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 the honest 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 it takes most people a year to believe it.
A real-life example
Ege, promoted to lead a backend team at a fintech in Maslak, spends three weeks doing every hard ticket and reviewing every pull request at midnight. His manager asks what the team did that week that they could not have done without him. The honest answer is nothing, and he realises that is the problem rather than the compliment.
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.