November 13, 2017 at 12:07 pmPM from Facebook: Counter-Intuitive Management Findings (Part 1)
- Transfer
The first time I started to lead people seven years ago was three years after my graduation from the university and my first work in the field of design. At that time, I was extremely lacking in qualifications. I had almost no experience when someone led me , not to mention leading me others. I am still grateful to the manager we had at that time for her faith in me. I do not think that in her situation I would put on myself. And, again, one of the things you learn - a visionary manager can sometimes see in you what you yourself do not see and push you towards those achievements that seemed impossible.
At the center of the frame is Julie Zhuo, product design director on Facebook.
For seven years, I have in most cases led a mixture of developers, some UI engineers and researchers. Most recently, I began to lead design managers.
I love my job. It seems to me that because of people it is both heavy and crazy and wonderful. She is about interacting with people. On the understanding of people. About finding the best in people. And again, on the understanding that everything is not perfect, but together with our imperfections, we can still achieve more than alone.
The translation was supported by EDISON Software , a professional software development company (here are examples of technical specifications once , two , three ), as well as software development for large customers ( microtomograph , mobile communications , city lighting ).
And yet, despite the fact that management, like upbringing, is a certain kind of black magic without complex and quick rules, of course, there are both good and bad managers. A better manager will get better results. They may not always be observed for weeks, months, or sometimes even years, but ultimately everything will be clear as day.
When I first started, some things worked out well. I was attractive, I took my responsibilities seriously and I was always worried about both sides of the matter. But there were also problems: Asian upbringing, which implied hierarchy and work in the stream, a crazy desire for perfectionism and a lot of self-doubt.
Here are some of the lessons I learned. Every year I hope to get even more.
One of the first things I ask of those who want to become a manager is a hypothetical question:
If the idea of spending 8 consecutive hours talking to people sounds awful, then you probably won't like working as a manager day after day. I am not saying that meetings are held every day, but the fact that the pulsating life blood of management is people cannot be avoided. If the options for listening to people and communicating with them are not suitable for you, then management will be a burden to you.
In the end, what happens if someone comes up with a problem for you - this person doesn’t get along with his colleague, he burns out and wants to go on vacation for a month, he feels that the project will not bring anything good - and while you talk with him, you feel deep in your stomach an unpleasant realization that you hate all this and that you can no longer. You will miss the days when you could manipulate anything directly - pixels, words, codes, music - quietly sitting in your headphones, and in this blessed world, no one needs to talk to you and load you with problems.
I learned this lesson well, because I myself was pushing people into the field of management when I thought that they had sufficient skills. But in the end, I knocked them out of the rut, and they burned out. It is terrible to hear from the person whom you asked to be a manager, a year later, after acknowledging that it is difficult for him to get up in the morning, because the idea that he needs to spend all day with people is so unpleasant for him.
Unfortunately, if you do not become a manager, then you will not advance on the career ladder. This sadly leads to incorrect outcomes in which those who do not like to deal with people become poor managers, and both themselves and their team suffer from this. On the other hand, we are lucky that many companies support separate, but equal career paths, in which at a certain level you can choose either to deepen your discipline or to lead people. If you find yourself at this crossroads, ask yourself if you are interested in management for the right reasons.
Those who become excellent managers sincerely love working with people. They see problems of motivation, personal barriers, and they view vague coordination as a difficult but feasible task. They love tête-à-tête conversations. Their satisfaction is achieved by the prosperity of others.
Before I started working in the field of management, I thought that people become managers because they are the best in their discipline. In the end, if the manager’s job is to give feedback to his colleagues, how can this be done if you are not good at everything?
It is because of this that I have long doubted this work. I was sure that it was never better in design than the guys on my team! And at the same time I thought that all this is exactly what they expect, or I should be able to do my job well. To make matters worse, I did the same with my managers. I was inclined to think that they were right (after all, it was their job to be right!), Which meant that I had no doubt in their decisions (although sometimes this turned into a passive-aggressive indignation). If something did not work out in the team, I posed this as a problem that they should solve.
Such an approach is destructive not only for me and my team, but also for my manager. This is exactly what defines our ideological culture, in which people are afraid to admit weaknesses or failures, and we all, like ducks, pretend to glide gracefully on the surface of the water, while in reality we are desperately floundering.
