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  • The Making of a Manager

  • What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
  • By: Julie Zhuo
  • Narrated by: Karissa Vackers
  • Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (100 ratings)

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The Making of a Manager

By: Julie Zhuo
Narrated by: Karissa Vackers
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Publisher's Summary

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo.

No idea what you're doing? No problem. Good managers are made, not born.

Facebook VP Julie Zhuo remembers the moment when she was asked to lead a team. She felt like she’d won the golden ticket - until reality came crashing in. She was just 25 and had barely any experience being managed, let alone managing others.

Her coworkers became her employees overnight, and she faced a series of anxiety-inducing firsts, including agonising over whether to hire an interviewee, seeking the respect of reports who were cleverer than her and having to fire someone she liked. Like most first-time managers, she wasn’t given any formal training and had no resources to turn to for help. It took her years to find her way, but now she’s offering you the shortcut to success.

This is the audiobook she wishes she'd had on day one. Here, she offers practical, accessible advice like:

  • Don’t hide thorny problems from your own manager; you’re better off seeking help quickly and honestly.
  • Before you fire someone for failure to collaborate, figure out if the problem is temperamental or just a lack of training or coaching.
  • Don’t offer critical feedback in a ‘compliment sandwich’ - there’s a better way!

If you’re looking to be promoted or in your first decade of management, this is your go-to guide.

©2019 Julie Zhuo (P)2019 Random House Audiobooks

What listeners say about The Making of a Manager

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  • Overall
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    5 out of 5 stars

Very helpful for new to mid level managers

Lots of stories resonated with me in my journey as a manager. it's helpful to listen to Julie's lessons in her trials and errors, and most of the lessons hold true in real world management. Each person's unique quality impacts your management style. Not all good managers are the same, yet the things we experience and love are all similar. It is overall a journey of growth in understanding oneself and understanding all others around us.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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So relevant!

So many great tips on managing, motivating, and coordinating teams, with great examples and case studies thrown in to highlight some of the theory. Based on the authors experience as a young new manager of a small team, growing into a passionate and experienced manager of many at Facebook. Great book.

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1 person found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Good overall

Good book. Has lots of little management lessons. Some of the tips seemed obvious having already worked under managers for a long time.

Narration was good but didn't feel as authentic or easy to follow as the actual author.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Tangible tips

A well written guide that helps frame the real pain points of what makes a manager, that resulted in it feeling relatable and understanding although I'm a manager on a much smaller scale. It also provided some good insights into how to solve many of the problems.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Author loses her points in autobiography.

The title of this book suggests it was written to help new managers from Zhou's experience. The book on occasion does make valuable points towards this. But these points are difficult to distil because they are so heavily wrapped in Zhou's unrelatable autobiographical stories. It is clear from the way she shares her lessons that she is banking on the people 'reading' (listening) being highly interested in social media and silicon valley. And though yes, technology (adjacent) businesses are taking the present and future, not everyone finds stories about Facebook's early beginnings all that magical, and the very vast majority of us don't benefit from "on days when you don't feel so great, just remember that blog post you wrote the other week may change someone's life". Zhou overestimates how enchanted her peers - or those interested in management - are with social media, and dresses her practical lessons in far too many silicon valley anecdotes.

She does have valuable insight, and I feel she would have really benefitted from clearly separating her wisdom from her experiences; either by writing two separate books, or dividing her book in chapters that were purely one or the other, rather than a constant mix of the two. This is purely because many of her experiences are not relatable and so end up clouding the universal point she's possibly trying to make.

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9 people found this helpful

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