Concept
The manager's job
The manager's job, in Julie Zhuo's definition, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together. It is measured by what the team produces because of what the manager did, not by the manager's own output, and it is a different job from the one that earned the promotion.
Most new managers are never given a definition, so they keep doing the job they were good at with a title attached. Zhuo's sentence replaces that: better outcomes, from these people, together. Three things follow. The manager's personal output no longer counts except as it raises the team's; the expert's habit of doing the work, which is comfortable, visible and fast, teaches the team to wait; and a practical test of whether the transition has happened is the calendar. A week full of tasks the manager used to do is a week in which the new job was not done. The definition also tells the manager what to do when something goes wrong: ask which of the three levers (purpose, people or process) failed, and fix the lever rather than the symptom. It is a plain sentence, and many people take a year to believe it.
A real-life example
A head chef promoted to run the kitchen of a hotel in Nevşehir keeps cooking the hardest dishes herself on every busy night, and the line cooks stop attempting them. After a month the hotel manager asks her what the kitchen can do now that it could not do when she took over. She cannot name anything, and realises that being the best cook in the room is no longer her job.
How to use it
- 1Write the definition where you will see it: better outcomes from these people, together.
- 2Mark last week's calendar: every block that was the old job is leverage wasted.
- 3When something fails, name the lever, purpose, people or process, before naming the person.