| name | people-management |
| description | Run a team of direct reports — 1:1s with reports, trust, feedback, career growth, hiring/firing, team comms. Use when new to managing, handling an underperformer, running career conversations or skip-levels. Influence up/sideways, your own promotion, and 1:1s with your own manager → design-org-influence. Triggers: new manager, 1:1 with a report, direct report, radical candor, BICEPS, career conversation, fire someone, delegation. |
People Management
Sources/gaps: references/coverage-gaps.md tracks candidates that need current/legal/org-specific review before promotion.
Sources (quotes verified against the texts):
- Kim Scott, Radical Candor (2017)
- Julie Zhuo, The Making of a Manager (2019)
- Lara Hogan, Resilient Management (A Book Apart, 2019)
- Julie Zhuo, selected Looking Glass essays (2020-2024) for remote management and user-guide updates
Task shape: managing down — your direct reports. The frameworks themselves (Radical Candor 2×2, BICEPS as an acronym, Tuckman stages, give-away-your-Legos) are assumed known; this skill encodes the named procedures. Influence up and sideways (business cases, PM partnership, your own promotion) → design-org-influence.
References: feedback-and-guidance.md · growth-and-careers.md · hiring-and-firing.md · meetings-and-comms.md · sources.md (incl. Soleio Cuervo + Steve Ruiz interview material in hiring-and-firing.md)
How the job is graded
Chris Cox's evaluation of Zhuo: "My framework is quite simple" — half on present outcomes (did the team achieve its aspirations?), half on future setup (hiring, development, team health). Grade yourself on both halves; most managers only track the first.
Three bench tests:
- Extended-vacation test (Zhuo): if you disappeared for a few months, how much would your manager need to step in? "Not much" = great bench; "a lot" = your next layer needs shoring up. You being non-essential to daily operations is the sign of good leadership, not a threat to your value.
- Rehire test (Zhuo), for a struggling leader on your team: "Assume the role was open. Would you rather rehire your current leader or take a gamble on someone else?"
- Vision repeat-test (Zhuo): "I'll know they did a good job describing their vision if I randomly ask five people who've heard it to repeat it to me and they all say the exact same thing."
Design-lead addendum (Sten): management is a craft shift, not a better version of individual contribution. The role adds why-setting, stakeholder translation, calendar load, and people outcomes; it removes much of the protected maker time that made the IC role satisfying. Before treating management as the default promotion, ask whether the person has gone deep enough in the craft to teach it back and whether they want the relational work enough to trade away execution time.
First 90 days: know your transition archetype
Zhuo's four routes into the job set what's easy and what bites:
| Archetype | You are… | Watch out for |
|---|
| Apprentice | managing part of your manager's growing team | Awkward new dynamic with former peers; friends sharing less with you. Don't soften into "just an idea, but…" — you now own outcomes. Agree scope/success/role-split with your manager explicitly. |
| Pioneer | founding member now growing a new group | No template, no peers in-function — build your support network outside the team. |
| New Boss | inheriting an established team | You lack context; listen-and-learn period first; don't change what isn't broken. |
| Successor | replacing your departing manager | Big shoes + grief on team; resist proving yourself by doing everything your predecessor did. |
Apprentice exercise: list everything awesome about the current state next to everything that could be better — that's your change/don't-change plan.
Trust core: the 1:1
Mark Rabkin (via Zhuo): "strive for all your one-on-one meetings to feel a little awkward" — the most important conversations have that property. Zhuo's three trust litmus tests: (1) reports regularly bring you their biggest challenges ("Everything is fine" for multiple weeks = prod further); (2) you exchange critical feedback without it being taken personally; (3) they'd gladly work for you again (don't ask directly — ask "What are the qualities of a perfect manager for you?" and compare yourself).
Hogan's first-1:1 question set (keep a pinned note per person; never too late — tee up with "I'd like to ask you some cheesy questions to help me better support you"):
- Grumpiness: What makes you grumpy? How will I know when you're grumpy? How can I help you when you're grumpy?
- Feedback/recognition: preferred medium, cadence (routine 1:1s vs as-it-happens), public vs private recognition — get these answers long before you need them.
- Goals/support: what makes 1:1s valuable, goals for the year/quarter, what they need from manager/teammates/peers.
- The "wordy question" (Paloma Medina): "Human learning and growth requires the right amount of four things: new challenges, low ego, space to reflect and brainstorm, and timely and clear feedback. How are these four going for you? Is there one you need more or less of?" Revisit quarterly.
- The most important question: "What's your favorite way to treat yourself?" — for meaningful thanks later.
Introduce yourself too: Hogan's manager Mad Lib ("I'm a ___ leader who values ___… You'll see this when I ___…") and her coaching question "What are you optimizing for?" — naming what you optimize for (e.g., growing emerging leaders → open questions, not directives) sets expectations for what reports can lean on you for.
