The Making of a Manager
Julie Zhuo · 2019
Promoted from designer to boss almost overnight, Julie Zhuo learned management the hard way - and distilled a decade of lessons into a refreshingly honest field guide. This is the practical playbook for anyone who suddenly finds everyone looking to them for answers.
A practical, popular field guide for first-time managers learning to lead people.
Three of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Making of a Manager pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.
- Your job isn't to do the work yourself - it's to be a multiplier. A manager exists to get better outcomes from a group of people working together, so judge yourself by your team's results, not your personal output.
- Run every part of your role through three levers - Purpose (does the team know what success looks like and care about it?), People (are they skilled, supported and motivated?), and Process (is it clear how everyone works together?).
- Make feedback frequent, specific and free of surprises. Give task-specific feedback the same day, aim for at least half of it to be positive, and never let an annual review reveal something your report didn't already know.
The other 4 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 10 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- What Management Really Is
- Surviving Your First Three Months
- Leading a Small Team: Trust First
- The Art of Feedback
- Managing Yourself
- Running Meetings That Don't Suck
- Hiring Well
- Making Things Happen: Vision, Strategy, Execution
- Leading a Growing Team
- Nurturing Culture
Finish The Making of a Manager tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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