From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo (Facebook VP, Sundial CEO, The Making of a Manager author)
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.