“Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.” ~ Julie Zhuo ~
Working in HR and People Ops, it’s our jobs to be knowledgeable about all the leading trends and best practices in all things people. Whether it’s philosophies of how to reward a employees, principles for what makes a superb team dynamic, or techniques in giving feedback, most of those lessons are usually piecemeal, disjointed, and isolated from the entire everyday ecosystem of an organization or team. When I found out I would be a people manager I probably felt more prepared than most. Not wanting to be overconfident, I still wanted to go into the experience as prepared as possible. @joulee book was the first one I picked up and it’s been incredibly enlightening. Many of the lessons in the book I’ve learned through my journey as an HR practitioner, but The Makings of a Manager brought them all together to succinctly encompass the journey of any people manager, humanize the experience, and give very actionable takeaways to improve the experience and outcomes for both manager and reports.