The role of a manager is to lead with purpose, streamline processes and motivate teams. But what does success look like for those new to the role? Asking questions, being curious and listening to your team is one place to start. In “The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You,” Julie Zhuo identifies the next moves in a playbook for first-timers growing into the position. In this episode of the podcast “The Next Chapter” by American Express Business Class, Zhuo and host Cardiff Garcia discuss which tools can help new managers to lead confidently and thrive.
The role of a manager is to lead with purpose, streamline processes and motivate teams. But what does success look like for those new to the role? Asking questions, being curious and listening to your team is one place to start. In “The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You,” Julie Zhuo identifies the next moves in a playbook for first-timers growing into the position. In this episode of the podcast “The Next Chapter” by American Express Business Class, Zhuo and host Cardiff Garcia discuss which tools can help new managers to lead confidently and thrive.
[Intro Music]
Cardiff Garcia: Imagine that you’re 25 years old. You’re a software designer at a fast-growing startup, and you like your work. And then suddenly your boss asks you to become something you never imagined you’d be: a manager. How would you learn to do it? Would you be able to let go of the career path you had envisioned for yourself? Could you earn the respect of the colleagues who now report to you, given that you’re still so young, and just a day earlier you were their friend and peer. Well now, you’re their boss.
Today’s guest had exactly this experience. And in ten years, she went from being an intern to the Vice President of Design at Facebook, which is now called Meta. Hi, I'm Cardiff Garcia, and welcome to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. In each episode of this podcast, we introduce you to a bestselling book that everyone in the business world can learn from. And we're also gonna hear how the author's advice has evolved since they published their work, and what they would write for their next chapter. On this episode, I'll be speaking with author Julie Zhuo. Just three years out of her internship, Julie was promoted, to her own surprise, into the uncomfortable position of managing older, and more experienced employees. She recognized that she needed help. So she read all the usual management books, but they just didn’t seem to apply to her. These were books mostly written by older. C-suite executives whose experiences she just couldn’t quite relate to. And so for years, Julie collected her own thoughts, and the lessons she’d learned, preserving the memory of how she felt in early months and years as a manager. And after almost a decade of finding her own way through the job, Julie decided to write the book that she had always wanted to read herself. I sat down with Julie Zhuo to discuss her 2019 book "The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You."
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Cardiff Garcia: Julie Zhuo, welcome to The Next Chapter.
Julie Zhuo: Thanks so much for having me, Cardiff.
Cardiff Garcia: Julie, you became a manager at 25, and you were worried that maybe you weren't ready. What do you think it was that your colleagues spotted early on in those first three years that led them to elevate you at the age of 25?
Julie Zhuo: I think the easiest way to put it is, I was friendly. I got along with a lot of people on the team, and maybe, I never know this for sure, but maybe I'm the person who just didn't say no when I was asked.
Cardiff Garcia: So you were the person who was always saying, yeah, we can get this done. Uh, I'll take that project, I'll take on the new assignment.
Julie Zhuo: Exactly.
Cardiff Garcia: And you describe the strangeness of having to manage people who just a day before were your peers on the design team and your friends. Can you tell us a little bit about how it changed your relationships with those colleagues? Uh, how did you navigate that?
Julie Zhuo: What was difficult for us and for myself at the time is I think we grow up and we have a very particular idea of what a boss should be like. So in high school I would take these various jobs. I had a supervisor, I had a boss, and we would all watch movies. And you see bosses on TV and they seem very authoritarian. They seem very commanding, maybe They seem very charismatic. Maybe they seem like they knew exactly what to do and told everyone else what to do.
Cardiff Garcia: And not collaborative, right? Like they say what goes and then you put that into place because they told you to.
Julie Zhuo: Exactly. And the reason I felt like such an imposter is because I didn't think I was that person. I didn't think I had all the answers. I didn't think I was the most skilled, knowledgeable, best designer on the team. And so when I was sitting there and the announcement had been made, now I'm having a one-on-one with each person.