It is foolish to expect that the team leader is much better versed than any other person in this team.
No need to know absolutely everything. You don’t even have to pretend that you all know. The best coaches are not the best athletes. The best teachers are not the best performers. Your job is to increase the efficiency of the team, which they could not have achieved without you, either because they are afraid of you, or because you motivate them.
I think we all watched enough episodes of Game of Thrones to know which choice was right.
How do you motivate the team? The topic itself is very long, but I would advise you not to be assholes / assholes, and to do what inspires and motivates you yourself, without thinking about what others expect from you.
I used to think that there is a certain list with qualities that determine if a manager is good. Do they enjoy great authority? Do you think strategically? Good in presentations? Can they complete 20 important tasks in a day? Break the fight? Reconcile people? Etc.
I'm not going to say that these are bad traits, but determining a successful manager is easy enough: his team is great. She surpasses all results.
What does it mean?
You can be the most hardworking, smart, cutest manager in the world, but if your team has 20 people and a mediocre reputation, then I'm sorry, but there is no world where you could be considered a “great” manager.
On the other hand, of course, a bad manager can be lucky. They can have incredible results because they work very closely with the team. Or because they already got a great team.
In the long run, however, there is no way around the fact that the best people in their field will not work for years under the direction of those whom they do not respect or who really don’t care about helping the team.
That's why one of the fastest ways to become a cool manager is to hire the right people. I remember when I was just starting to hire, I biasedly looked for people whose career path I understood and went along it myself. Involuntarily, I set the ceiling for the people I was looking for. As a person with 5 years of experience, I had no idea how someone from the 10th would want to work in my team. Unfortunately, this view meant that the growth of my team would be slow.
If you are the most experienced person in your team in several dimensions, then the hierarchy will seem convenient, but, believe me, you do not have a great team .
It is a thousand times better to have a diverse team with people who are strong in areas where you are weak, who can teach you new skills and challenge you to take on new perspectives. This is the fastest way to grow into a manager. If you are not sure if your team will be able to come up, ask yourself if you learned something meaningful from your team. If you are having difficulty with examples, you might want to focus on the team’s ambitions.
Sometimes new managers ask me: “What lessons should I learn to quickly improve my skills and become a pro?”. I used to ask such a question myself, hoping to get life hacks that would speed up the learning process.
That is, I believe that in order to become a truly confident senior manager, it takes at least 3 years (and in most cases more).
You can’t cut the path, trying to master this area in a few months or even a year, reading books, absorbing articles or asking for advice from other people (but these things, of course, help speedy assimilation).
This is because management is not just a skill like drawing, where you can practice alone for hours. You need the opportunity to be inside certain situations in order to learn and grow.
For example, let's look at what makes a designer great. Pretend there is a company with 100 designers. If you led only 5 designers, then, in your opinion, one of these five would be the best. If I ask you: “What qualities does a great designer have?”, Then you are likely to name the things that exactly that person does well.
Now let's imagine that another manager in the company leads the remaining 95.
Between the two of you, who do you think will, statically speaking, lead both the best and worst designers in the company? Who do you think will have a more developed and detailed perspective of what a good designer looks like?
This pertains to a ton of different management situations: leadership lagging. Hiring new people. Work with adult talents. Failure to launch a product. Regulation of a period of low morale. The sudden dismissal of people from your team.
The first time that the above happens under your supervision, it is always new and difficult; no matter how many books you read on this subject. But after the fifth time, the tenth or the twentieth, you no longer freak out. You understand that everything will be all right. You can handle it because you have to. You will become a stone, solid in the face of the winds of change.
The fact is that it's hard to snap your fingers and say: “Cool, I need to gain experience in firing people. Let me practice this next month. ” Circumstances should be so that you have a chance to really do it. At the same time, an inexperienced manager can do much more damage than an inexperienced individual assistant, so the opportunities for new difficulties do not materialize at your request.
Now, when I conduct interviews, I always rejoice at the people who enter the door, with experience in managing various teams over the years. We can say that they bring a kind of confidence and stability to the room, which means that these people have endured a lot - times of scarcity and times of excess - and that several storm clouds on the horizon will not scare them.
At the center of the frame is Julie Zhuo, product design director on Facebook.
