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A Guide to Your First Management Role // Book Summary of Julie Zhuo’s ‘The Making of a Manager’

December 16, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

First-time managers are often unprepared for—even unaware of—the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager. This is particularly true at fledging startups that don’t have bonafide HR departments to guide their novice managers nor can afford management coaches. Besides, it takes a new boss a year or two to learn the basics and become comfortable in his/her new role.

Julie Zhuo, Vice President of Product Design at Facebook When Facebook was small enough and “the entire company could fit into a backyard party,” 25-year old product designer Julie Zhuo was asked to become a manager. Zhuo had started at Facebook as its first intern and then gone full-time. Having no prior managerial experience, she acted how she thought managers were supposed to act and made many mistakes. In due course, she found joy in the role, expanded her skill set, and evolved to become Facebook’s VP of product design.

In The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (2019,) Zhuo has chronicled her experiences from ramping-up into management and getting to know herself better. It’s the book she wishes had been there for the novice manager that she was.

Zhuo offers many hard-earned insights that only time in the trenches can reveal:

Operate from first principles. “Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.”
Not everyone is cut out for a managerial responsibility. “Being a manager is a highly personal journey, and if you don’t have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.”
Let go of your old “individual contributor” role and make the shift to being the boss. Don’t spend time trying to do the work. Invest your time in coaching, supporting, and developing employees. Don’t run interference between them.
Discover your decision-making proclivities. Map out your strengths and weaknesses. “Great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses.”
Realize that the source of your power as a manager is everything but formal authority. Respect trumps popularity.
Don’t manage everyone in the same way. Learn to appreciate how distinctive each individual is in what he/she wants from work and what animates him/her to work well.
Trust is a critical ingredient in relationships. “Invest time and effort into creating and maintaining trusting relationships where people feel they can share their mistakes, challenges, and fears with you.”

Zhuo offers practical—if basic, but sufficient—advice for setting a vision, assessing the culture, delegating problems, giving feedback, aligning expectations, setting priorities, establishing a network of allies and confidants, hiring cleverly, and other responsibilities of leading a team. She delves into many difficult circumstances she’s encountered, e.g., handling previously-peers-now-employees whom she passed over for a promotion.

Recommendation: The Making of a Manager is an excellent primer for novice managers. It offers an insightful, practical, and relevant playbook for making the transition from being an outstanding individual contributor to becoming a good manager of others.

Complement with Andy Grove‘s High Output Management (1983,) Loren Belker et al.’s The First-Time Manager (2012,) and Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days (2013.)

Don’t One-up Others’ Ideas

October 15, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A manager who has the tendency to put his oar in his employees’ ideas ends up killing their ownership of ideas. This diminishes their motivation and performance.

When employees feel disrespected or unappreciated, survival instincts will kick in—employees turn inward and stop participating fully in their teams. It will only erode their commitment and led to poor results.

People Tend to Reject Ideas Offered by Others in Favor of Their Own

In the bestselling What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007,) the celebrated leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith describes this behavior as the tendency to “add too much value.”

If you’re inclined to get wrapped up in adding your two cents and improving the quality of an idea a little, you may devalue an employee’s commitment to execute the idea:

Imagine an energetic, enthusiastic employee comes into your office with an idea. She excitedly shares the idea with you. You think it’s a great idea. Instead of saying, “Great idea!” you say, “That’s a nice idea. Why don’t you add this to it?” What does this do? It deflates her enthusiasm; it dampers her commitment. While the quality of the idea may go up 5 percent, her commitment to execute it may go down 50 percent. That’s because it’s no longer her idea, it’s now your idea.

Don't One-up Others' Ideas

Effective Coaching is Helping Others Discover Insights

Focus on helping others discover insights—not by solving the problem for them, but by helping them improve how they’re thinking about the problem.

