Book Summary: Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo

I finally got around to picking up The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo and finished it in a couple of weeks. It was a brilliantly written and relatable book about some of the ups and downs of being a new manager, packed with plenty of advice. Having managed a team before, I could relate to some of the mistakes Zhuo made in her early career — but I also learned about some of the mistakes I can avoid as I grow in the years to come.

The Making of a Manager — Julie Zhuo on Kindle

She covers everything from what a manager’s role is through to building a team, giving feedback and surviving the transition from tools to people skills. I took a lot of notes and here are some of my favourite lessons from the book.

1. A great manager puts the purpose (the why), the people (the who) and the processes (the how) at the core to get better outcomes from people working together.
2. Cultivate an environment of trust within your team and between your direct reports.
3. Strive to be human: Be authentic, vulnerable, and honest.
4. Have better meetings (read: prepare for meetings), not more meetings.
5. Feedback is a gift: Give it early, often and concisely.
6. Seek out your cheerleaders and celebrate the wins — big and small.
7. Make time to reflect on each week. Learn from it, plan ahead and set goals.
8. Design your team with intention. Set and celebrate team values, invest in culture, and set an example.

1. A great manager puts the purpose (the why), the people (the who) and the processes (the how) at the core to get better outcomes from people working together.

Contrary to popular belief, your role as a manager is not to do everything yourself. Your role is to improve the purpose, people and processes of your team to increase the team’s collective outcomes. A great manager will build a team that works well together, support members in reaching their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently.

The levers you can pull to influence outcome are:

• Understanding the purpose, the “why”. Ensure that your team knows what success looks like and is invested and cares about achieving it (together). Get everyone aligned on the vision and purpose. Involve them. Get buy in.
• Understand the people, the “who”. Develop trusting relationships with your team, understand their strengths and weaknesses. Set your team up for success by making good decisions about who should do what, and invest in their growth.
• Understand the process, the “how”. Establish core values within the team for making decisions and solving problems. Processes help run efficient meetings, future proof past mistakes, plan for tomorrow and nurture a healthy culture.

2. Cultivate an environment of trust within your team and between your direct reports.

Trust in the workplace is vital to the success of a team, but it can’t be built overnight. Trust must be earned, and part of your role as a manager is to build these relationships and create an environment of trust and support — both between you and your direct reports, and between your team members.

Why do we need trust? Trust has a huge impact on teamwork, collaboration, engagement, productivity and much more. When an employee trusts their manager, they are more likely to be engaged at work, produce better quality work and share challenges or problems early before these lead to dissatisfaction and resentment.

Trust is a fundamental part of being a manager; whether you’re having your 1:1s, helping with a challenge, giving feedback or reviewing their performance you want your team and reports to tell you the truth — the good, bad or ugly. They should feel comfortable bringing their biggest challenges to your attention. If your direct report or team doesn’t trust you then you’re unlikely to truly know what is happening and be able to support your team.

One of the best ways to check whether you have a strong relationship with your report is to find out if they “would gladly work for you again”.

We are more than the output of our work on a particular team, at a particular moment in time — and true respect reflects that.

3. Strive to be human — be authentic, vulnerable, and honest.

No-one is perfect, and managers are no exception. Besides, people don’t want perfection, they want authenticity and honesty. They want the authentic version of yourself — not the fake, trying-to-be-someone-else version and certainly not someone who says one thing, but does the opposite.

Being a good manager does not mean always being right, having all the answers or being perfect. You should strive to be human and embrace the messiness that comes with that, like you would have before taking on the manager title. While it can be challenging to be vulnerable, I can attest from personal experience that once the barriers between boss and employee are brought down, the conversations become much more honest, open and productive for both you and your reports.

As you share more of your authentic self and embrace vulnerability, you will naturally become more relatable and less “scary”. Not only will your team find you less intimidating, they’ll approach you with their challenges and trust you more (see point 3). Some ways to help break down these barriers include:

• Own up to your fears, and feelings. Break down the stigma by sharing pieces of yourself with the team when something scares you.
• Admit the mistakes that you’ve made and take meaningful action to do better.
• Accept that you can’t and don’t know everything — instead recommend someone who might or tackle the problem together.

People don’t tend to leave bad jobs… they leave because of bad bosses and poor management. In other words, people tend to stick around for a good manager.

4. Have better meetings (read: prepare for meetings), not more meetings.

Have you ever looked at your calendar for the day or week and realised it’s all meetings? Me too and it sucks. As Zhuo mentions in the book, preparation is the key to a productive meeting, whether it’s a 1:1 with a report, a design critique on a project or a team meeting. Make sure you know what success for each meeting looks like and have a clear outcome for the meeting. It will help save time and ensure everyone’s on the same page.

Some of a manager’s most important meetings are their regular 1:1s with their direct reports. These meetings can vary in purpose from week to week, depending on the situation, but at their core, they provide an opportunity to give your report your undisrupted attention so you can coach them and help them grow professionally. 1:1s could be used to discuss any challenges your reports are facing, ensure values and expectations are aligned, share feedback or something else. They are more for your reports than for you as a manager. It’s rare that an amazing conversation springs fourth without preparation or prompts to talk about it. Encourage your reports to bring questions to your next 1:1.

For your next meeting:

• Ask yourself : In terms of this meeting, what does a great outcome look like? What is the goal of the meeting? Which people are necessary to make that outcome happen? Have I got the right people on the invite list.
• Be prepared . Send out an agenda before the meeting with pre-readings, actions or decisions that will be made to give everyone time to prepare and be on the same page. The larger the meeting, the more important the preparation.
• Follow up afterwards . Summarise the meeting and any decisions and/or next steps.