For seven years, I have in most cases led a mixture of developers, some UI engineers and researchers. Most recently, I began to lead design managers.
I love my job. It seems to me that because of people it is both heavy and crazy and wonderful. She is about interacting with people. On the understanding of people. About finding the best in people. And again, on the understanding that everything is not perfect, but together with our imperfections, we can still achieve more than alone.
The translation was supported by EDISON Software , a professional software development company (here are examples of technical specifications once , two , three ), as well as software development for large customers ( microtomograph , mobile communications , city lighting ).
And yet, despite the fact that management, like upbringing, is a certain kind of black magic without complex and quick rules, of course, there are both good and bad managers. A better manager will get better results. They may not always be observed for weeks, months, or sometimes even years, but ultimately everything will be clear as day.
When I first started, some things worked out well. I was attractive, I took my responsibilities seriously and I was always worried about both sides of the matter. But there were also problems: Asian upbringing, which implied hierarchy and work in the stream, a crazy desire for perfectionism and a lot of self-doubt.
Here are some of the lessons I learned. Every year I hope to get even more.
1. To be an excellent manager, you must enjoy dealing with people.
One of the first things I ask of those who want to become a manager is a hypothetical question:
“Imagine that you spent the whole day working side by side with people and constantly interacting with them. Does that sound awful or cool? ”
If the idea of spending 8 consecutive hours talking to people sounds awful, then you probably won't like working as a manager day after day. I am not saying that meetings are held every day, but the fact that the pulsating life blood of management is people cannot be avoided. If the options for listening to people and communicating with them are not suitable for you, then management will be a burden to you.
In the end, what happens if someone comes up with a problem for you - this person doesn’t get along with his colleague, he burns out and wants to go on vacation for a month, he feels that the project will not bring anything good - and while you talk with him, you feel deep in your stomach an unpleasant realization that you hate all this and that you can no longer. You will miss the days when you could manipulate anything directly - pixels, words, codes, music - quietly sitting in your headphones, and in this blessed world, no one needs to talk to you and load you with problems.
I learned this lesson well, because I myself was pushing people into the field of management when I thought that they had sufficient skills. But in the end, I knocked them out of the rut, and they burned out. It is terrible to hear from the person whom you asked to be a manager, a year later, after acknowledging that it is difficult for him to get up in the morning, because the idea that he needs to spend all day with people is so unpleasant for him.
Unfortunately, if you do not become a manager, then you will not advance on the career ladder. This sadly leads to incorrect outcomes in which those who do not like to deal with people become poor managers, and both themselves and their team suffer from this. On the other hand, we are lucky that many companies support separate, but equal career paths, in which at a certain level you can choose either to deepen your discipline or to lead people. If you find yourself at this crossroads, ask yourself if you are interested in management for the right reasons.
Those who become excellent managers sincerely love working with people. They see problems of motivation, personal barriers, and they view vague coordination as a difficult but feasible task. They love tête-à-tête conversations. Their satisfaction is achieved by the prosperity of others.
2. Knowing all the answers is not the goal. Team motivation to find answers is already a goal
Before I started working in the field of management, I thought that people become managers because they are the best in their discipline. In the end, if the manager’s job is to give feedback to his colleagues, how can this be done if you are not good at everything?
It is because of this that I have long doubted this work. I was sure that it was never better in design than the guys on my team! And at the same time I thought that all this is exactly what they expect, or I should be able to do my job well. To make matters worse, I did the same with my managers. I was inclined to think that they were right (after all, it was their job to be right!), Which meant that I had no doubt in their decisions (although sometimes this turned into a passive-aggressive indignation). If something did not work out in the team, I posed this as a problem that they should solve.
Such an approach is destructive not only for me and my team, but also for my manager. This is exactly what defines our ideological culture, in which people are afraid to admit weaknesses or failures, and we all, like ducks, pretend to glide gracefully on the surface of the water, while in reality we are desperately floundering.
Listen, nobody's perfect. In some aspects of our lives, we are heroes, and in others we are hard on.
It is foolish to expect that the team leader is much better versed than any other person in this team.
No need to know absolutely everything. You don’t even have to pretend that you all know. The best coaches are not the best athletes. The best teachers are not the best performers. Your job is to increase the efficiency of the team, which they could not have achieved without you, either because they are afraid of you, or because you motivate them.