If you have an idea that the other must hear, don’t tell them immediately. Use Socratic questioning to tease the idea out of them.
Examine how you hand out ideas. Resist the temptation to add your advice. Before you propose an idea, pause and ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”
Avoid declarative statements such as “you should …” or “I think … .”
The higher up you go in an organization, the more your suggestions become interpreted as orders.
Don’t marginalize the concerns of your team members in the interest of moving your ideas forward. Ignoring employees’ inputs can send a message to the entire team that you’re not actually looking for their creative ideas, but that you’ve got your own agenda and just want them to rubberstamp it.
Get your team involved early. People are more motivated to do the things they have to do if they are part of the planning and strategy.

Idea for Impact: Improve your team performance by encouraging better thinking, not by handing out advice.

Don’t give unsolicited advice. Don’t make team decisions to which you—but nobody else—is committed. Learn to persuade others to see things your way by tapping into their talents, passions, and abilities.

Remember, being an effective manager is not about winning yourself; it’s about making other people winners.

Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

August 27, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Firing is About an Underlying Commitment to Retaining Great People

The former General Electric leader Jack Welch earned the moniker “Neutron Jack” for sacking some 100,000 employees in the early years of his tenure as chief executive. Welch defended the dismissals by emphasizing that it would have been far more heartless to keep those employees and lay them off later when they had little chance of reinventing their careers. The dismissals were part of his deliberate efforts to establish a corporate culture that emphasized honest feedback and where only the “A players” got to stay.

Many Fired Employees Feel Surprised That the Axe Didn’t Fall Sooner

Fire Fast---It's Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees Managers know that ending a bad fit sooner is better than doing it later. Firing a bad employee is often better for both the employee leaving and the employees remaining.

Then again, many managers hesitate because firing is awfully difficult. No one likes to fire people. Looking an employee straight in the eye and telling he’ll no longer have a job is one of the harshest things a manager will ever have to do.

Besides, some managers are so uncomfortable with conflict that they are unwilling to deal directly and honestly with a problem employee, not to mention of confronting the risk of a wrongful termination claim.

If an Employee is Not Working out for You, Fire Fast

By holding on to a bad employee, you are really doing a disservice to the employee. Forcing a person to be something he’s are not, and giving him the same corrective feedback—week after week and quarter after quarter—is neither sustainable nor considerate. Trying to keep the employee in the wrong role prevents his personal and professional evolution.

Give the employee a chance to turn the situation around—people can change.
Try to find him an appropriate role within your company. Recall the old Zen poem,

Faults and delusions
Are not to be got rid of
Just blindly.
Look at the astringent persimmons!
They turn into the sweet dried ones.

However, if the employee is a truly bad fit, reassigning him just shifts the problem to a different part of the company.
If your efforts to remediate a bad employee haven’t worked out, cut your losses and fire him promptly. Help the employee move on to a job or a company where the fit is much better.

Idea for Impact: It is much worse to retain someone who is not suited for his job than it is to fire him. Help him find a new role quickly and land on his feet.

Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?

July 24, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Akio Morita, the visionary co-founder of Sony, liked to tell a story about recognizing opportunities and shaping them into business concepts.

Two shoe salesmen … find themselves in a rustic backward part of Africa. The first salesman wires back to his head office: “There is no prospect of sales. Natives do not wear shoes!” The other salesman wires: “No one wears shoes here. We can dominate the market. Send all possible stock.”

Morita, along with his co-founder Masaru Ibuka, was a genius at creating consumer products for which no obvious demand existed, and then generating demand for them. Sony’s hits included such iconic products as a hand-held transistor radio, the Walkman portable audio cassette player, the Diskman portable compact disk player, and the Betamax videocassette recorder.

Products Lost in Translation

As the following case studies will illustrate, many companies haven’t had Sony’s luck in launching products that can stir up demand.

In each case in point, deeply ingrained cultural attitudes affected how consumers failed to embrace products introduced into their respective markets.

Case Study #1: Nestlé’s Paloma Iced Tea in India

Marketing and Product Introduction Failure: Nestle's Paloma Iced Tea in India When Swiss packaged food-multinational Nestlé introduced Paloma iced tea in India in the ’80s, Nestlé’s market assessment was that the Indian beverage market was ready for an iced tea variety.

Sure thing, folks in India love tea. They consume it multiple times a day. However, they must have it hot—even in the heat of the summer. Street-side tea vendors are a familiar sight in India. Huddled around the chaiwalas are patrons sipping hot tea and relishing a savory samosa or a saccharine jalebi.

It’s no wonder, then, that, despite all the marketing efforts, Paloma turned out to be a debacle. Nestlé withdrew the product within a year.

Case Study #2: Kellogg’s Cornflakes in India

The American packaged foods multinational Kellogg’s failed in its initial introduction of cornflakes into the Indian market in the mid ’90s. Kellogg’s quickly realized that its products were alien to Indians’ consumption habits—accustomed to traditional hot, spicy, and heavy grub, the Indians felt hungry after eating a bowl of sweet cornflakes for breakfast. In addition, they poured hot milk over cornflakes rendering them soggy and less appetizing.

Case Study #3: Oreo Cookies in China

Marketing and Product Introduction Case Study: Oreo Green-tea Ice Cream Cookies in China When Kraft Foods, launched Oreo in China in 1996, America’s best-loved sandwich cookie didn’t fare very well. Executives in Kraft’s Chicago headquarters expected to just drop the American cookie into the Chinese market and watch it fly off shelves.

Chinese consumers found that Oreos were too sweet. The ritual of twisting open Oreo cookies, licking the cream inside, and then dunking it in milk before enjoying them was considered a “strangely American habit.”

Not until Kraft’s local Chinese leaders developed a local concept—a wafer format in subtler flavors such as green-tea ice cream—did Oreo become popular.

Idea for Impact: Your expertise may not translate in unfamiliar and foreign markets

In marketing, if success is all about understanding the consumers, you must be grounded in the reality of their lives to be able to understand their priorities.

Don’t assume that what makes a product successful in one market will be a winning formula in other markets as well.
Make products resonate with local cultures by contextualizing the products and tailoring them for local preferences.
Use small-scale testing to make sure your product can sway buyers.

How to Hire People Who Are Smarter Than You Are

June 27, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Apple’s Steve Jobs frequently pointed to the risk of a “bozo explosion,” which is what happens within a company that makes the mistake of hiring B-grade managers early on. As the company expands, these bozos—Jobs’s label for well-meaning, but less-competent managers—tend to emerge through the ranks and run important divisions of the company.

When bozos hire other people, they prefer to hire bozos. As entrepreneur (and bonafide Steve Jobs’s coattail-rider) Guy Kawasaki explains, “B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players.” Lo and behold, entire divisions are soon swarming with hordes of bozos.

How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion

The heuristic “hire people smarter than you” is obvious enough, but, every so often, smart people can be a terrible fit within your team.

In this Startup School 2013 interview with venture capitalist Paul Graham, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offers a better heuristic to hiring and keeping smart people who aren’t jerks and can get things done:

What’s the right heuristic for determining if someone is really good? Over time, what I figured out was that the only actual way to let someone analyze whether someone was really good was if they would work for that person. I don’t think that needs to recurse too many levels down in the organization but I basically think that’s a really good heuristic. I believe that. If you look at my management team today if we were in an alternate universe and I hadn’t started the company it would be an honor to work for any of these people. I think if you build a company that has those kind of values, rather than just saying ‘oh I want to hire the best person I can find’ or whatever, if you hold yourself to that standard then I think you’ll build a pretty strong company.

Idea for Impact: Mediocre managers often feel threatened by employees who seem more intelligent than they are, and could potentially pinch their jobs. In contrast, a wise manager knows that she reveals well on her own ability to discover and nurture talent.

As with advertising tycoon David Ogilvy‘s Russian nesting dolls metaphor for building “a company of giants,” insist that managers hire folks who are better than themselves. For example, a product manager should hire a designer who is better at design than the manager is, not worse.
Insist that each interviewer ask themselves of job candidates, “Would I want to work for this person?”
Remember, the best don’t come cheap.

Change Isn’t Just Possible—It’s the Way Life Works

June 13, 2019 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Remarkable lines from “Change” from the English metaphysical poet John Donne‘s Elegy III (Poems of John Donne, Volume 1, 1896):

To live in one land is captivity,
To run all countries, a wild roguery;
Waters stink soon, if in one place they bide,
And in the vast sea are more putrified:
But when they kiss one bank, and leaving this,
Never look back, but the next bank do kiss,
Then are they purest; Change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life and eternity.