I honestly felt, what am I gonna do to help this person? How can I tell them how to do their job when I might not even know what the answer is? And so it was a little bit of that awkwardness that I felt in those early days, months, honestly, even years. Uh, and it was that journey that ultimately led me to really reflect on what does it mean to be a great manager for someone?
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah, and psychologically it's an odd thing to one day be somebody's friend and peer, and then the next day be their boss, because you might be worried, for example, that the person will be, I don't know, resentful because you were elevated and they weren't, or that it'll make them less likely to share things openly with you because that power dynamic has changed. How did you sort of get through that? How did you, how did you figure out that new dynamic?
Julie Zhuo: The most important thing that I learned in the process of being a new manager is it's okay for me to not know the answers, and my job is to help the other person.
Cardiff Garcia: Mm-hmm.
Julie Zhuo: Point blank just help them be more effective in their role. Just see if I can take stuff off of them, help them resolve a conflict, be a good thought partner for them, and overall take their ideas and curate them and have the team as a whole be more effective.
And so as soon as I was able to let my guard down and be able to be more frank, hey, there's a lot of things you know way better than me, but my job is to help you be more effective so our team can reach its goals and you can reach your own goals. And why don't we think about working together towards that aim? I think it became easier because it wasn't so much about that power dynamic. It was more about us working towards the things that we all wanted to do together as a team.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah. And you mentioned that within the first few months you worried that you might be in over your head. What was the toughest challenge for you? Was it the pace of growth of the company? Was it just the fact that like your responsibilities had changed so dramatically from being the person who was doing the designing, to overseeing the people who were now doing the designing? What was, what was the hardest thing in those early months and maybe even in those early years about becoming a new manager?
Julie Zhuo: The hardest thing for me was really grasping what it means to do well at the job of management. So when I was an individual contributor and I was simply responsible for designing, it felt very clear I would work on a project. I was responsible for a lot of the design decisions, the things that the user would get to see and experience.
I would do a lot of iterations. I would get feedback, and eventually we would ship the product and I would feel like I had contributed something. With management I didn't get that tangibility because it felt a little bit like my job was to have meetings. Figure out how to support my people, but what does it look like if I had done a good job? There wasn't a thing I could necessarily point to, a project I had shipped, a feature I had launched, and so I struggled with that for quite a while. What does it mean for me at the end of the week to feel like I had a very, very good and productive week? And because I wasn't clear on that, I felt like I was often trying different things or, you know, maybe my job was to give great feedback, or maybe my job was to solve problems, or maybe my job was to bring people together for a meeting and figure something out together. But it wasn't always very clear how those things translated into success as a manager.
Cardiff Garcia: A lot of times people refer to managers in this kind of derogatory way because they wonder what they actually do all day. So you have the frontline workers, the contributors, the people who are doing, in your case, for example, the design work directly, and they can point to the actual work, and then they might be wondering, well, what do the managers do all the time? But actually what you're saying is that management really matters and that you had to convince yourself of that. So how did you go about doing that?
Julie Zhuo: The thing that ultimately clicked for me was when I started to see my job, not as the output of what I was able to produce, but more what were our team able to do together. And so what I mean by that is I needed to see my job as more of a multiplier effect rather than additive. So if I have, for example, five people that I'm trying to support our team of designers, how could I make sure that each of those people feels twice as effective or is able to get 20% more design shipped, or 60% more creative ideas flowing. Whatever it is that is the metric, what you're looking for is a greater leverage on the talent that is already there on the team, and that is the way to really look at what a great manager does.
Cardiff Garcia: You also write that when you were looking for management books, a lot of the ones you came across tended to be written by very senior managers. What did you want this book to address that theirs had missed?