Mechanics (Scott + Zhuo): the report sets the agenda; it's not a status channel; show up — never cancel. Failure signals from 1:1s: frequent cancellations, update-only content, good news only, no criticism of you, chronic no-agenda.
User guides for working together (Zhuo, 2020): when trust or communication keeps misfiring, write and exchange "how to work with me" guides. Include how you view success, how you communicate, what may annoy people, what gains/loses your trust, strengths, growth areas, expectations for reports, and how you give/receive feedback. Specificity and vulnerability matter; generic values do not.
Diagnosing reactions: BICEPS as a lens
When someone reacts "irrationally" to news, diagnose which core need is threatened: Belonging, Improvement/Progress, Choice, Equality/Fairness, Predictability, Significance (Paloma Medina, via Hogan). Hogan's desk-move example: a "just logistics" desk move can threaten every single one of the six. Key correction: "we project our own core needs onto someone else" — so ask, don't assume; share the list with the team and ask which comes up most for each person.
Crisis script (Hogan): "As your manager, I want to make sure I'm supporting you as best I can. Is there anything that would be helpful to you to chat about?" — make "No thanks" tremendously easy. If they share hard news, "do not respond in a way that requires them to reassure you" ("It makes me sick hearing this" refocuses sympathy on you). Partner on goals instead: How else could we meet this goal? What can I do to help? What would be the impact of moving it? Vent to your own support network, never to the report.
Your own support: Voltron and first team
- Manager Voltron (Hogan): a deliberately assembled network of manager-peers — people who push you out of your comfort zone, have more and less experience, come from other industries, and are good at what you're terrible at. Recruit with the Pasqua move: pick a topic you genuinely need help with, find someone in your extended network, ask them to coffee about it.
- First-team mentality (Hogan): "their first team is their peers across the company," not their reports — it produces decisions that consider the whole company and gives you peers who are weathering the same storms.
Delegation
Zhuo's intersection rule: "spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what's most important to the organization and 2) what you're uniquely able to do better than anyone else."
- Anything a report can do as well or better → delegate. Things you do better but that aren't top-priority → still delegate and coach.
- Never-delegate list = your personal strengths applied to top org priorities (Zhuo's writing → career guidelines; her colleague's operations → recruiting machinery).
- Delegate publicly — "Elaine is our chief financial officer" empowers; a private ask doesn't.
- Hogan's messy-project gift: "the best gift you can give your teammates is a messy, hard-to-measure, unscoped project" — it builds problem-solving, support networks, and leadership faster than clean work. Pair it with a safety net: name how/when you'll support ("DM me on Slack if you've spent more than one day stumped"), say out loud that it's a stretch on purpose, and set a RACI where they're Responsible and you're Consulted + Accountable so failure isn't career-ending.
- "If you delegated everything you did today to someone else, do you think there'd be no more problems left for you to solve?" — giving pieces away is how you find the bigger ones.
For design managers, stay close enough to "open the file" (Sten). You do not need to be the strongest maker on the team, but you need current contact with the tools, constraints, and edge cases your reports face. Hands-on credibility lets you teach execution, not only strategy. Letting the craft drift too far turns reviews into abstractions that junior designers cannot use.
Energy management is part of the job design. If leadership drains your attention through meetings, reserve recovery and deep-work blocks deliberately; a manager who never processes cannot listen well, coach well, or make clear decisions.
Checklist
Relationship to other skills
design-org-influence — the other direction: influence up/sideways (business cases, PM partnership) and your own promotion/reviews. Hiring philosophy and signals (spike hiring, AI-fluency interviews, team archetypes) live in its references/team-building.md; this skill owns hiring process mechanics and firing. Note the deliberate tension: as an IC influencing up, "always have a pitch for your complaints" (Steiner); as a manager receiving ideas, Scott/Laraway invert it — demand-a-recommendation kills innovation; nurture fragile ideas, and deciders get facts, not recommendations. Same person, two roles, opposite defaults — see meetings-and-comms.md.learning-experience-design — designing manager training, coaching curricula, practice/feedback loops, and job aids; this skill owns the manager's actual relationship with reports.personal-growth — the user's own life/work direction, goals, sustainable practice, recovery, and course correction; this skill owns growth, feedback, and performance support for direct reports.user-research / design-prototyping — what your team does; this skill is how you run the team doing it.write-clear-prose — the writing layer for feedback emails, comms plans, and recap emails.
Staleness note: the books are 2017–2019; company specifics (Google/Facebook/Etsy process details, the Candor app) decay fastest. The procedures — career conversations, the feedback equation, BICEPS diagnosis, skip-level protocol, comms plans — are the durable layer.