Change helps you come back to yourself, over and over again, and ride the waves of richness through whatever life has to offer.

Change is a gift! Flow with it and seek out the beauty in each moment. Show up and be present, for there is something precious for you now—even within the pangs of loss and melancholy.

To Micromanage or Not?

June 12, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Micromanagement—any unnecessary meddling in someone else’s responsibilities, decision-making, and span of authority—is one of the most common gripes that employees have about their managers. No manager’s participation, influence, and authority should chip value away from an employee’s work.

Nobody Likes a Meddling Boss

To Micromanage or Not? There’s a thin line between appropriate questioning and micromanaging. What characterizes micromanaging is not whether a manager is questioning the minutiae, but whether the fine points are significant enough to be probed into and to what end the manager is probing.

For instance, is a manager making a point of a certain inconsistent operating expense, or is the manager examining bookkeeping details that may help bring to light a bigger-level problem such as a defective accounting system? Asking questions doesn’t in and of itself signify micromanaging, as long as those questions lead to insights of some substance.

If a manager hones into some trivial detail and challenges it with an intention of establishing an employee’s error, it’s reasonable to assume that the manager is micromanaging.

When micromanaging happens in the area of the manager’s expertise, his nitpicking is usually provoked by an egotistical need to emphasize his knowledge or experience on the subject, especially if the manager is insisting on his pet course of action.

Idea for Impact: When tactically applied, micromanaging can be a powerful tool to get the right things done

The ability to pose broad, open-ended questions (try the Socratic Method) and help an employee uncover crucial details—and to do this without creating the perception of micromanaging—is a particularly valuable managerial skill.

The smartest managers I know of do away with as many unnecessary reports, reviews, and approvals as possible. They ask the right questions about the right subjects in the right tone to help refocus an employee’s attention while deferring to the employee’s decision-making prerogative. They don’t delve into the fine points of everything—they selectively micromanage only if they must.

Why a Friend Can’t Keep a Secret

April 2, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A caring, faithful relationship with a family member or a friend is a sacrosanct space where you can shed your guard, reveal your secrets, and disclose your worries. Such relationships are life’s principal social support systems.

Your ability to form close relationships with others hinges on the trust you feel with your nearest and dearest.

Once You Share Something Confidential, You Lose Control of it

Sharing your secrets with others and keeping others’ secrets are essential to establishing and nurturing bonds between people.

Secrets are kept or revealed for a variety of complex reasons—utter carelessness, actual malice, self-serving manipulation, or altruistic protection of others.

Forgetfulness and negligence often initiate letting a secret slip; some people may not understand the potential consequences of not keeping somebody’s secret to themselves.
As the World War II idiom cautions, loose lips sink ships. Some blabbermouths just can’t be the soul of discretion—they have no filters and don’t concern themselves with betraying others’ trust.
Some folks justify spreading others’ secrets by convincing themselves that the secret is common knowledge—if a source shared a secret with them, the source may have shared it with others too.
Some nefarious people use secrets they’re supposed to keep as currency to curry favor with someone else. An egregious recent example is that of McKinsey’s Managing Director Rajat Gupta revealing confidential information about Goldman Sachs, on whose board of directors he sat, to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
Some people may assume an altruistic—or self-righteous—mind-set and reveal a secret assuming that divulging the secret could be more beneficial to those concerned than keeping the secret.
Some people reveal secrets because they can’t bear the mental distress of keeping the secret. Often, the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep it.

If you’ve been told a secret or have some information in hand that may put somebody in immediate emotional or physical risk, be careful in how you act. Telling secrets in the wrong way, to the wrong people, or at the wrong time can be surprisingly destructive. If required, seek help from a relationship counselor.

If a friend shared something about you that you told them in private, try to forgive his/her lack of discretion. Hold back your trust until you can feel comfortable trusting them again.