Julie Zhuo: The most important thing for me when I was a new manager and I was at the bookstore and I was trying to figure out what would help me learn the job and be more effective, is I wanted to feel like there was somebody who situation resembled mine. And what I found lacking was that, again, a lot of business books, management books are written by people who felt they were at the peak of their career. You have these wonderful books by these amazing CEOs who had just retired, and so they had seen a lot and they had done a lot, but they're not new to management like me. Similarly, you have people who are management consultants and they've studied the art of management. They've done all these research reports, they have the best practices, but they're also not people who were in my situation. And so what I wanted to do with my book is try and meet people where they were, meet them, where they were emotionally, meet them, where they were in terms of their understanding of management. And I wanted it to to feel a little bit like, you know, a mentor is having coffee with you, somebody who's just a, a couple years ahead who'd gone through it, but is not so far ahead of you sitting down and having a coffee and sharing that experience.
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Cardiff Garcia: Yeah. Well, I wanna now turn to some of the ideas that are in your book, the Making of a Manager. And you've already referenced purpose people and process, and you write that the role of a manager is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team. And I'm quoting you here to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can. Can you just kind of explain what you mean by this?
Julie Zhuo: So if you think a little bit about what is a team, it is a group of people with talented skills who are trying to put those skills together towards a greater good. And that greater good could be any outcome. In the book, I used the example of a lemonade stand, maybe you and I are trying to start a business and we wanna be able to sell lemonade.
And so there's things that you can do and there's things that I can do. For example, we can go shopping, we can actually make the lemonade, we can man the booth. We could try and appeal to customers. We can take payment, give them them lemonade and so forth. And those are all individual things that need to happen. But ultimately, if we get way more people working together, what's helpful is a person whose job it is to really focus on the overall output of the team. And that person is what I call the role of the manager. The job of the manager is not to do the individual functions, but to do whatever they can to help everyone else on the team be more effective and produce more together towards the goal.
Cardiff Garcia: A lot of times, uh, when a manager is new to a team, they really want to put their stamp on the situation like “Hey, I'm here and this is how we're gonna do things.” There's a lot of attention focused on them because they're new and so they take advantage of that. But you are right that this can be a little bit dangerous because the team may not know that manager yet and there may not be a kind of trust that's already been built up.
So can you kind of offer some wisdom on how a new manager, when they show up can actually gain that trust and still be able to sort of shift things in the direction that they want to?
Julie Zhuo: I think it's really important for a new manager to be able to sit down and just listen. In the beginning because a lot of how you build trust is you have to get to know each other. You have to go and actually ask questions, be curious, and listen to what everyone says. And when we take the time to do that, we also learn a ton about what's going well, what's not going well, what do people see as the opportunities, what are things that they would wanna change? And it's very hard to know if you don't have context for a team or a particular way of doing things, what is the best way to even change or evolve towards? You kind of have to understand the lay of the land. And the very best way to do that is to listen, to understand what other people who have been there far longer than you who have a lot more of that context in history. What do they think? And often listening is a way of also building a relationship. If I sit down and I ask you a bunch of questions, I kind of get to know you and same, you can ask me questions, you can get to know me. And if we get a sense of who we are and the fact that we have different skills, we have different strengths, then it becomes easier for us to have the conversation of, okay, so how can the things you're good at and the things I'm good at, how can we bring that together and help the team do all the things that we really wanna do?
Cardiff Garcia: Something that you reference only briefly, but which made me kind of stop and think, was the idea that management can actually be kind of lonely. And when you stop to think about it, that makes sense because there is a power dynamic between the manager and the people they're managing, and then there's a power dynamic between the manager and their bosses too. And presumably, yes, you could find some solidarity with other managers, but they're managing their own teams. So I'm kind of curious to know how do you find not just advice and wisdom for how to be a better manager, but also a certain sense of solidarity with other managers so that the job is a little bit less lonely?
