The Challenges (and Triumphs) of a Young Manager

CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.

Flash back with me to the early days of Facebook. Not quite all the way back to founder Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard dorm room days, but not that long after. In the early 2000s, Facebook had set up in California and like a lot of startups there, a handful of bright, recent graduates were working long hours and fantasizing about changing the world. The entire company staff could fit into a backyard party.

One of them was Julie Zhuo, who started there as the first intern. She studied computer science in college, got hired as a product designer and then a few years into the job she suddenly got a tap on the shoulder. She became a manager. It was a daunting experience, one with many missteps and misunderstandings. At just 25 years old she tried to act the way she thought a manager was supposed to act. Back then, Zhuo didn’t get much guidance on being a first-time manager and now she’s written the book she wishes had been there for her.

Today Julie Zhuo is the vice president of product design at Facebook. Her book is called The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You. Julie, thanks for being here.

JULIE ZHUO: Thank you for having me.

CURT NICKISCH: So, take me to the moment that you started managing. You were 25. You were at this fast-growing startup where you were sort of living in the now, right? Just dealing with the problems that were right in front of you and trying to solve them as quickly as possible, but not really thinking very far ahead for the company, or for yourself. Did you want the job? What happened?

JULIE ZHUO: It wasn’t something that I had been sort of thinking about. To be honest, our team – I had joined a team of designers. We were maybe five or six when I joined. We didn’t really have a formal manager because the team was still small enough. We obviously had the senior-most designer, the person who had been longest-tenured and he took kind of leadership role, but we didn’t have even managers in the traditional sense. There was no one that I was meeting with one-on-one. I wasn’t having career conversations.

And so, I’d been in this mode now for, at this point, about three years. And very used to the idea that I was just going to be asked to do whatever needed to be done. One day I might be working on an icon, the next day we had just brainstormed a new feature, so let’s go and put together some designs. So the idea that I might just get asked to help out with something and that I had never done before, that was pretty common.

And so one day, my manager said “Hey, we’ve been interviewing a lot more designers and we have a few more people slated to start in the next couple of months and I’m just by myself. I’m going to need someone else to help me manage.” And she had actually only been managing for maybe at that point a year, a year and a half. But you know, she said, “You get along with everyone. You’re pretty friendly and as these new designers start it would be great to be their manager and help them out, help onboard.”

And I was sort of surprised to kind of get offered that, but I was also in the mentality of yes, of course, I’ll do everything I can to help the team. And so, on the spot, I just said, “Sure! Yeah, happy to do so.”

CURT NICKISCH: OK. So, she picks you as a manager. You say yes. Happy to jump in and do whatever needs to be done, boss. And then what? What did you do?

JULIE ZHUO: So, very quickly we announced it to the team and then she recommends that I get on take time to go and meet one on one with each of these people who are now going to be reporting to me instead of her.

And I remember my first just very, very awkward moment where I’m thinking, oh my gosh, am I really cut out for this? It seems now a little different than all of these other roles or tasks that I would volunteer for in the past. And that was when I was having my one on one with a report of mine who yesterday was a peer of mine and in fact, someone who I really looked up to in the team. Somebody who had been doing design work much longer than I had. Somebody I considered a lot more talented frankly as a designer than myself.

And I’m sitting with him in a room and I could tell he sort of just like, “I don’t know what you can really offer me,” and I’m thinking the same thing in my head. And it’s this super awkward dynamic where I’m like, what have I gotten myself into?

CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, and the flip side is that somebody who was the most senior designer, or the person with the most design experience could have been picked, but they’re not always the best – subject matter experts aren’t always the best managers.

JULIE ZHUO: Yes, and that was something that I learned far later in my career. But at the time, I think I felt that I constantly did ask myself, “What do I have to offer?” I’m not going to be the best at critiquing your work. I’m not necessarily going to be able to teach you how to do this or that because that’s not what I’m super strong in.

