The making of a manager

📚 These are my very personal key takeaways from the book, I hope they are useful and I strongly recommend you read the whole book!

Stay open minded and curious as you meet everyone

• In your first few 1:1s ask your reports the following questions to understand what their “dream manager” looks like:

  • What did you and your past manager discuss that was most helpful to you?

  • What are the ways in which you'd like to be supported?

  • How do you like to be recognized for great work?

  • What kind of feedback is most useful for you?

  • Imagine that you and I had an amazing relationship. What would that look like?

• Learning how a new team works takes time. In your first few months, your primary job is to listen, ask questions, and learn.

• Invest in building new relationships

• A manager's job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together through influencing purpose, people and processes

• Achieve stellar 1:1s through preparation:

  • Discuss top priorities: what are the one, two or three most critical outcomes for your report and how can you help them tackle these challenges?

  • Calibrate what "great” looks like: do you have a shared vision of what you're working towards? Are you in sync about goals or expectations?

  • Share feedback: what feedback can you give them that will help them and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as 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 are they feeling on the hole? What's making them satisfied or dissatisfied? Have any of their goals changed? What have they recently learned and what do they want to learn moving forward?

• A coach's best tool for understanding what's going on is to ask

• Your job as a manager is to empower your reports to find answers themselves

  
  

• Identify: these questions focus on what really matters for your report and what topics are worth spending more time on:

  • 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, hese 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 te best course of action?

  • What's the worst-case scenario you're worried about?

    
    

• Support: these questions zero in on how you can be of service to your report:

  • How can I help you?

  • What can I do to make you more successful?

  • What was the most useful part of our conversation today?

• Recognition for hard work, valuable skills, helpful advice, or good values can be hugely motivating if it feels genuine and specific.

• There's one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it.

  
  

• Feedback

  • Set clear expectations:

    • What a great job looks like for your report

    • What advice you ahve to help your report get started on the right foot

    • Common pitfalls your report should avoid

  • Task specific feedback:

    • Be as precise and as detailed as you can

    • Focus on the hat rather than the who

    • Make feedback a lightweight, habitual part of your day

  • Behavioural feedback

    • Share it thoughtfully and regularely

    • It has to be personalized and in depth

  • Your words need to be thoughtfully considered and supported with specific examples to explain why you feel that way

    
    

• Hiring well

  • Good candidates will accept the job it the process feels attentive, focused and fast. It gives them confidence in the company and the team they would be working with.

  • Making this happen requires a strong manager-recruiter relationship.

  • After delivering an offer, check in with the candidate every other day to let them know that you are thinking about them and are excited about welcoming them in the team.

  • Get multiple interviewers involved: the best practice is to have the candidate to talk to multiple people who know what the role needs, with each interviewer asking different questions so that the group emerges with a well-rounded perspective.

  • This can also reduce bias and catch subtle red flags.

  • Important: when debriefing, each person should independently record their rationale and their final hire or no hire decision before hearing other interviewers’ thoughts to ensure that the discussion doesn't lead to groupthink.

• Good all-purpose interview questions:

  • What kind of challenges are intersting to you and why? Can you describe a favorite project? This tells you what a candidate is passionate about.

  • What do you consider your greatest strength? What would your peers agree are your areas for growth? This question gets both at a candidate self-awareness and what their actual strengths and weaknesses are.

  • Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now? This lets you understand dthe candidate's ambitions as well as how goal oriented and self-reflective they are.

  • What was the hardest conflict you've had in the past year? How did it end, and what did you learn from the experience? This gives you a sense of how the candidate orks with other people and how they approach conflict.

  • What is something that has inspired you in your work recently? This shelds light on what the candidate thinks is interesting or valuable.

    
    

• As a manager it's important to define and share a concrete vision for your team that describes what you are collectively trying to achieve. To help you get started you can ask yourself the following questions:

• Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly. What do you hop[e will be different in two to three years compared to now?

  • How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? What do you hope will be your team's erputation in a few years. How far off is that from where things are today?

  • What unique superpowers does your team have? When you are at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like for your team to be twice as good? Five times as good?

  • If you had to create a quick litmus test that anyone could use to assess whether your team was doing a poor job, a mediocre job, or a kick-ass job, what would that litmus test be?

• If you are leading a smaller part of a larger organization, then your team's plans should relate directly yo the organization's top-level strategy

• People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined. Prioritization is key and it's an essential managerial skill.

  • When ownership isn't clear, things lip through the cracks: always define ownership.Even when people have the best of intensions, fuzzines around role definition can create problems.

  • The clearer you are about whom you are holding accountable for what, the les of a chance there is for ambiguity and crossed wires

  • E.g. “Dan, I'd like you to take the lead on framing the options; Sarah, can you own defining the visual language?” or “Each of you should take a stab at how you'd design this. For the areas where you have differing opinions, let's have the three of us get together and I'll make a call”

    
    

• Ways to tell if your team is executing well:

  • List of projects or tasks are prioritized from most to least important

  • Efficient process for decision making that everyone understands and trusts

  • The team moves quickly, especially with reversible decisions

  • After a decision is made, everyone commits (even those who disagree)

  • Every task has a who and a by when

  • The team is resilient and constantly seeking to learn

Define a long term vision: "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else"