Julie Zhuo: I think it's a great question and the most important thing I've found to help myself grow is finding really great peer groups, and I say peer groups with an S because they're actually different groups of people who have this job that is parallel to mine, but maybe in a slightly different dimension. So when I became a manager and I was managing a group of designers, design was always a much smaller team at my company than engineering. And so as a result, the people who were managing engineering had seen issues of scale that were a few years ahead of where we were with design. And so it helped me a lot to be able to talk to some of those folks. And yes, they didn't necessarily understand design, but they understood what it meant to have four people. And now we added five more people and. Meetings are run differently. So they could give me advice on what does it mean to scale, or they could gimme advice on how should I think about developing processes as we grow and as we add more people? Or how would we onboard someone new who joined the team? And the advice they gave me wouldn't fit a hundred percent because we still had to then adapt it to our own function and our discipline. But it was really helpful to know, hey, this is somebody else who'd gone through it in a slightly different context and to be able to get some of that learning. At the same time, I also had a group of people who were doing similar jobs to me in this case design, but at different companies. And so also not a full exact one-to-one context mapping, but they also knew the design industry, knew the work of designers, knew the personality of designers, the craft of the work, and they could help me understand things like how is our industry changing? How should we set up best practices for designers? They might not know my exact company, but the advice was still relevant. And so sometimes you have to almost cobble together these different groups of people all with insights that will be applicable, not a hundred percent, but, but somewhat. And in that way feel like, okay, now with all of these pieces, I can put that together and figure it out for my own team.
Cardiff Garcia: And how hard was it to let go of some of the tasks that you were doing before you became a manager, in which you probably, in a lot of cases, really enjoyed, you, liked having like that direct influence over the work that was being done versus now you were overseeing people who were doing that work directly.
And so to this concept of sharing Legos that you describe in the book, um, you know, how hard was it to essentially share your Legos? You know what I mean?
Julie Zhuo: Yeah, it was difficult. And the reason it's difficult is because many people who become managers, you often start as an individual contributor, which means you love the work, you love designing, you love engineering, you love interacting with customers, you love doing the sales calls, whatever it is that you do.
And so when you start to manage, it's very, very tempting to continue to wanna do that. And so what would happen is I would talk to one of the people I'm supporting and they would show me a design, and I would wanna get in there and start commenting on the specific decisions. And then they would start to get inevitably a little bit irritated because they would feel like…
Cardiff Garcia: Hey, you're micromanaging me. What are you doing?
Julie Zhuo: And that's why I think that's what micromanagement is. It's somebody else
coming in to make a bunch of decisions that honestly should be your decisions. And I realized that, that I wasn't really that healthy because I'd get that feedback, I'd always get pushback, Hey, you know, you went in there and you critiqued all this stuff, but honestly I got it. That's, that's kind of my job. And I had to check myself and say, you're right, you're right. That's not my, my job is to figure out how to help you be more effective. My job is not necessarily, again, to be the person to make all the design decisions. A better thing for me to do is to figure out how you can get all of the feedback from the people that might be best equipped to give you feedback. And so what we ended up doing is, for example, designing critique as a process where other designers who were the best equipped to give feedback could be able to give feedback on junior designers work. And that ended up being far more scalable and far more leveraged, and, uh, a lot more positive for the members of my team.
Cardiff Garcia: And as a manager, you kind of can't avoid having tough one-on-one conversations sometimes with the people who report to you. And some of those conversations may be about things like compensation, which is always delicate. And sometimes you may have to tell someone that they're not doing a good enough job, that they need to be better.
And you don't want to demoralize the person, but you do want to get your point across and you want to incentivize or maybe encourage them to do a better job. And I was struck by something that you shared in the book. You said that one of your friends, a guy named Mark Rabkin, said that all of your one-on-one meetings should be awkward.
That awkward interactions are good. Cuz that means you're talking about the real stuff. And I'd love to hear more about making those tough one-on-one conversations, those awkward conversations really fruitful. How do you, how do you make it so that those conversations end up leading to a good outcome instead of just both sides being sort of upset with each other once the meeting's over?