I think I put a lot on myself to try and come across like I really knew what I was doing and looking back, I think this is one of the fallacies that I made and that I see a lot of new managers make, is the idea that because you grew up with this idea that managers are, have all this power. They have this authority. They’re able to fire you. They’re able to promote you. That they often have this confidence and they know what they’re doing and they’re right, and they always sound like they’re on top of everything.

And I tried to emulate that image in my mind of the successful manager. And as a result, I always felt like in some ways I was maybe playing a role of sorts. I would try to come into meetings sounding a lot more confident or prepared and if I got asked a question, I would think to myself, oh my gosh, I have to know the answer and I’d make up an answer, but then try and deliver it like it was a very confident answer, even when it wasn’t. Unfortunately, it took me some time to realize that I had to learn another way and put that aside because it wasn’t actually helping me.

CURT NICKISCH: In those early management years, how much time do you think you spent managing your teams work and product, and output and how much time do you think you spent managing people?

JULIE ZHUO: The context to keep in mind is when I started managing, I still had quite a full plate of doing my own individual contributor work. So, there were still projects that I was the lead designer for. There were still tasks and other things that I had to deliver.

And in retrospect, I think I held on to it for too long. And the reason why it was difficult for me frankly to give that away is I had this notion that I would, if I was no longer close to the work, if I was no longer, for example, using and learning the latest tools of what designers were using, or if I weren’t immersed in my own projects and could understand the process that the designers were going through, I thought that I would be a far less effective manager.

I thought that if I wasn’t also walking the walk that the members in my team would respect me less because they would see that maybe I was out of touch, or that I didn’t really know what it took to be a designer on the ground. And that insecurity kept me wanting to prove that I could still do design work, far past the point in which it was honestly, maybe a healthy balance for me.

CURT NICKISCH: You are now VP of product design and then you have a team of hundreds probably, right, under you?

JULIE ZHUO: Yes.

CURT NICKISCH: So, you clearly are a good manager. What do you most attribute your success as a manager to?

JULIE ZHUO: The biggest thing is probably just that I really love the job. And I know a lot of people who I believe have all of the skills to be a great manager, but if that’s not the thing that you get a lot of joy or passion out of, if the role of managing and which again, to me is very simply defined as helping a group of people get to the outcomes and the goals that you’ve set.

If that’s not the thing that gives you joy, then it’s going to be really hard to I think, be great at it. And the thing for me is I’ve always gotten so much satisfaction out of, I didn’t have to be me who did the thing. It had, I got an equal if not more satisfaction out of knowing that I helped someone, or I enabled someone to achieve either their goals or the goals of the team.

And I think the second part of that is at the end of the day I do, I love working with people. And I think that even though management is really challenging and I feel this pretty much almost every day, challenging because no human is the same and so, no two relationships are the same.

And challenging because I have to really try and listen and empathize and kind of get to know this particular individual, their strengths, their areas of growth their quirks, their likes, their dislikes and figure out how to help them be most productive in the context of both our working relationship, but the relationship that they have with the broader team. I find a lot of satisfaction and honestly curiosity in doing that, in getting to know people and connecting a little bit more deeply with them.

CURT NICKISCH: Now Facebook is obviously a very different company than it was when you started. Was there a time as it was scaling, as more investors came in that the heavies came in with management where there were people who had serious experience in management at other firms and had not just kind of grown up with the company, building something from the ground up?

JULIE ZHUO: Absolutely, and most startups fail. It makes sense that most of the people are going to be focused on the tasks at hand, the product that they’re building and not necessarily thinking about org design or are we living the kind of culture? Are we doing the kind of team things that we believe we need to because maybe there isn’t going to be a tomorrow?

And as your company scales you get past that, right. It becomes, you know let’s say we were very lucky our company did well. And when we got to that point of scale, we ended up hiring obviously people who were much more experienced at helping to take a small company that was doing well and turn it into kind of a longer-lasting company, right?

CURT NICKISCH: Was that hard for you at all? I mean did you resent anybody coming in and being a peer or a superior, somebody who hadn’t kind of been through the thick and thin of the early days?

