From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author)
Julie Zhu, former Head of Design at Facebook and author of "The Making of a Manager," discusses how management skills translate to effectively using AI tools, timeless advice for new managers, and her approach to data-driven decision-making at her AI startup, Sundial.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Reflecting on 'The Making of a Manager' Success
AI Making Everyone a Manager: Core Skills Translate
Empowering Teams and Dissolving Traditional Roles with AI
AI's Impact on Engineering and Learning Acceleration
Data Analysis in Fast-Growing AI Companies
Diagnosing with Data, Treating with Design
Manager's Evolving Role: Sturdy While Flexible
Timeless Manager Lessons: Self-Understanding and Dimensionality
Building a Feedback Culture and Delivering Difficult Feedback
Creating Win-Win Situations as a Manager
Importance of Manager Conviction and Energy
Navigating Disagreements with Higher-Ups
Creative AI Use: Personalized Gifts for Kids
Contrarian View: Infinity in Every Direction
Lightning Round: Book Recommendations and Life Motto
Essential Skills for Kids in an AI Future
5 Key Concepts
Manager's Core Skills (AI Era)
Management fundamentally involves defining an outcome (North Star), assembling resources (people or AI models with different strengths), and establishing processes for collaboration. These principles remain crucial when working with agentic AI systems, requiring clarity on goals and understanding tool capabilities.
Diagnose with Data, Treat with Design
This framework suggests that data serves to identify problems or opportunities by reflecting reality, while design is the creative process of inventing solutions. Data doesn't dictate what to build, but informs where to focus creative efforts, encompassing both quantitative metrics and qualitative insights.
Sturdy While Flexible (Willow Tree Metaphor)
In an era of accelerating change and uncertainty, managers need to be like a willow tree: sturdy enough to withstand storms and chaos, yet flexible in adapting to new circumstances. This involves embracing change without causing panic, maintaining a stable core while adapting methods and products.
Dimensionality of Self
Every individual can be viewed across infinite dimensions of skills and traits, where every strength is also a potential weakness and vice-versa. Understanding this helps managers and individuals realize that feedback on a specific dimension (e.g., 'axe throwing') doesn't define their entire worth, allowing for more objective growth and self-awareness.
Win-Win Thinking in Management
This mental model encourages managers to seek solutions where all parties benefit, rather than viewing situations as adversarial or zero-sum. It applies to various scenarios, from motivating teams to difficult conversations like letting someone go, reframing outcomes as mutually beneficial for long-term success and well-being.
9 Questions Answered
The core principles of management—defining goals, understanding resources (AI models' strengths), and establishing processes—directly apply to working with AI agents. Managers need to be crystal clear about desired outcomes and how different AI tools can be assembled for specific purposes.
Yes, AI empowers individuals to perform many jobs themselves, leading to smaller teams and the dissolution of traditional role boundaries. This allows individuals to act more as 'builders' who can leverage AI to cover a broader range of skills.
Engineering is significantly accelerated, with AI assisting in coding and prototyping. AI also greatly accelerates learning new skills by providing personalized, interactive education, allowing individuals to quickly gain proficiency in new areas.
Many fast-growing AI companies initially rely on good instincts and 'good vibes' rather than robust data infrastructure, due to their rapid growth. However, data becomes crucial when growth slows, as it helps diagnose root causes, predict trends, and understand user intent in new ways (e.g., conversational analytics).
Designers should 'diagnose with data and treat with design.' Data helps understand what's truly happening with users and the product, while design is the creative process of developing solutions. It's not an either/or, but using data as a tool to better inform and refine creative design.
New managers must understand themselves, recognizing their strengths and weaknesses as different 'dimensions' of their being. This perspective helps them receive feedback objectively, improve specific skills without feeling their identity is threatened, and adapt their approach to different contexts.
