The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You - Softcover

Zhuo, Julie

 
9780593852781: The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593852788 ISBN 13: 9780593852781
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Wall Street Journal Bestseller!

Congratulations, you’re a manager!

After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: You don’t really know what you’re doing


That’s exactly how Julie Zhuo felt when she became a rookie manager at the age of twenty-five. She stared at a long list of challenges―from hiring to firing, from meeting to messaging, from planning to pitching―and faced a thousand questions and uncertainties. How was she supposed to spin teamwork into value? How could she be a good steward of her reports’ careers? What was the secret to leading with confidence in new and unexpected situations?

Having now managed teams spanning tens of people to hundreds, Zhuo is ready to share the answers to all those questions, and more. The most important lesson of all? Great managers are made, not born. And if you’re reading this book, you’re already on your way to becoming a great manager.

In this revised and updated edition of The Making of a Manager, new managers will discover the transformative insights and practical examples that made the original an instant classic, along with essential new guidance for today’s challenges―including how to build trust and maintain morale during downturns and layoffs, and how to foster culture and connection while managing remote teams.

Whether you’re new to the job, a veteran leader, or looking to be promoted, this is the handbook you need to be the manager you’ve always wanted.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julie Zhuo is an entrepreneur and product executive known for shaping the digital experiences of billions worldwide. She founded Sundial with the mission of helping the world’s most innovative companies make faster, better decisions with data. Previously during her 14-year journey from Facebook’s first intern to vice president of product design, she spearheaded the development of iconic features for over two billion users. An active speaker and investor, Zhuo regularly writes about technology, design, and leadership on her popular blog The Looking Glass. She graduated with a computer science degree from Stanford University and lives in California with her husband and three children.

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Introduction

Great Managers Are Made, Not Born

I remember the meeting when my manager asked me to become a manager.

It was unexpected, like going for your daily run and tripping over a pirate chest. Oh, I thought, how intriguing.

We were sitting in a ten-person conference room, kitty-corner from each other. “Our team is growing,” my manager explained. “We need another manager, and you get along with everyone. What do you think?”

I was twenty-five, working at a start-up. All that I knew of management could be neatly summarized into two words, meetings and PROMOTION. I mean, this was a promotion, wasn’t it? Everyone knows this conversation was the equivalent of Harry Potter getting a visit from Hagrid on a dark and stormy night, the first step in an adventurous and fulfilling career. I wasn’t about to turn down that kind of invitation.

So I said yes.

It was only later, walking out of the room, that I thought about the details of what she had said. I got along with everyone. Surely there was more to management than that. How much more? I was about to find out.

—

I remember my first meeting with a direct report.

I arrived five minutes past our scheduled time, in a rush and flustered by my lateness. This is a terrible start, I thought to myself. I could see him through the windowed door of the conference room—the same one I had met my manager in previously—eyes glued to his phone. Just a day earlier, we had both been designers on the same team, sitting in our adjacent pods, working on our respective projects while lobbing rapid-fire design feedback across the aisle. Then the announcement was made, and now I was his manager.

I’m not nervous, I told myself. We’re going to have a great conversation. About what, I wasn’t entirely sure. I just wanted this meeting to feel normal, like it had yesterday and the day before that. If he didn’t love the fact that I was his manager, then at the very least I wanted him to be cool with it.

I’m not nervous.

I walked in. He glanced up from his phone, and I’ll never forget the expression on his face. It had all the surliness of a teenager forced to attend his ten-year-old cousin’s Pokémon-themed birthday party.

“Hi,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “So, uh, what are you working on right now?”

His scowl only deepened, settling in like a bear for the winter. I could feel the sweat starting to form on my face, the hot rush of blood pounding in my ears.

I wasn’t a better designer than this guy. I wasn’t smarter or more experienced. The look on his face alone was enough to dispel me of any notion that he’d “be cool” with the fact that I was his manager. The message was as clear as if it had been written in giant black Sharpie:

You have no idea what you’re doing.

At that moment, I felt he was absolutely right.

—

Three years later, after that fateful conversation with my manager, my role shifted again. Our design team had almost doubled in size since I started. Having made it through my first few years at a hyper-growth start-up, I thought I was used to change. I was no stranger to dealing with the firsts or rolling with the punches.

Still, I was unprepared for just how much the new manager role would stretch me. For one thing, I was managing product designers, a discipline I didn’t even know existed before I arrived at the company. For another, the responsibilities of managing people and the way they worked together felt like an enormous leap from creating user interfaces or writing code. In those early months and years, everything felt new and uncomfortable.

I remember my first time interviewing someone for my team. Even though I was clearly the one with the upper hand—I asked the questions, I decided how the conversation should flow, I selected hire or no hire at the end of the day—my hands were shaking for the entire forty-five minutes. What if the candidate thought my questions were stupid? What if she saw me for the fraud I felt like? What if I accidentally made our team seem like a clown show?

I remember my first time delivering bad news. We were kicking off an exciting new project that had everyone passionately discussing the possibilities. Two of my reports asked me if they could be the lead. I had to say no to someone. I practiced the conversation in front of my bathroom mirror at home, imagining every terrible scenario—was this even the right decision? Was I a dream crusher? Would somebody quit on me right on the spot?

I remember my first time presenting in front of a large audience. I was showcasing design work at Facebook’s F8 conference amid a sea of fuzzy cushions and neon lights. We’d never done a public event at that scale before, so it was a big deal. In the weeks leading up to the event, I couldn’t stop fiddling with every detail of my presentation. I desperately wanted it to go well, but public speaking terrified me. Even practicing my talk in front of helpful colleagues felt like a nerve-racking ordeal.

I remember my three primary emotions navigating the choppy waters of my new role: fear, doubt, and am I crazy for feeling this way? Everyone else around me seemed to be doing just fine. Everyone else made it look easy.

I never thought managing was easy. I still don’t.

Today, nearly ten years after I started on that path, my team has grown by a few orders of magnitude. We design the experience that more than two billion people see when they tap the blue f icon on their phones. We think through the details of how people share what’s on their minds, keep up with their friends, interact through conversations and thumbs-ups, and create communities together. If we do our jobs well, then people all over the world—from Belgium to Kenya, from India to Argentina—will feel closer to one another.

Good design at its core is about understanding people and their needs in order to create the best possible tools for them. I’m drawn to design for a lot of the same reasons that I’m drawn to management—it feels like a deeply human endeavor to empower others.

I’m by no means a management expert. I’ve learned largely by doing, and despite my best intentions, I’ve made countless mistakes. But this is how anything in life goes: You try something. You figure out what worked and what didn’t. You file away lessons for the future. And then you get better. Rinse, repeat.

I’ve had plenty of help, too, in the form of some amazing leadership training courses (Crucial Conversations is my favorite), articles and books that I turn to again and again (like High Output Management and How to Win Friends and Influence People), and, most important of all, my colleagues. They have generously shared their wisdom with me and inspired me to strive for better. I feel lucky to have worked with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and a host of others past and present who have taught me so much.

Another tactic in my self-education started about four years ago, when I decided to write a blog. I thought that the act of sitting down every week and sorting through the jumble of thoughts ping-ponging around my head would help me make sense of them.

I called my blog The Year of the Looking Glass because, like Alice, “I know who I was when I got...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593852788
ISBN 13 
9780593852781
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
337
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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