JULIE ZHUO: Yeah, absolutely! There were moments there when I remember even very distinctly, I would sit in on these interviews with other design managers and these were managers that had had experience managing a team of maybe 100 to 200. And at the time, our team was still quite small and our design team was maybe 30 or 40, pushing onto 50.

And I remember hearing these managers describe all of these processes for how they handle, how they would do these six-month-long user research trips and they would hold these types of assemblies. And I remember even very distinctly this feeling of: Wow, that just seems like a lot of overhead and that totally wouldn’t work here! We’re fast. We’re scrappy. We do things quickly and this person seemed like they’re coming in and they’re going to put in a bunch of processes and they’re going to put in a bunch of like checkboxes to do X and Y.

And I kind of had this mentality of they don’t get us. They don’t know how we work. It was through working with them over the course of six months to one year to two years that I saw just how important their experience was. The fact that they had gone through that before and that all of these things that they had predicted would come to pass, sure enough, did! Right? So I had to kind of go through it to truly understand and appreciate how lucky I was to be able to actually work with people like that and to learn from them.

CURT NICKISCH: I’d like to do a little bit of a lightning round of a bunch of common management problems that you have – you’ve covered many of these in your book. Number one, what’s your philosophy on meetings? How do you like to run meetings?

JULIE ZHUO: I like meetings to have a very clear outcome in mind, what a successful version of that meeting would look like. And I try to stay away from having too many recurring meetings unless it’s very very clear, again, what we’re trying to get out of them.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s the biggest mistake people make and maybe you’ve learned not to make when it comes to recruiting and hiring?

JULIE ZHUO: The biggest mistake is I think, trying too hard to tell the candidate what you think they want to hear, that’s going to attract them to your role. I think its way better for you to be really honest about the environment that you’re in, the problems that you have and try really hard to understand the truth about this candidate and what they care about and their skills and what is fulfilling for them, and to see if there’s naturally going to be a fit.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s your favorite method for giving feedback?

JULIE ZHUO: I try and strive for giving at least 50 percent or more feedback that is reinforcing what is going well, or what I think this person’s talents are, or what something that they should continue to do, or do more of. I found that the most effective feedback is frankly when you tell someone something that they weren’t aware of and it gets them to change their behavior in a way that they’re proud of.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s one thing on your schedule that you really look forward to or make sure you make time for it each month?

JULIE ZHUO: I have lots of what I call thinking, or reflection blocks in my calendar. Starting with Monday morning. Usually, I’ll have an hour or maybe 90 minutes and that I really look forward to because I go into work and instead of immediately going from meeting to meeting and kind of reacting to situations, it gives me time to plan and really imagine the scenario. Which is OK, now it’s Friday afternoon. I’m driving back from the office, back home. I’m looking forward to the weekend. What is going to make me feel like I had a great week?

And I think about that on Monday morning and I write my list. Number one, I will be most satisfied if X and Y happen. Number two, number three. I try to make a list of the top three to five things that matter and then I try to make them feel really concrete and tangible in my mind.

And then I go through my schedule and I make sure that I have enough time to dedicate to whatever is number one, number two, number three. And more importantly to make sure that those things get more time and energy than the things that are going to be number six, number seven, number eight on the list.

CURT NICKISCH: What’s the most important thing for a young manager to incorporate when they’re managing an older, more experienced worker?

JULIE ZHUO: I think the most important thing is just to be authentic and listen well. And don’t let those feelings of like, oh this person is older, more experienced, whatever than me, what do I have to offer, get in the way of you actually be able to show up as you are.

And if this is someone that you actually do think is extremely talented, or you’re honestly nervous about it, oftentimes the best thing you could do is frankly, admit that and say look, I’m learning. I’m new to this job. You’ve been doing this job for years and I’ve got a lot to learn from you, but my job is to help you and help our team.