Ideas to Use When Delegating

January 24, 2018 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Ideas to Use When Delegating The American industrialist Alfred P. Sloan once declared, “The most important thing I ever learned about management is that the work must be done by other men.”

A manager’s principal task is to get things done through other people. Therefore, delegation is one of the most important skills a manager can master.

In addition, being effective at delegation has benefits in many areas of life—enlisting a friend to repair a computer, or getting your kids to rearrange a bookshelf, for example.

Here are a few ideas for effective delegation.

Delegate every task that can be performed just as well by someone who is paid less than you are.
Pick people who can accept responsibility.
Match the person to the task.
Remember that the person performing the task may not do it as well as you do it.
Build employees’ confidence by assigning low-risk projects at first. By giving employees tasks that are right at the limit of their existing capability, or even just beyond, you can motivate them to develop their skills and knowledge.
Let employees put their own spin on the assignment. Learn to have faith in the ingenuity of your employees, and give much latitude in how they do things.
Delegate outcomes, not just tasks. Identify the precise problem and define exactly what you want your employee to do.
Confirm understanding. Don’t assume that your employee understands what we mean. Have the employee restate the outcome you’ve delegated in his own words.
Give a due date for the assignment.
Monitor what you delegate. Don’t meddle—an overly-engaged boss can create self-induced commotion. Effective managers delegate results when they can and interfere only when they must.
Learn to be patient. Expect employees to make wrong decisions. Spend time with them to learn why a decision was wrong and how to avoid it the next time, rather than reproach or assign blame.
Set the standards, but tell your employees what you’re willing to accept as tradeoffs of delegation. Offer to lend a hand wherever necessary. As Peter Drucker wrote in The Leader of the Future, “Effective leaders delegate, but they do not delegate the one thing that will set the standards. They do it.“

By learning to delegate effectively, you can create a work environment that is more time- and skills-efficient, foster creativity and opportunities for professional growth, and focus on the importance of managerial communication.

Five Pitfalls of Coaching Success

December 20, 2017 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

According to Coaching, Mentoring and Managing: Breakthrough Strategies to Solve Performance Problems and Build Winning Teams (1996) by William Hendricks, et al., some managers instinctively do things that thwart their team’s performance.

Examine if you’re guilty of one or more of the following.

Do you tend to speak at your employees, not with them? Your style of instruction could be accompanied by the frequent use of phrases such as “I want” and “you should.”
Do you tend to exaggerate situations or behavior? Your tendency to color an employee’s behavior using qualifiers such as “always,” “never,” and “everyone” could be dragging him down. Generalizations could crush the employee’s sense of self-esteem. If you want to create positive change, instill pride, not shame.
Do you sometimes assume that your employee knows a problem and the solution? It’s possible that the employee may not recognize the problem. Skillfully use lines of questioning that can help the employee drill down into the details and reveal a higher-level issue.
Do you often fail to follow up? If you don’t follow up on directions or performance expectations, you will inevitably find yourself reacting to unpleasant surprises.
Do you not reward improved behavior? If you don’t reward positive changes in behavior, you will not expand behavioral adjustments to permanent performance improvement. Managerial feedback and coaching is all about reinforcing positive behaviors and encouraging corrections to damaging behavior.

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People Tend to Reject Ideas Offered by Others in Favor of Their Own

Effective Coaching is Helping Others Discover Insights

Idea for Impact: Improve your team performance by encouraging better thinking, not by handing out advice.

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Firing is About an Underlying Commitment to Retaining Great People

Many Fired Employees Feel Surprised That the Axe Didn’t Fall Sooner

If an Employee is Not Working out for You, Fire Fast

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Products Lost in Translation

Case Study #1: Nestlé’s Paloma Iced Tea in India

Case Study #2: Kellogg’s Cornflakes in India

Case Study #3: Oreo Cookies in China

Idea for Impact: Your expertise may not translate in unfamiliar and foreign markets

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How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion

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Nobody Likes a Meddling Boss

Idea for Impact: When tactically applied, micromanaging can be a powerful tool to get the right things done

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Once You Share Something Confidential, You Lose Control of it

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