A concise, practical guide to being a manager. On the positive side, there is relatively little fluff or business speak; instead, the book jumps into the day-to-day details of what it takes to be an effective manager, which is refreshing to see in a business book. On the negative side, the book is a bit too obsessed with Facebook and companies like Facebook: not everyone is a manager at a VC-backed, hypergrowth, once-in-a-generation tech giant, so not all the lessons here will apply. Overall, a very worthwhile read for anyone who is a manager, or aspiring to be one.
Here are the key insights I got from this book:
1. The job of a manager
“Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.”
2. The tasks of a manager
A manager’s daily tasks can be grouped into three buckets:
- Purpose: this is the why. What outcome is your team is trying to accomplish? Everyone on the team should have a similar answer to, “why does our work matter?” A huge part of your job as a manager is to “ensure your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.”
- People: this is the who. Your job as a manager is to ensure that you hire the right people and create an environment where they can grow and thrive.
- Process: this is the how. When you work alone, you need no process; but when you are coordinating the work of a group of people, you do; and the more people, the more process you need.
3. Evaluating the performance of a manager
To evaluate how a manager is performing, focus on two things:
- What results (outcomes) did the team achieve? In what ways did they make the company and its customers more successful?
- How satisfied is the team? Is the team happy, working well together, and doing a good job of hiring and developing individuals?
4. Deciding if you want to be a manager
Key questions to ask yourself to determine if you can be a great manager:
- Do I find it more motivating to achieve a particular outcome or play a specific role? As a manager, you may have to perform a huge variety of tasks to help your team achieve a specific outcome; as an individual contributor (IC), you typically play a single role the whole time, such as writing code or doing design work.
- Do I like talking with people? If you had to spend 70% of your day in meetings, what’s your reaction?
- Can I provide stability for an emotionally challenging situation? Your direct reports will bring their own experiences, motivations, hopes, fears, etc to the table. As a manager, you are going to have a lot of hard conversations: giving tough performance review feedback; letting someone go; and so on.
5. How to get people to do great work
A great way to think about this question is to flip it around. What gets in the way of doing good work? It really comes down to two possibilities:
- They don’t know how to do good work. This is usually because the person lacks the training they need. A big part of being a manager is hiring people with the right skills; another big part is providing the environment and training where people can improve their skills.
- They know how to good work, but they aren’t motivated. On possibility is that people don’t know what good work looks like: defining standards of performance and providing lots of examples helps here. Another possibility is that they know exactly what good work looks like, but they aren’t on board with what they are being asked to do. A huge part of management is inspiring people: if they aren’t bought into the purpose, people will trudge along, and you won’t get the best work from them. Note that you can’t inspire people by just telling them to do something; the word “inspire” is not an accident—as a manager, you have to learn how to be inspirational.
6. The role of trust
All relationships are based on trust. If your employees don’t trust you, or you don’t trust them, you cannot work together effectively. Therefore, it’s critical that employees know that you care about them, that you will always be honest with them, and they can always be honest with you. You know you’ve achieved this when the following three items are true:
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Your reports regularly bring their biggest challenges to your attention. “A hallmark of a trusting relationship is that people feel like they can share their mistakes, challenges, and fears with you.”
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You and your reports regularly give each other critical feedback and it isn’t taken personally. The only way you and your direct reports can get better is if you can tell each other what isn’t working. This can feel a little bit awkward; that’s normal.
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Your reports would gladly work for you again. This is one of the biggest indicators of the strength of your relationship: would they sign up to work for you again?
7. The role of expectations
Your job as a manager is to set clear expectations for each direct report before any work begins. In particular, right up front, you should define:
- What a great job looks like, versus a mediocre or bad job.
- What advice you have to get started on the right foot.
- Common pitfalls to avoid.
8. The role of feedback
Your direct reports almost always want feedback; and you’re probably not giving them enough of it.
Make sure to give at least two types of feedback:
- Task-specific feedback: provide detailed feedback on specific tasks as often as you can, and as soon after the task was completed as possible. This should be akin to “coaching,” where your goal is to help the person get better at that specific type of task.
- Behavior feedback: provide higher-level feedback on the themes and patterns you see across many tasks regularly, but not quite as often, and do it more thoughtfully. This is feedback on the employee’s skills and career trajectory, and often indicates how you evaluate their performance, so while it’s incredibly important to provide (and many managers fail to do it), it can also be more sensitive. Make sure to think through what you want to say, and have plenty of examples to back up what you’re saying.
9. Delivering feedback effectively
It’s very easy for feedback to be misheard and not have the desired effect. The employee may perceive the feedback as a threat to their career, and when you’re threatened, you go into a “flight or flight” reaction, where you’ll experience a variety of physiological and neurological reactions (e.g., increased heart rate and blood pressure) that make it much harder to absorb information.
The key to make sure your feedback is heard is to ensure the listener feels safe. There are several ways to make this happen:
- Make it clear that you care about the person you are talking to and want them to succeed. If you show any ulterior motive (e.g., you’re just annoyed), your feedback won’t get through.
- Share positive feedback along with the negative feedback. Recognizing what’s going well, and not only the problems, is much more likely to change behavior.
- Share feedback with a sense of curiosity. For example, state your feedback, and then ask, “Does this feedback resonate with you? Why or why not?” This shows curiosity and a desire to understand; moreover, it gets the person to reflect, rather than just become defensive.
- Repeat the message many times. Sometimes, you have to hear the same thing over and over before it has an effect. Share it in a 1:1; have others share it in 360 feedback; share it in writing; and so on.
- Follow up to see if you were heard. At the end of the conversation, ask “OK, let’s make sure we’re on the same page: what are your key takeways and next steps?”
10. Managers as coaches
Many people work with their managers solely as authority figures. The predominant emotion is, “don’t mess up” and “don’t let them see weaknesses and think I’m incompetent.” This rarely leads to a healthy relationship. In fact, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy: you’re struggling, but you refuse to ask for help, so you keep struggling, and as you never get better, you ultimately are judged incompetent.
A better model is to work with a manager as a coach. It would be crazy for an athlete to try to hide weaknesses from their coach. The same is true with managers. Good managers are their to help you get better: treat them as a coach, not a judge.
11. Defining a vision
One way to inspire a team is to share with them an inspiring vision of what the future will look like. A key point is that this vision must be concrete. It can’t be squishy or vague. It should be bold and it should be instantly clear whether you’ve accomplished it.
For example, compare a political vision like, “America will get wealthier” to “A chicken in every pot.”
You know you’ve done a good job defining the vision if you can ask 5 team members what the vision is, and they all say the same thing.
12. Hiring tip: look for advocates, not consensus
When interviewing a candidate, don’t use consensus to make the hiring decision; everyone saying “hire,” but no one being enthusiastic, often leads to weak hires who don’t perform all that well. Instead, look for one or more passionate advocates who feel strongly about hiring the candidate and are willing to go to bat for them. That’s usually a stronger signal of a strong hire.
Rating: 4 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like my books. If you need help with DevOps, reach out to me at Gruntwork.