And so, I want you to help me understand what you care about, what your strengths are, what you’re trying to grow in, what opportunities you’d like and I’m going to do my best to help you and I also want to hear maybe your ideas for the team. What do you think we can be doing better as a team through your experience and help me do that?

CURT NICKISCH: What’s the best thing about management that you learned from Mark Zuckerberg?

JULIE ZHUO: The thing that I’ve learned the most about Mark Zuckerberg is the importance of having a clear and compelling long-term vision. Mark was always so strong at being able to create that picture that if we did well, or that we worked together well as a team that this is the impact that we could have in the world. And even when we were quite a small company, and it was very clear to us that we had this opportunity to build a tool, a social communication tool that would connect everyone in the world. And when you’re kind of, just everyone sees you as a college site, or college and high school site and no one knows, nobody outside of your circle of college friends knows what Facebook is.

It’s a very, very bold and ambitious vision, but we talked about it enough. He made it real enough for us that it almost seemed, not inevitable, but totally within our reach. Something that we could go out and do and he really instilled that sense of confidence and motivation in the team.

CURT NICKISCH: Julie I have a final question for you. You became a manager at 25 and that almost could have gone differently right? You could have been – you could have stayed as an individual contributor and you could have been a top designer, and been involved in really cool projects, and never become the manager that you are today.

And you clearly spent a lot of your time and energy and emotional energy just figuring out how to be the best manager you can be. So, looking back, I’m just curious, how much richer has being a manager made your life and what would you tell people at 25 if they have this opportunity to know about that path?

JULIE ZHUO: The first thing I would say is that a lot of what learning to be a manager and learning to be a leader — because whenever you talk to pretty much anyone in their 20’s or early 20’s, I think everyone has this aspiration that they can grow their career. And growing their career means whether or not you are a manager that you’re growing as a leader of other people.

And what I would say is there’s actually a ton of overlap and they are different roles, but what has been some of the most satisfying lessons that I’ve learned from management are frankly about how to grow as a leader. As kind of a more mature individual, as the kind of person that can help others, or that can rally a group of people around a particular cause.

And so, it’s not about just like do you have to pigeon hole yourself into one role or another, it’s just about saying OK, well what does it take to grow in my career as a leader? And I’ll try out some of the things that are about learning to work more effectively with people because frankly, at the end of the day if you want to be a leader you have to learn how to work through and with other people effectively. And that part is enriching and valuable, and you learn so much about yourself regardless of whether you think personally, management is managing a large team is the right path for you, or whether you want to continue to grow in your discipline.

And so, I would just encourage people to take on whatever opportunities come their way that will enable them to learn some of those skills, to learn how to work through and with other people, and to learn how to become a stronger leader.

I think the second thing I would say in regards to management and why I find it so personally enriching is a lot of, also learning for me at least, to manage well, has been about learning about myself and who I really am, what my values are, what I’m good at, what I’m not good at and kind of getting to that brutal honesty with myself.

And I know that at 22 or 25 if you had asked me all of these things about myself, I may not have been able to answer them. I didn’t know at that point maybe what I loved and what I didn’t love, or my, the things that would become my values or the things that I kind of want to live my life by. Those are things that we’re still maybe figuring out in our 20’s and in our 30’s. But that is a really, really important and worthwhile endeavor and more than that, it also makes you a much better leader and a much better manager.

And spending time reflecting on kind of what you care about, what you value and frankly getting to the point where you have people in your life who can be honest with you about the things that you are good or not good at. That, knowing, having that knowledge and feeling kind of grounded in who you are, allows you to make far better decisions as a leader and a manager. Because you don’t have to be everything to everyone. I think you just have to sort of accept who you are and then create the team in which you will be able to play to your strengths.

CURT NICKISCH: Julie, thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about your journey as a manager and to share your lessons from it.

JULIE ZHUO: Thank you so much.

CURT NICKISCH: That’s Julie Zhuo. She’s the vice president of product design at Facebook and the author of the book, The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.

Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Curt Nickisch.