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

“Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.”

“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.”

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel, goes the popular saying.”

“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,”

“Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.”

“One day, you hear someone shouting rudely at a teammate. If you do nothing, you risk sending the message that you tolerate this kind of behavior. Instead, defuse tensions in the moment by asking the shouter to calm down or help them leave the room. Later, in private, tell them that what they did is unacceptable.”

“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.3 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.”

“I learned then one of my first lessons of management—the best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.”

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

“The first big part of your job as a manager is to ensure that your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.”

“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.”

“What leads people to do great work? It feels like a complicated question but it really isn’t, as Andy Grove points out in his classic High Output Management. He flips the question around and asks: What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities. The first is that people don’t know how to do good work. The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.”

“People’s dissatisfaction will fester beneath the surface until one day they surprise you with their resignation. And most of the time when that happens, they’re not just quitting your company, they are also quitting you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The job of a manager . . . is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.”

“If you can pinpoint a problem and motivate others to work with you to solve it, then you’re leading.”

“the most rewarding part of growing my team has been watching our collective capabilities extend far beyond what any one of us could have achieved.”

“If you think he is the epitome of awesome, tell him. If you don’t think he is operating at the level you’d like to see, he should know that, too, and precisely why you feel that way.”

“If the first time he hears that he’s not meeting expectations is during his performance review, it’s going to feel terrible,”

“As the team grows in size, it matters less and less how good she is personally at doing the work herself. What matters more is how much of a multiplier effect she has on her team. So how does this work in practice?”

“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?”

“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?”

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

“you have to enjoy the day-to-day of management and want to do it.”

“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.”

“I once had a very talented designer on my team. She was creative and thoughtful and happened to be the most experienced person in an important product area. Everyone on her team naturally went to her for advice on big decisions. I thought to myself, Obviously she should be a manager! When the team expanded, I asked her if she would step up into the role. She said yes, and I gave myself a hearty pat on the back for setting her up to have even more impact.About a year later, she quit.I’ll never forget what she told me right before she gave notice. She admitted that every morning as she lay in bed, she dreaded the prospect of going to work and managing people. As she said this, I could see that it was true. Her curious and thoughtful spark had been replaced by glassy-eyed exhaustion. Her team had issues that needed sorting through, and she was so burned out that she couldn’t muster the motivation. Her everyday responsibilities were not what she was passionate about. At her core, she was a maker; she wanted long periods of uninterrupted time to go deep on a problem and create something tangible with her hands.”

“Leadership, on the other hand, is the particular skill of being able to guide and influence other people.”

“A leader, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be a manager.”

“So to be a great manager, one must certainly be a leader.”