Julie Zhuo: I think the heart of really great interactions and one-on-ones is first caring. If you know that I care about you and that I really see you and recognize you and respect you as an individual. Everything becomes easier. Think of the example of your best friend. You're going shopping with your best friend. You try on an ugly sweater, your friend says, yeah, that looks pretty ugly on you. You don't get offended because you know that person has your back. You know that they're saying it for your own good. They're not trying to make you feel bad. It's almost funny and it's refreshing that level of honesty. And it's because you've built those, those bridges of trust over those years.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah it’s not an existential crisis for your friendship because you know it's meant usually, you know, assuming it's not a frienemy, it's meant in the best possible light.
Julie Zhuo: And it's very different. If a stranger says that…
Cardiff Garcia: Yes.
Julie Zhuo: Like, what? What did you just say to me? But if your best friend says that, and you know again, they don't want you to go out there looking bad, then you'll take it well, and I believe that that is the core of how these deep feedback, sometimes again, awkward conversations, can be made less awkward as if there is a great foundation where the person truly be feels, Hey, I know you care about me. I know you want what's best for the team and for me. So that's the first thing I'll say. I, the second thing I'll say that will make this much easier is if we are aligned on a shared goal. So as an example, if I come in there and I start critiquing the last presentation that you made, you might be taken aback because it's hard.
It's an, it's, it's, it's criticism. It's me saying that, Hey, I think you could have done this better. But at the same time, if you know, and I know that what we want is our team to win. We want our team to win. We wanna be effective. We want our goals to be hit. We want our company to succeed. We wanna make a billion dollars, whatever it is, if you know that that's what we're both working on and we've established that, then it's easier for me to be able to say this in the spirit of me helping you and you helping me do better so that we can achieve this goal together. I think the third thing that also helps is if I am also open to feedback from you. So if it's really one-sided, if every single time we talk you feel like I'm telling you something, hey, this could have been better. Hey, don't do that. More of that, it doesn't feel equal. But if I also come in and say, by the way, you know that both of us are trying to make this thing happen, make our team win. What feedback do you have from me? I could probably stand to do certain things better. And so I wanna give you feedback to help you improve, but I also want you to give me feedback so that I can improve, and together we're in the same boat. We're just trying to help our team win.
Cardiff: You're listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. When we come back, we'll hear what Julie would write for her next chapter, and how she learned to better work with her own bosses.
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Cardiff Garcia: Well, Julie, I now want to ask you the one question that we ask every guest of The Next Chapter, which is if you could add one more chapter to your book, now that it's been out for I think three or four years, What's the one thing that you would really want to get across to people, uh, that you weren't able to include when the book first came out?
Julie Zhuo: It's a really great question. I think the chapter I would add would be about how to manage in much tougher times. So the context of me writing the Making of a Manager, of course, was that I was at this high growth startup, and so we were able to do things like invest in the future and coach people and focus on hiring and scaling and all of that stuff.
And that is awesome when the economy is going really well. But then when the economy has shifted, and we saw that in the last couple of years with the pandemic and with all the changes that it wrought and all the difficulties that people had, that sometimes you have to manage through the hard times as well. And in those hard times it is different. Sometimes it just feels like you're fighting for the survival of your team. I think a lot about small business owners who had to make really, really difficult, excruciating decisions about whether to lay people off or to furlough the business or or do those things.And it's a very different mentality because at that point it really is about survival. You're not thinking about the next year. You're not thinking necessarily about, can I invest and do this in one or two years from now to pay out? You're just thinking, how are we gonna get through the next week, the next month? And so, I have a little bit more of that experience myself. I've started a company since, uh, writing the making of the manager. And so the perspective of being that person who is wholly responsible for the success of this venture, who, you know, you have employees depending on you for their paycheck and what to do in really hard situations, I think that would be the angle I'd want to focus on.
Cardiff Garcia: Yeah, that's interesting because it's not just that companies you know, have good times and then they have bad times and they experience the regular fluctuations of the business cycle in the last few years, in particular, the very nature of how we all interact with each other has also changed. So if you look at something like the rise of remote work, I have to assume that that also affects how people manage as well.