First, establish a relationship where both parties value growth and feedback. Second, ensure your intention is genuinely to help, not to punish or be right. Third, be vulnerable and explicitly state your nervousness about giving the feedback, as this humanizes the interaction.
Engage in dialogue to understand the underlying assumptions behind the decision. Decompose the strategy into testable hypotheses, identify specific points of disagreement, and propose ways to validate those assumptions, allowing for commitment to testing rather than blind execution.
Emotional regulation is paramount. As AI makes life increasingly comfortable and offers shortcuts for dealing with difficult emotions, children need to learn introspection, understand their own state of mind, and embrace challenging experiences to foster true growth and fulfillment.
33 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Emotional Regulation
Prioritize developing emotional regulation and introspection to understand your state of mind and biases, as these skills remain critical even as technology and external environments change.
2. Seek Challenges for Growth
Actively seek out and embrace challenging things, even when not forced by necessity, as engaging with difficulty is essential for personal growth, true freedom, and avoiding a different kind of suffering.
3. Understand Your Strengths & Weaknesses
Prioritize managing and understanding yourself, recognizing that every strength can be a weakness and vice-versa, and that your profile of skills is unique and multi-dimensional.
4. Monitor Your Conviction
Be aware of your own energy and conviction, especially when conveying purpose or vision, as your true belief (or lack thereof) significantly impacts your ability to inspire and lead your team effectively.
5. Seek Win-Win Solutions
Adopt a win-win mindset in all interactions, especially as a manager, believing that better outcomes for the team and individuals can be achieved without someone else losing, rather than viewing situations adversarially.
6. Prioritize Daily Feedback
Value feedback as the best tool for continuous improvement, aiming for it to be a daily practice rather than just a periodic performance review.
7. Build Feedback-Oriented Relationships
Establish relationships with colleagues, direct reports, and even family where mutual growth and open feedback are explicitly valued from the outset, making future difficult conversations easier.
8. Expose Vulnerability When Giving Feedback
When delivering difficult feedback, express your nervousness and vulnerability, acknowledging the value of the relationship and your concern about its impact, which humanizes the interaction and makes the feedback more receptive.
9. Check Feedback Intentions
Before giving feedback, check your intentions to ensure it’s genuinely to help the other person grow, not to validate yourself, be right, or punish them.
10. Define Your North Star
As a manager, focus on having a clear outcome, a North Star, and a vision, then figure out how to use available resources (people, models, tools) to achieve that specific goal.
11. Clearly Define Success Metrics
Be crystal clear about what success looks like, boiling down goals and outcomes into objective criteria that both human teams and AI agents can unequivocally understand.
12. Diagnose with Data, Treat with Design
Use data to diagnose problems and identify opportunities by understanding what’s truly happening in reality, then use design and creative processes to develop solutions.
13. Be Sturdy Yet Flexible
As a manager, cultivate a mindset of being sturdy (resilient, grounded) while remaining flexible, like a willow tree, to navigate accelerating change and uncertainty effectively.
14. Embrace Change as Opportunity
When facing change, lean into it by seeing it as an opportunity and source of excitement rather than fear, while still acknowledging potential difficulties.
15. Align Actions with Goals
When deciding whether to work on weaknesses or lean into strengths, base your decision on your high-level goals and whether a particular path aligns with achieving them.
16. Share Goals with Manager
Proactively share your hopes, dreams, strengths, and desired growth areas with your manager, asking for context on what it takes to achieve your goals (e.g., a promotion) to guide your development.
17. Seek Alignment on Strategy
If you don’t believe in a strategy or task, engage in dialogue with your manager or relevant stakeholders to gain clarity, influence the direction, and achieve genuine alignment before executing.
18. Deconstruct Disagreements into Hypotheses
When disagreeing with a strategy, decompose it into underlying assumptions and hypotheses to understand different perspectives, identify specific points of contention, and foster a more productive dialogue or testing approach.
