you feel most proud to be a part of your team? Why?

• What does your team do better than the majority of other teams out there?

• If you picked five random members of your team and individually asked each person, “What does our team value?” what would you hear?

• How similar is your team’s culture to the broader organization’s culture?

• Imagine a journalist scrutinizing your team. What would she say your team does well or not well?

• When people complain about how things work, what are the top three things that they bring up?

UNDERSTANDING YOUR ASPIRATIONS

• Describe the top five adjectives you’d want an external observer to use to describe your team’s culture. Why those?

• Now imagine those five adjectives sitting on a double-edged sword. What do you imagine are the pitfalls that come from ruthless adherence to those qualities? Are those acceptable to you?

• Make a list of the aspects of culture that you admire about other teams or organizations. Why do you admire them? What downsides does that team tolerate as a result?

• Make a list of the aspects of culture that you wouldn’t want to emulate from other teams or companies. Why not?

UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE

• On a scale from one to nine, with nine being “we’re 100 percent there” and one being “this is the opposite of our team,” how close is your current team from your aspirations?

• What shows up as both a strength of your team as well as a quality you value highly?

• Where are the biggest gaps between your current team culture and your aspirations?

• What are the obstacles that might get in the way of reaching your aspirations? How will you address them?

• Imagine how you want your team to work in a year’s time. How would you describe to a report what you hope will be different then compared to now?

Sheryl Sandberg was the one who taught me otherwise. Some years ago, Sheryl started talking to the company about the importance of hard conversations. Whenever we’re feeling tension with our coworkers—they have a habit that irritates us, we disagree about an important decision, or they do something that seems thoughtless—she encouraged us to sit down with the other person and discuss that tension openly. Because if you don’t, nothing will get better, and resentment will only grow.

When you value something deeply, don’t shy away from talking about it. Instead, embrace telling people why it’s important to you. Assume that for the message to stick, it should be heard ten different times and said in ten different ways. The more you can enlist others to help spread your message, the more likely it is to have an impact.

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. I’ll get notes from people saying, “I care about that too. How can I help?” I’ll hear others reinforcing the same messages and supporting each other to change their behavior. And even when people disagree with me, the act of discussing it openly sheds light on the topic for everyone.

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.

These days, I’m wary of seemingly simple incentive rules that promise amazing results. They are rarely simple, and often leave collateral damage. Usually, a better option is to have a frank discussion about what we should value and why. Why should we care about exploring more designs early on? Why should we aim to speed up engineering velocity? Once people understand and buy into those values, they can make the best decisions on how to apply them.

The way to identify and resolve incentive traps is to regularly reflect on what the difference is between your stated values and how people are actually behaving on your team. What’s leading them to make certain decisions? If you’re not sure, ask. Why did you choose to build these five features instead of the one that the customers are asking for? If you learn the issue is primarily structural, make changes to your incentives so that the right behaviors are rewarded.

There is power in rituals. Beyond slogans or speeches, they create actions around which team members can bond. And they can be as unique, quirky, and fun as your team.