5. Feedback is a gift — Give it early, often and concisely.

Giving (and receiving) feedback, both when things are going well and when they aren’t, is one of the most important and fundamental aspects of the job. There are two core types of feedback, one being task-based feedback and the other being behavioural feedback.

Task-based feedback is best given often and in relation to the task itself and should become a regular habit to feedback to your team, particularly your junior members. You should aim to give this kind of feedback right after the action or event — let them know what you thought they did well, and what could go better in the future. Be as precise and as detailed as you can. It may only be a small nugget of feedback, but it’s better to do it frequently than wait weeks or months.

Behavioural feedback on the other hand should be considering multiple themes and connecting the dots between a range of situations and events. It should be considered and supported with specific examples to help them understand how they are perceived by others (their team, others in the company, their peers). This type of feedback suits itself to being less-frequent and quarterly or bi-yearly.

Regardless of the type of feedback you’re giving you should consider how you are delivering it — it should be personalised and tailored to the individual and their actions and goals. When you give feedback well, you will help your report grow. Depending on the individuals in your team, the frequency, style and delivery of feedback that works for one direct report, may not work for another.

In the book, Zhuo shares a wide range of prompts for giving good feedback, even when it’s tough feedback and ensuring it’s heard. Her advice includes:

• Share task-based feedback in a timely manner after the situation or event, not months later.
• Deliver tough or critical feedback in a rational or impartial matter e.g. “When I [heard/observed/reflected on] your [action/behaviour/output], I felt concerned because….”
• After you’ve given feedback, try asking “Does this feedback resonate with you? Why/Why not?” to find out if the person has understood the feedback.
• Use a prompt like “So what do you think your next steps should be?” to help your reports frame up how they can act on this feedback.

As well as giving feedback, you should also have an open mind to receiving feedback. Like you give feedback to your reports to improve, they might also have feedback for you and it does not have to be taken as negative criticism. Learn and grow from it instead — as you’d expect your reports to do.

6. Seek out your cheerleaders and celebrate the wins — big and small.

This learning resonates with me, as your job changes from a focus on tools and outputs to people and your team, your definition of success also needs to change. Something Zhuo mentions in the book is the importance of taking a moment to note the wins down (no matter how big or small) and being grateful for what went well today. As you shift into management all your familiar markings of success will change, and this can leave you feeling overwhelmed, like a failure, or like you’re not doing a good job. Whether it’s a meeting that went well, a kind piece of feedback from a colleague, report or client, or simply handling a situation better than you would have 3 months ago — these wins are all worth celebrating. I’ve started using my Notion Wins Template in recent months and this has helped the changing sense of accomplishment that comes with management.

In a similar vein, surround yourself with a group of people who will support and cheer you on, no matter what. While management may be completely new to you, or the problem you’re solving is unfamiliar, it’s likely that someone out there has had a similar struggle in the past and can shed some light on it. Sharing the struggles and challenges helps to lighten the load and help you see something from a new perspective — it could be a partner at home, a group of friends or a trusted colleague. Admitting your struggles and asking for help is not a weakness, it in fact shows courage.

7. Make time to reflect on each week — learn from it, plan ahead and set goals.

Reflection, goals and growth mindsets are essential foundations and habits any new manager should aspire to set down. Set time to make your lofty goals 2 years and even 5–10 years from today. Then break the aspiration down into achievable 6-month goals. Spend time weekly, monthly or half-yearly reflecting on the time past, the learnings from your actions and iterating towards your lofty goal.

When you look at life with a growth mindset, you understand that you can get better at anything (including management), as long as you put hard work, curiosity, and time into your goal.

8. Design your team with intention — set and celebrate team values, invest in culture, and set an example.

Your team is at the heart of what you do. Once you know your team, once you’ve built the relationships, your next job is to understand them. The culture of your team is like it’s personality — it exists whether you are consciously investing in it, or not thinking about it at all. Your team’s culture needs nurturing, it needs investing in, and it needs creating.

A single great hire can make a big difference in your team’s outcome. Alternatively a poor hire can ruin a great team. Hiring is not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to build the future of your organisation.

Below are a few key lessons that Zhuo mentions around team, culture and values:

• Know the kind of team you want. Identify the values you want within your team and then develop a game plan to help those flourish.
• Walk the walk, talk the talk. If you say something is important, be the first person to live by that value, otherwise don’t be surprised if no one else does either. People watch their managers; if they’re doing something that differs from expectations, your team will notice.
• Don’t tolerate assholes on your team. Assholes will shed toxicity into the team.
• Build habits, traditions and ceremonies that celebrate your values. e.g. “Fail of the Week” to share mistakes in a safe space. Morning yoga to promote wellness, Q&A to be transparent with the wider team, “lunch ’n’ learn” to share knowledge across the team.
• Adapt your methods to suit your team as it grows. Your job will change and while the core principles of people management will stay the same, how you spend your time will impact your results massively.

“As a leader, nurturing culture may not be the first thing on your mind but pay attention to your own actions — the little things you say and do as well as the behaviours you reward and discourage. All of it works together to tell the story of what you care about and how you believe a great team should work together.” — Julie Zhuo

Whether you are a new manager just starting out, or have been learning from your mistakes for a while now, I would recommend reading her book and/or giving this talk with Ascend a listen. The advice is relatable and simple, and it’s a great resource to flick back through.

If you enjoyed this summary, let me know in the comments; or if you want to chat about management over Zoom or coffee, connect with me on Linkedin — I’d love to share experiences!