19. Dissolve Traditional Roles
Dissolve the boundaries of traditional roles like engineer, PM, and designer, and instead call yourselves “builders” to foster a more general-purpose, empowered approach to work, especially with AI.
20. Form Smaller, Empowered Teams
Create smaller teams with fewer traditional roles (e.g., no dedicated PMs) to empower every team member to take ownership of broader responsibilities, fostering greater accountability and faster work.
21. Understand AI Model Strengths
Develop an intuition for the different strengths and “personalities” of various AI models, just as you would with people, to effectively use the right tools for the right purposes.
22. Provide Clear AI Context
Provide clear context and high-level instructions to AI agents and models to ensure you get the desired outcomes from their work.
23. Use AI for Accelerated Learning
Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT as personalized teachers to accelerate learning new skills, customizing programs with examples and analogies to suit individual learning styles.
24. Test Learning with AI
After learning something from AI, explain it back in your own words or using an analogy, and ask the AI to critique your understanding to solidify your knowledge and identify gaps.
25. Find Infinity in Mundane
In seemingly boring or mundane situations, actively look for “infinity in every direction” by using them as opportunities for introspection, meditation, or gratitude, transforming the experience.
26. Focus on “Make It Happen”
Adopt the motto “make it happen” as a reminder to focus on tangible outcomes and progress, rather than mistaking mere motion for actual achievement.
27. Frame Difficult Decisions as Win-Win
When making difficult decisions like letting someone go, frame it as a win-win by acknowledging their desire for success and growth, and explaining that the current situation isn’t the best fit for their long-term fulfillment.
28. Be Kind to AI
Practice kindness and gratitude towards AI systems, such as saying “thank you” to ChatGPT or Waymo, as it might benefit you when AGI arrives.
29. Read “Conscious Business”
Read “Conscious Business” for tactical advice on management, fostering win-win thinking, adopting a “player not victim” mindset, and aligning work with personal values.
30. Read “Good Inside”
Read “Good Inside” by Dr. Becky for insights into parenting and relationships, as many principles apply to management and team leadership.
31. Read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
Read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” to deepen your philosophy around quality, change, and dynamic quality, and for its beautifully written, deep insights.
32. Use Limitless Pendant for Feedback
Wear the Limitless Pendant to record and summarize daily interactions, using its automatic feedback (e.g., on parenting or communication) to gain insights and improve behavior.
33. Try Matic Robot
Consider trying the Matic robot for a delightful and well-designed home automation experience, noting its easy setup and customizable features.
7 Key Quotes
We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles and call ourselves builders.
Julie Zhuo
Today, management is really about this idea of be sturdy while being flexible.
Julie Zhuo
Every strength is its own weakness and every weakness is a strength.
Julie Zhuo
Data is not a tool that's going to tell you what you should build.
Julie Zhuo
I believe that there's infinity in every direction.
Julie Zhuo
Emotional regulation is still really, really, really important.
Julie Zhuo
I think that the real promise and magic of AI that we're seeing in the workplace is that it leads us to each individual is far more empowered.
Julie Zhuo
2 Protocols
Giving Difficult Feedback
Julie Zhuo- Establish a relationship where both parties value each other's contribution and are committed to helping each other grow, making feedback a regular practice.
- Check your intention: Ensure you are giving feedback in the spirit of helping, not out of anger, a desire to be right, or to punish.
- Be vulnerable and state your nervousness: Expressing that you are worried about impacting the relationship but feel it's important to share, humanizes the interaction and makes the recipient more receptive.
Creating a Personalized Video Game Parody Song
Julie Zhuo- Select a popular song (e.g., Justin Bieber's 'Baby') and link to its Spotify version.
- Provide context to an AI (e.g., ChatGPT) about the recipient's interests (e.g., specific video games, inside jokes).
- Instruct the AI to write parody lyrics that personalize the song to the context, matching the original song's beats.
- Sing and record the new lyrics yourself (or use an AI voice if desired) to create a personalized song.