You'll Manage

What do you do when you feel like an imposter or feel inadequate? Fake it till you make it? Or be forthcoming with your shortcomings?

Our guest Charlene Leung shares how when she first transitioned from individual contributor to people manager (less than a year ago!), she felt the pressure to project all-knowing confidence in order to earn the respect of her team, even when that confidence was false. But she came to see that putting up this false front was counterproductive, and that when she was willing to be vulnerable with herself and her direct reports, it brought her team together, built trust, and eased the anxieties that had often kept her up at night.

“You'll Manage Challenge” episodes put theory into action, providing you a clear, achievable next step to up your management game within a week.

In Episode 11, Eusden Shing, an engineer-turned-product leader from Hulu and Pinterest, shared how he came about his set of core management principles, and how they have been key to effectively managing and guiding teams. Compiling a full set of "commandments" takes time, but in this week’s Challenge we’ll talk about how to get started, one principle at a time.

“No one is unreasonable.”

That's one of the 10 principles that Eusden, an engineer-turned-product guy lives by. In this episode, he shares how having carefully crafted a list of principles has helped him lead teams at companies like Hulu and Pinterest. We learn about some of his top 10, including “trust is the foundation” and “focus on few things well,” and how he puts them into practice to manage and collaborate effectively.

“You'll Manage Challenge” episodes put theory into action, providing you a clear, achievable next step to up your management game within a week.

In Episode 9, Charlene Lee, head of product and design at Radar, spoke about the importance of building community and relationships at work. It's the perfect topic for a “You'll Manage Challenge”: A huge, daunting task that we can only start tackling bit by bit.

We were electrified by two simple words in this interview: "community leader."

We've all felt how much more enjoyable and effective work can be when we're collaborating with people we have mutual trust, respect, and care for. By extension, Charlene Lee, head of product and design at Radar, points out, building effective teams means building community.

“You'll Manage Challenge” episodes put theory into action, providing you a clear, achievable next step to up your management game within a week.

In Episode 7, CEO and co-founder of Remote Job van der Voort shared his passion for remote working and the incredible freedom and flexibility it brings. This week's challenge is about looking for ways to bring a bit of those benefits to yourself and your team, even if your organization is far from going fully remote.

CEO and founder of Remote Job van der Voort has a message for all of us still adapting to working and managing from home – being forced to learn to operate remotely might be a blessing in disguise.

Once the VP of Product at GitLab, another fully-remote organization, Job was so passionate about empowering people to work from anywhere that he left to start a company that specializes in helping other businesses go remote. In this episode, he tells us why – and the lessons all managers can learn from managing remote.

“You'll Manage Challenge” episodes put theory into action, providing you a clear, achievable next step to up your management game within a week.

In Episode 5, Tomás Campos revealed to us the one critical question he learned to ask at Uber: “What are your expectations of me as a manager?” It's not always an easy question to answer, though, so this week's Challenge provides some other ways to approach that question and start a conversation.

Early Uber employee Tomás Campos circled the globe launching the service in new cities. Managing teams from different cultures, he discovered how essential it was to ask a simple, yet critical question: “What are your expectations of me as a manager?”

Listen in to hear Tomás share some of the painful consequences he faced before he learned to always ask – and why when he did ask, he says it was “one of the most interesting exercises I've ever gone through in my life.”

“You'll Manage Challenge” episodes put theory into action, providing you a clear, achievable next step to up your management game within a week.

In Episode 3 we talked about empowerment, and this week's Challenge will help you, well, challenge your direct reports! Using a four-stage framework, you'll be able to thoughtfully and carefully guide your team towards greater autonomy and responsibility (it's not the deep end or nothing!).