Quick Thoughts on The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Zhuo, Julie. The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You. Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.
My Review 4/5
Honestly, I wish I had picked this one up earlier in my career as a manager.
The book jumps right into the observation that great managers are made, not born. There are tangible, discrete, learnable skills to being a great manager, and pursuing them takes time and effort. Congratulations; reading this book is a step in the right direction.
The Making of a Manager is especially helpful in those first few years of management when you’re navigating all the challenges of the promotion, facing new expectations from senior leadership, and letting go of being an individual contributor.
The chapter “Your First Three Months” offers direct advice on navigating the transition. Pro tip: There was probably someone else on the team going for the same promotion; now, your first management task is rallying the team.
Other chapters cover delivering hard feedback when an employee isn’t a good fit for the organization and optimizing your most impactful decision—who you hire. This book is a candid look at the rapid growth of Facebook1 and Zhuo’s career as a manager.2 I think the book reads conversationally with a vibe of “If I was figuring it out as I went, along so can you!”
Reading this in 2025, it seems the “growth at all costs” days of ZIRP are long behind us, but even if you’re not scaling a team of 10 to 100, the bulk of the content covers fundamentals like “Leading a Small Team” and “The Art of Feedback.” Worth a read.
The lesson is that management is a skill just like programming—or design, in Zhuo’s case—and must be nurtured and practiced. Use this book to build your skills.
Significant Revisions
- Mar 13th, 2025 Originally published on https://www.jsrowe.com with uid FC17D53E-D97D-4D8D-8E5B-B6628DB86C21