So what are your thoughts on how to have really good, let's say, one-on-one conversations or meetings in an era when those very things are being conducted in profoundly different ways than how they were done in the past?
Julie Zhuo: The principles for me are the same. I think actually doing it is harder. So we talked a little bit before about how you gotta get to building that relationship, building those bridges of trust. And often that means like getting to know people, getting curious about them, but, and it is just that much harder when we don't see each other.
When you and I interact and maybe we pass by, we have lunch, it is easier to form a relationship. But when we have a scheduled 30 minute call or one hour call once or twice a week, it just feels so much more formal. It feels harder to really get into the personal aspects. And so I think what we have to do is we have to be a little bit more intentional about making space for that. Perhaps there's times in which we have to just chat, but the chat isn't so formalized. It's not like, oh, we're going to talk about the work or give feedback. sometimes it's just, look, everyone's gonna go and have some ice cream and we're gonna sit there with our bowls of ice cream and we're gonna talk about something that isn't our actual work, whatever it is, the rituals and actually crafting those rituals that help us build those bridges of trust are so much more important when we can't fall onto casually passing one another in the lunchroom or whatnot, as a way of building that connection.
Cardiff Garcia: As you became an experienced manager. In other words, as you went from being a novice to a very experienced manager, did you find that that experience also helped you in your interactions with your own managers and how so?
Julie Zhuo: Absolutely. I think it gave me a lot more empathy for management because sometimes I, I think I used to be hard on my managers as well. If they didn't do something, I would think, oh, they didn't know that, or they missed seeing this issue. And at the end of the day, we are all human regardless of our skill, our experience, whatever it is, we're all human.
We make mistakes. We try and do our best. And that is true across the board, no matter who you are. And I think one of the great gifts that managing of the years has taught me is how to really understand and see the best in everyone. And that is true for the people that I support. That's true for the leaders that I've had the privilege of, of being able to work for.
All of us have our gifts, all of us have, have our unique strengths and by virtue of being in a particular role, right? So for example, I'm managing a team. Let's say you're my manager, you have a slightly different perspective because you have a more bird's eye view of a cluster of teams that roll up to you. And so that position often does offer you a different perspective than what I might be seeing. Just like a person who is on my team has a different perspective than what I'm seeing. And all those perspectives are really important and helpful in order to get, again, this living dynamic organism that we call the team or the company, operating in the best manner. And so I think it's having empathy for that, that we don't all have the same information. We don't all have the same strengths, but the information we have and the strengths we have are important and are valuable. And if we can come together and curate it in the right way and use it to our advantage, then we can do some amazing things together.
Cardiff Garcia: Last question. It's a little bit of a creative exercise. There's a lot of advice in your book for how to make a one-on-one conversation better. So imagine for a second that you and I had just had a one-on-one conversation and you're my manager. How would you close a conversation like this so that we both are kind of left with a good imprint, both sort of freshly enthused about going off and doing great work for the rest of our day?
Julie Zhuo: Uh, well, I hope that what we'll have talked about is, uh, like I said, gotten to the heart of the thing. Right? You, I've gotten a chance to understand a little bit more about you. You've gotten a chance to understand a little bit more about me, but I always like to close one-on-ones with maybe even asking you: What do you look forward to this week? What would make this a wonderful week? And finally, what's one thing I can do to help you have a wonderful week?
Cardiff Garcia: Well, unfortunately, I'd been looking forward to having this conversation all week, but now sadly, it's over. So let me instead end our chat by saying thanks so much Julie Zhuo. The book is The Making of a Manager. Really appreciate your being on The Next Chapter.
Julie Zhuo: Thanks so much, Cardiff. This was so fun.
Cardiff Garcia: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks to Julie Zhuo for coming on the show today. And please tune in for our final episode of season two where I’ll be speaking with James Clear about his book "Atomic Habits" on the best way create long lasting change in your routines. Until then, be sure to follow or subscribe on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Thanks for listening.