The Making of a Manager summary

Introduction

The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo. Becoming a great manager means learning how to achieve better outcomes by helping your people and your team thrive. Stepping into your first managerial role can be exciting and daunting in equal measure. Someone has believed in you enough to give you this opportunity, but most new managers still feel out of their depth during their first months.

Suddenly, you are responsible for more than your own work. You are responsible for helping other people succeed. You must give feedback, run meetings, hire people, and make difficult decisions. As your team grows, the challenges grow with it.

So how can you become the kind of manager people actually want to work for? Julie Zhuo became a manager at Facebook when she was just 25. She had little idea what she was doing at first. Over time, experience taught her what effective management really requires.

Her lessons show how everyday managerial decisions can produce extraordinary teams.

Outcomes Over Activities

Outcomes Over Activities. A good manager's job is about outcomes, not activities. At just 25, Julie Zhuo was offered the job of a lifetime. She was asked to manage Facebook's design team.

More amazingly, this was Zhuo's first managerial role. Thrust into the deep end, she found herself asking a basic question. What does a manager actually do? At first, Zhuo believed management consisted of a familiar collection of activities.

She held meetings with team members. She gave them feedback. She decided whom to promote and sometimes whom to let go. But she eventually realized that this definition was short-sighted.

It focused on day-to-day activities rather than what those activities were supposed to accomplish. After gaining more experience, Zhuo became more strategic. She started thinking about how effectively her team worked together. She considered how she could help people develop their careers.

She also created processes that improved efficiency without introducing unnecessary complexity. Eventually, Zhuo arrived at a much simpler definition. The job of a manager is to achieve better outcomes from a team. That idea changes how managerial performance should be judged.

Many people use a box-ticking approach. They ask whether a manager works hard. They consider whether the person is likable. They might look at whether the manager gives impressive presentations.

Those qualities can be useful. But none of them proves that someone is a great manager. The real test is the outcome produced by the team. A good manager's team consistently delivers strong results.

So begin by asking what outcome your team is trying to achieve. For Zhuo, one important outcome was great design. An excellent design manager should therefore lead a team that consistently produces great designs. A mediocre manager will produce mediocre outcomes.

The distinction is simple. Great managers help their teams achieve great results. Everything else is secondary.