I think we all watched enough episodes of Game of Thrones to know which choice was right.
How do you motivate the team? The topic itself is very long, but I would advise you not to be assholes / assholes, and to do what inspires and motivates you yourself, without thinking about what others expect from you.
3. To evaluate the strength of a manager, look at the strength of his team
I used to think that there is a certain list with qualities that determine if a manager is good. Do they enjoy great authority? Do you think strategically? Good in presentations? Can they complete 20 important tasks in a day? Break the fight? Reconcile people? Etc.
I'm not going to say that these are bad traits, but determining a successful manager is easy enough: his team is great. She surpasses all results.
What does it mean?
At the most basic level, this means that all the daily things that you - yes, YOU personally - achieve, do not mean anything by themselves.
You can be the most hardworking, smart, cutest manager in the world, but if your team has 20 people and a mediocre reputation, then I'm sorry, but there is no world where you could be considered a “great” manager.
On the other hand, of course, a bad manager can be lucky. They can have incredible results because they work very closely with the team. Or because they already got a great team.
In the long run, however, there is no way around the fact that the best people in their field will not work for years under the direction of those whom they do not respect or who really don’t care about helping the team.
That's why one of the fastest ways to become a cool manager is to hire the right people. I remember when I was just starting to hire, I biasedly looked for people whose career path I understood and went along it myself. Involuntarily, I set the ceiling for the people I was looking for. As a person with 5 years of experience, I had no idea how someone from the 10th would want to work in my team. Unfortunately, this view meant that the growth of my team would be slow.
If you are the most experienced person in your team in several dimensions, then the hierarchy will seem convenient, but, believe me, you do not have a great team .
It is a thousand times better to have a diverse team with people who are strong in areas where you are weak, who can teach you new skills and challenge you to take on new perspectives. This is the fastest way to grow into a manager. If you are not sure if your team will be able to come up, ask yourself if you learned something meaningful from your team. If you are having difficulty with examples, you might want to focus on the team’s ambitions.
4. The most significant advantage of a senior manager compared to a junior manager is an expanded perspective
Sometimes new managers ask me: “What lessons should I learn to quickly improve my skills and become a pro?”. I used to ask such a question myself, hoping to get life hacks that would speed up the learning process.
Now, to be completely honest, I don’t think that you can learn a lot about management without having to practice it.
That is, I believe that in order to become a truly confident senior manager, it takes at least 3 years (and in most cases more).
You can’t cut the path, trying to master this area in a few months or even a year, reading books, absorbing articles or asking for advice from other people (but these things, of course, help speedy assimilation).
This is because management is not just a skill like drawing, where you can practice alone for hours. You need the opportunity to be inside certain situations in order to learn and grow.
For example, let's look at what makes a designer great. Pretend there is a company with 100 designers. If you led only 5 designers, then, in your opinion, one of these five would be the best. If I ask you: “What qualities does a great designer have?”, Then you are likely to name the things that exactly that person does well.
Now let's imagine that another manager in the company leads the remaining 95.
Between the two of you, who do you think will, statically speaking, lead both the best and worst designers in the company? Who do you think will have a more developed and detailed perspective of what a good designer looks like?
This pertains to a ton of different management situations: leadership lagging. Hiring new people. Work with adult talents. Failure to launch a product. Regulation of a period of low morale. The sudden dismissal of people from your team.
The first time that the above happens under your supervision, it is always new and difficult; no matter how many books you read on this subject. But after the fifth time, the tenth or the twentieth, you no longer freak out. You understand that everything will be all right. You can handle it because you have to. You will become a stone, solid in the face of the winds of change.
The fact is that it's hard to snap your fingers and say: “Cool, I need to gain experience in firing people. Let me practice this next month. ” Circumstances should be so that you have a chance to really do it. At the same time, an inexperienced manager can do much more damage than an inexperienced individual assistant, so the opportunities for new difficulties do not materialize at your request.
Now, when I conduct interviews, I always rejoice at the people who enter the door, with experience in managing various teams over the years. We can say that they bring a kind of confidence and stability to the room, which means that these people have endured a lot - times of scarcity and times of excess - and that several storm clouds on the horizon will not scare them.