This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Katie Greifeld and I have been in here chatting about what it's like to be a manager. And you know what, spoiler alert, neither of us are managers. Know somehow, I'm not in charge of a single person other than myself. It's probably a good thing for both of us. I know, it's a lot of work. It's really interesting because it's something
that Julie Jaal writes about. She's the co founder of In Spirit and also the author of the new book The Making of a Manager, What to Do When Everyone looks to You. Julie joins us this afternoon from the Bay Area out west. Julie, how are you. I'm doing great. How are you all doing? We're doing well. Thanks. Um. Take us back to your mid twenties and when you got this promotion and you became a manager. That is sort of the genesis of this book. So I was
years old. I had just joined a scrappy startup three years prior. It was a little college social at working at the time called Facebook. Heard of it locally for me, you know, to start up, grew and grew, and so within a couple of years we had added a lot more people. And since I was one of the early people there, one day my manager turned to me and said, you know, we have four new designers joining next week and I don't have time to meet with them. Why
don't you be their manager? And at this point, you know, I had no training at this about how to lead, how to manage. But yet I found myself in this situation needing to ramp up new people and help our team grow. And this is a very common story in Silicon Valley or in any context where a small team starts to take on bigger and bigger goals. Uh. And
that is how I found myself in that role. Um, without that preparation, I made every single mistake in the book about learning how it is to manage and lead people. And ultimately, some years later, I decided to write all that down and UM, hopefully I can seem like I'm having a coffee chat with somebody else finding themselves in that situation. And so I mean, if you could go back in time and talk to younger Julie Newly in that situation, what would you say? What would be the
main bullet point there. The most important thing I would tell somebody in that situation here is what the job of a manager is. Because here's the thing. We grow up, we watch movies. We have a sense of like, what does the boss do right? And we think about the boss as the person who makes decisions, the person who hires and fires people, the person who gets to tell everyone else you know, what's right and how things go. And the reality is, in my experience, like, that's not
really what great managers do. So the first thing I want from to understand is what exactly is the job of management? And very simply I define it as the manager's job is to help a group of people be able to achieve more together. So how do they do that right? How do they actually get a group of talented people to achieve more together? There are three main
levers that a manager has. The first is people. You know, you need to bring in talented people who have the skills to be able to do what the group wants to do together. The second is process. So do you have all of these great people, okay, how should they work together? You know? How do they come up with new ideas? How do they resolve disagreement, who should do what? You know? How does their work get divided? And finally purpose, which is defining what does success look like for this
group of people? How do we know what a good job is? How do we know what a great job is? How do we know what a mediocre job is? All that has to be shared in terms of all of the members on the team in order for this to team to go on and do great things. I'm wondering about people who may not be managers yet and may not even aspire to be managers. And how you know we talked about this idea of managing up and the idea of working with your bosses in a way that
is productive. What if I do you have for people in those situations? The most important advice I have for somebody when they think about managing up is make sure you know these two things. Make sure that your manager knows what you aspire for, what your goals goals are in your career. Do you want to get a promotion? Do you want to manage one? Did? Do you want to take on big projects? Or or you know, are you very happy doing what you're doing? You know, what
kind of projects are you excited to take on? What kind of challenges are meaningful and what kind of things do you hate doing? Make sure your manager understands that a right, So ask yourselves, does my manager understand what my aspirations are, what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are? And if not, go ahead and tell them right, tell them in a one on what make sure they know. And the second question is do you want to understand what success for my manager looks like in regards to
what I can do to help them? Because if you don't feel like you know what your manager is is aspiring for in regards to the team that you're a part of, or what success for you looks like, you know, you're gonna be basically talking past each other. So both of these things need to be true. And if they're not clear, that's what time with the manager in one on one setting is for. Right. Make sure they understand
your goal. Make sure you understand their goals. And Julie, what would you say, not necessarily to a new manager entering a situation, but a manager that maybe has already had some struggles with their team with the reports, who has you know, maybe lost faith? How do you rebuild that sort of trust there. It's super critical that managers have the trust with their team. And you know, everyone
makes mistakes. I've certainly made many as a manager, and in those cases, what helped me the most was being able to admit my own vulnerability and uh and and come clean with people. Right. The thing is a lot of times managers have immense pressure on them. You know, they might think I'm the manager and the boss, I'm the person who should have all the answers. But that's just too high of an expectation to have on anyone. There's no single person and a company who should feel
like they have the answers to every single problem. That's why we have a team. That's why people come together to work on big problems. And so in the cases in which you know, as a manager you made the wrong call, something happened, just to own it. Just admit that there was a mistake, you know that you made, you thought certain things, it didn't happen the way they expected, and and complete and ask for help. Ask the team, Hey, you know, this is one of the things that we
need to do together as a team. I don't have all the answers. I would like ideas from all of you, what do you think we should do? The best thing I've found for myself as a manager, the thing that gave me both a lot more impact but also a lot more power, is to be able to leverage the expertise and the wonderful talent among the people on my team. Julie Jow we got to leave it. Their co founder
at the Advisory Firm in Spirit. It's an organization that partners with tech companies to help scale and build products. Julie Wi also spent years at Facebook, where she helped build the app into one that's used by more than a billion people. She's the author of the new book The Making of a Manager, What to Do When Everyone Looks to You. Joining us this afternoon from the Bay Area in California. Julie, thanks so much for taking the time.