This was the author’s route to management. The Apprentice path begins when your boss’s team grows and she asks you to manage part of it. There are several possible paths to becoming a manager, and each route comes with its own potential opportunities and pitfalls during those early months.įirst, there is the Apprentice path to management. How they come into the management role in the first place determines what the new managers find easy or difficult in their first three months. She’s noticed a pattern in their responses. When the author bumps into new managers at Facebook, she asks which aspects of the job they’ve found easier or more challenging than expected. It really is that simple – no box-ticking or long lists necessary.Īll routes to management have advantages and pitfalls. If, like Zhuo, the outcome you’re looking for is great design, then remember that an excellent manager’s team will consistently pitch you great designs, whereas a mediocre manager’s team will pitch you mediocre designs.Ī great manager is one whose team gets great results. So, ask yourself what outcome your team or business seeks. In other words, the team of a good manager will achieve good results – consistently. Actually, only the outcome of the team they manage can answer this question. If they check all three boxes, then they must be a good manager. For instance, you might assess whether they are hard-working, likable or good at giving presentations. How? Well, many people assume a box-ticking attitude when considering whether a manager is a good one. As you work toward this goal, you’ll begin to recognize the difference between a good manager and a mediocre one. The job of a manager, as it turns out, is to achieve improved outcomes from your team. These include ensuring her team was working effectively together, helping team members achieve their career aims and developing processes to improve efficiency without any hiccups along the way.īut now, with nearly a decade of management experience behind her, Zhuo believes that the answer to what a manager does is far more concise than either of her previous lists capture. She realized that a manager’s role was actually to focus on wider issues.
However, she soon realized that her approach was short-sighted as it focused on basic daily tasks, rather than long-term goals.Īfter a few years of experience under her belt, Zhuo became more strategic.
In her early days as a manager, Zhuo believed that her job consisted of holding meetings with team members, giving them feedback on how they’re doing and working out which subordinates to promote or to fire. Thrown in at the deep end, Zhuo soon asked herself, “What does a manager actually do?” More amazingly still, this role was Zhuo’s first managerial role. At the age of just 25, Julie Zhuo was offered the job of a lifetime – managing Facebook’s design team.
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