LearnaBytes

The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo is a great book for new managers because it gives an account of Julie’s experience as a new manager and some of what she did to develop into a more matured and competent manager. As at the time the book was written Julie was a senior design executive at Facebook and what she writes about in the book are insights from her growth as a manager at the company.

This is not a little book with 276 pages but it is well worth reading if you want to pick up some good management tips based on real life experience rather than abstract theories and models. The book has ten chapters and here are their titles:

1. Chapter One: What is management?
2. Chapter Two: Your first three months
3. Chapter Three: Leading a small team
4. Chapter Four: The Art of feedback
5. Chapter Five: Managing yourself
6. Chapter Six: Amazing meetings
7. Chapter Seven: Hiring well
8. Chapter Eight: Making things happen
9. Chapter Nine: Leading a growing team 
10. Chapter Ten: Nurturing culture

From the chapter topics, you can see that there are a number of useful areas for new managers such as understanding what management is, what to do in your first three months, how to lead a small team, giving effective feedback, managing yourself well and how to recruit the right poeople (if you will be involved in hiring people).

While there is a lot ot learn from this book, I have summarised a lesson I got from the book into a 1-page poster on how to earn your team members trust. For any manager, being able to earn the trust of team members is crucial for effective management. I learnt about four steps we can take to earn the trust of our team members from the book. Here they are: