Crafting your 10 commandments

Making vulnerability your strength

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.

Why it matters

We often have an image of how a manager “should” act or come across. Confident. Cool. Capable. Ready to lead the way to succcess.

However, as Charlene shares, we may be doing ourselves and our teams a disservice by trying to mold ourselves into this archetype. In fact, showing vulnerability is a strength. Having open and honest conversations, including about your weaknesses and uncertainties, and enabling others to do the same is key to building rapport and trusting relationships within your team, as well as fostering an environment of collaboration, risk-taking, and growth.

Putting it into action

1. Be okay with not knowing everything, and ask for help

Everyone has limits and weaknesses, and we face new challenges every day. It's much harder to accommodate for and overcome them if you don't admit them though. Whether you're on day 1 or day 1000 of being a manager, don't be shy asking for help and guidance – and don't be too hard on yourself!

2. Admit to your team when you don’t know

Your job as a manager isn't to have all the answers. Your job is to guide your team towards finding the answers together. Get comfortable saying “I don’t know,” as long as you pair it with a plan to figure it out together. Inviting your direct reports to problem solve with you builds a stronger sense of ownership and engagement.

3. Create room for vulnerability within your team

Be conscious and deliberate about how you build trusting and mutually supportive relationships within your team. For example, Charlene created a regular forum for team members to share their challenges and seek help from each other – and she saw a dramatic impact on how they connected and collaborated with each other.

Other resources recommended by our guest

Bringing Up the Boss by Rachel Pacheco

Share your insights & experiences

When have you felt comfortable or uncomfortable being vulnerable with your team? In moments when you (or someone else) chose authenticity and vulnerability over false confidence, what impact did you observe?

We‘d love to hear from you at [email protected] or on Twitter @YoullManage!

Where to learn more about our guest

Charlene Leung is Group Product Manager at Ylopo. You can find and connect with her on LinkedIn.

Challenge: Crafting Commandments

“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.

The management commandments You'll Manage Challenge

For this week’s challenge, you'll start identifying one or two principles based on the feedback you give to your team.

Here's how:

1. Note the feedback you have been giving this week and reflect on whether there are common or recurring themes.
2. Reflect on those themes and dig deeper to uncover the underlying reason for its prevalence. For example, a specific, prescriptive piece of feedback about how to conduct a meeting may reflect a broader principle or management truth that you believe in about communication or transparency.
3. Try to articulate that reason as simply and clearly as possible, such that you can then articulate going forward with your team. That’s your first principle! It doesn't need to be perfect – undoubtedly this will a forever evolving, iterative list.

Share your Challenge experience

Drop us an email at [email protected] or tweet us @youllmanage to let us know how your experience completing the Challenge was. What principles did you come up with? How did you uncover them? Or do you already have a set of principles that you've developed over time?

Even better, record a voice memo and attach it to your email, and we might feature you in a future episode of You'll Manage!

Crafting your 10 commandments

“No one is unreasonable.”

That's one of the 10 principles that engineer-turned-product guy Eusden Shing 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.

Why it matters

Effective teamwork is often about effective alignment – around what matters and what doesn't, what success looks like, and how best to get there. Having clarity around your core beliefs helps us lead with focus and intentionality, but perhaps even more important is the ability to effectively articulate them. Building a shared understanding of how to collaborate and excel together not only helps align and mobilize your team, it also provides a framework for coaching your team members and giving them feedback.

What are your "commandments"?

Putting it into action

1. Start capturing potential principles

Reflect on your own experiences. What are some potential candidates for your list of operating principles? Is there anything you've learned from others that has stuck with you, whether from mentors and managers or books and podcasts? Are there concepts you often find yourself using to coach others? Start capturing it all in a live document.

2. Test them out

As you grow your list of potential principles, you’ll want to see which ones actually work. Try to put them into practice in your workplace – do these principles work in the context of helping you make decisions at work, collaborate with colleagues, and tackle tough challenges? Consider discussing them with your team and get their feedback as well to see if it resonates.

3. Communicate and incorporate

Once you feel you have a solid list that’s been tried and tested, it’s time to start spreading the word. Incorporate your principles into how you frame your actions, decisions, feedback, advice, and more. Make it part of onboarding for new team members. Ultimately, if they truly are effective, essential principles they should become an essential part of your team's culture

4. Iterate

Revisit your list periodically. Do the principles still make sense and still work for you and your team? Are there new ones you want to add and maybe ones that no longer resonate? What feedback have you gotten from others? Your journey as a manager is forever evolving, as well as the contexts you're working in, so it’s likely that your principles will evolve over time as well.

Other resources mentioned in this episode

• "No One is Unreasonable" by Seth Godin
• The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh
• High Output Management by Andy Grove (introduces "task relevant maturity")

Share your insights & experiences

What are some of the principles you have on your list? How did you come to consider them essential? How do you propagate them within your team's culture?

We‘d love to hear from you at [email protected] or on Twitter @YoullManage!

Where to learn more about our guest

See Eusden's list of principles on his

Challenge: 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 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.

The community building You'll Manage Challenge

Your challenge this week is to take one deliberate step towards fostering a stronger community with your team. It can be small, like asking an icebreaker question at your next meeting, or bigger, like organizing a book club. It can be silly, like a dress-up day, or serious, like grouping new sets of people together on projects.

Every workplace and team community is different, so we can't tell you what exactly to try, but hopefully this episode provides some good options and a bit of inspiration.

Share your Challenge experience

Drop us an email at [email protected] or tweet us @youllmanage to let us know how your experience completing the Challenge was. What was your community-building effort? How did it go? What would you recommend to others?

Even better, record a voice memo and attach it to your email, and we might feature you in a future episode of You'll Manage!

You're not just a manager, you're a community leader

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. And so, managers need to think of themselves as community leaders.

Why it matters

Charlene's perspective on management was shaped significantly by her time at Google, whose research has found that the relationships we have with colleagues aren't just a nice to have – they're a key foundation to effective teams. Google identified "psychological safety" as by far the most important dynamic for effective teams and creating "an inclusive team environment, showing concern for success and well-being" as one of the top 10 common behaviors of its best managers.

Thus, it's incumbent on good managers to build those connections – not just one-to-one with their direct reports, but among team members as well.

Putting it into action

Building community seems like a daunting task, but it can be done bit by bit. Charlene suggest starting with these three pillars:

1. Understand your community and get to know your all your team members. Who are they? What are their personal goals? (Listen to our interview about career conversations in episode 1 for more on this.)
2. Create space for community to get to know each other. Whether in small ways like icebreaker questions at the start of meetings or bigger ones like team activities, create opportunities for people to get to know each other personally.
3. Draw on your own experiences. Think back to when you felt included, psychologically safe, energized – times when you were excited to go to work and see your teammates every day. What made that experience so special? What can you do to bring that back into your own team, in your own authentic style?

Share your insights & experiences

How would you describe the communities you've been part of at work? What are ways you've successfully built and strengthened your team community? What aspects have been particularly challenging?

We‘d love to hear from you at [email protected] or on Twitter @YoullManage!

Where to learn more about our guest

Connect with Charlene Lee at charlenelee.me and visit her company Radar's website to learn more about the company and see the open roles in their fast-growing team!