Open and Connected: How I learned to manage myself and others
Since 2007, I’ve felt like I’ve been sitting on a Saturn V rocket that hasn’t stopped accelerating. I’ve been at Facebook all eight years — five as an individual contributor (IC) and three as a manager, and at this point I’m not even sure I know what life without excessive G force feels like. I’ve changed seats many times — hopping around departments ranging from Community Operations, to Platform, to Sales and Marketing Partnerships — and grown up a lot in the process. When I started, I was living on a friend’s couch and surviving on micro-kitchen food. Today, I’ve emerged out of the Facebook forge drinking pitchers of the ‘Kool Aid’ and, of course, Red Bull.
My journey is some parts luck, skill, patience, and opportunism. There have been highs and lows. But I know that people are starting out as managers all the time, so I wanted to jot down the lessons I’ve come to value — specifically the lessons about management — for those just getting started. To the new managers out there, I hope that the ride on your rocketship is as fulfilling as mine.
Managing takes different skills than IC work. Sometimes, people who are excellent at individual work don’t transition into becoming excellent managers.
Luckily, Facebook has a dual-track compensation framework, where you can be promoted through the ranks not only as a manager, but also an IC — both on parallel career tracks with equal pay. The system is purpose-built to prevent rising ICs from feeling forced into management in order to grow their career. If your company doesn’t work like this, you should quickly determine if it could, and push for it.
This is a critical screening mechanism — the first rule about being a good manager is that you’re doing it for the right reasons; you care about people and want to help them. Without this essential motivation, you and your employees will struggle with your role.
#1 Dare to Care
Work is full of emotions. I’ve cried in front of my managers, and folks have cried in front of me. Teams are built and defined in these moments.
Taking a genuine interest in people and working to see things from their point of view unlocks the trust and insight needed to turn a group of individuals into a well-knit squad.
Here’s a great post from a 20-year Air Force leader about the importance of care, even in a an environment of tough personalities like the military. In fact, caring is a major theme across many military leaders:
“The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” — Colin Powell
What’s great is that it only gets easier. Care really shows up when you’re able to empathize, and empathy, like all skills, can be grown and developed over time.
If you’re worried about whether all this personal connection goes beyond the professional, the truth is that it’s a different line for everyone. I’ve managed people with no filters between work and social lives, and others who aren’t comfortable sharing their personal sides. It’s all a matter of checking in with them to understand their point of view.
#2 Always Be Learning
Managers have an outsized impact on their peoples’ experiences and behavior, so the better you are as a human being and coworker, the better you’ll build a team that follows suit. This self-improvement is a lifelong journey.
To reach your full potential, you need to fundamentally believe that you can evolve your behavior through deliberate practice. I know where I still have a lot of growing up to do, and seek the challenges that push my limits further all the time.
It’s also important to remember that growth goes hand in hand with humility. While some people look at leaders as all-knowing and all-powerful, the truth is that the best leaders remain humble.
And of course, all this is pretty hard, and it will push you out of your comfort zone. Personal growth comes from struggle and involves failure, but despite that, it’s important that you remain encouraging, open, and calm under any pressure all the time. You’re the safe harbor that people will need in the storm.
#3 It’s Not About You
Veteran managers know that nothing is more important than the success and fulfillment of their team members. A manager must learn to drive impact through other people while allowing them to self-organize in their day-to-day.
It starts by understanding what people need. Performance is only sustainable when people are happy, and high performers are only happy when they’re challenged and growing.
But this isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. Your job as a manager is to remain flexible — not treating everyone with the same approach every time, but instead adjusting your assistance based on their skill with each task.
Specific attention to each person makes a big difference. The core of strength management is aligning someone’s interests and strengths to company goals, and not force-fitting them into a standard template for success.
And often, their strength is greater than yours. Each of your people has more expertise on their focus area than you, and relying on their input allows you to accelerate your progress while empowering individuals.
“A leader isn’t good because they’re right. A leader is good because they’re willing to learn and to trust.” — General Stanley McChrystal, Listen, learn…then lead.
This means you are dictating less and coaching more. A great coach understands that it’s best to ask questions and let others find their own answers, enabling them to strengthen the skills needed to do so again.
But you are not just a passive observer — your support is still critical. It’s as important to protect your people from negativity and blame when times are tough as it is to give them the spotlight when they succeed. Those moments are what they’ll most remember you for.
Everyone’s style is different, but I also make a point of remembering to smile and laugh. Positive emotions are consistently associated with better work performance, and managers must not only embody those emotions, but set explicit emotional values and embed them in team practices and performance reviews.
#4 Your Best Tool is Recognition
Gratitude and appreciation are the dual-heartbeat of your influence. What you recognize and compliment in others is what grows. I make a point of calling people out when I see them helping their teammates, and I put people in the spotlight when I see them taking initiative on tough challenges. People know what I appreciate, and the values that I consistently emphasize and reward are what get internalized across the team.
Your To-Do List
Facebook has the 7 behaviors of a manager, which are the centerpiece of manager training classes, work satisfaction surveys, and your own performance reviews. In a nutshell, they are:
- Show care by understanding what is most important for each person’s experience at Facebook
- Set clear expectations and goals for individuals and the team
- Provide the resources people need to do their jobs well, and actively remove roadblocks to success
- Give clear, actionable feedback on a timely basis
- Hold people and the team accountable for success
- Recognize people and teams for outstanding impact
- Support people in finding opportunities to develop and grow based on areas of strength and interest
Translating those high-level aspirations into your day to day is where you really show up as a manager. Here are some tactical tips and real-world applications I’ve seen excellent managers apply consistently.
#5 Be the C.E.O. — Chief Executive Organizer
In all things, you should strive to be the most on-time, the most forward-thinking, and the fastest to follow through on commitments. Crystalize and document your team’s mission statement, goals, long-term vision, org structure, and roadmap. Use structured team meetings and weekly reports to keep everyone routinely on-track.
#6 Thrive on Real-time Feedback
Real-time feedback is critical, and to get it right you must first be attentive enough to spot something, courageous enough to bring it up, and sensitive enough to know how to make it land best.
Sheryl Sandberg emphasizes the importance of hard conversations, and rightly so — those conversations have had profound impact on the people that work for her. This is more art than science, but feedback sessions have been my most defining moments at Facebook, and have become the foundations of the relationships I build.
Remember that positive reinforcement is a powerful thing! It’s important to be as precise and frequent with your positive feedback as your constructive feedback.
And your reports aren’t the only people that need feedback — you do to! I regularly ask for constructive feedback in order to get a better sense for how I show up to my team.
#7 Prioritize and Humanize Your 1:1s
I get most of my work done in 1:1s, and I don’t even spend most of the time talking about work.
I hold 1:1s with my reports every week without fail, and use the time to open up about emotions and their feelings about their work, not just task lists. My goal is to find a way to help them in every session, and understand their mindset and motivation as much as their work projects.
#8 Make Expectations Specific and Accountable
For projects and daily tasks, you need to be very specific with expectations, set firm commitments, and check in regularly to confirm alignment. The upfront investment allows the follow-ups to be lighter, and actually gives your report more autonomy and clarity in what they’re doing every day.
It’s also important to help your people understand how their daily work connects with their career growth. You need to solidify performance expectations according to their IC level with tools like expectations grids, which map job levels to expected skills and impact.
#9 Constantly Drive Life Goals
My boss pushed to me write this because I love writing, but wasn’t finding time for it amidst my work responsibilities. He gave me permission to spend working hours on it, and it’s been one of most fulfilling parts of my year.
Make time with your reports to identify how they want to grow. Plan for work and studies that will push their growth in that direction, and review and reflect on progress and new goals. The more that their growth is oriented to life goals instead of promotion goals, the better.
I also like spending time discussing personal development every week, versus monthly check-ins. I often see follow-through lapse without keeping the topic top of mind, and personal development often energizes and connects us more than tactical check-ins, anyway.
#10 Hire People Who Lead, On and Off the Field
Your job can become a nightmare if you’ve got the wrong people surrounding you. Keep the hiring bar high by only hiring people you’d want to work for.
Raise interview quality and signal by giving your fellow interviewers briefs on what you’re looking for, alongside unique focus-areas and question sets. Recognize that domain expertise becomes outdated while skills build on themselves, and concentrate interviews on questions that unearth a person’s mindset and not just their knowledge.
I hire people that inspire, motivate, and befriend others — while keeping work productivity high. Often, those things are the direct drivers of that productivity. People like this drive the team unity and collaboration that make Mondays a joy instead of a terror.
#11 Empower People with Great Tools
Facebook is inundated with amazing tools that drive productivity and learning. A big part of my job is just organizing these tools for my folks, and applying them at the right time. I feel like I’ve gotten a ‘Facebook MBA’ from my on-the-job development and access to training and leaders we get here, and I just want to drive others to pull from and create similar resources as much as they can, too.
#12 Get Help!
You are not alone, and you’re not the first person that’s wanted to skill-up their management skills. There’s an amazing community of managers here on Medium, with hundreds of years of combined experience on areas like performance reviews, promotions, and personal development.
But what will really up-level you is a great mentor. Driving a closer relationship with your immediate boss (or their boss!) is a great start, but you should also search outside your command chain for leaders that inspire you and that are willing to invest time in you. These folks can provide advice and experience that could unblock all kinds of issues for you, and get you striding towards better management all the more rapidly.
That’s it, and yet it’s only the beginning! I’d love for folks to comment or message me with what you’ve done or learned that’s been helpful. And if you enjoyed this, click ‘Recommend’!
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