The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

No recruiter can possibly know what an ideal candidate looks like for your team. They also can’t help you assess for specialized skills like reading X-rays or writing code.

In my experience, it’s unlikely that the structure of a decision meeting makes it a good forum for generating ideas.

I left with a deeper appreciation of both the importance of planning good meetings and the value of giving feedback to improve bad meetings.

The power of diversity helps our team avoid biases, make better decisions, and think more creatively.

What’s something that’s inspired you in your work recently? This sheds light on what the candidate thinks is interesting or valuable.

To have a high-functioning team, people need to work well with one another, so you need to find ways to nurture empathy, create trust, and encourage collaboration. Sometimes, you may decide to get a group of people together for the simple purpose of focusing on relationships.

The solution is to help everyone come prepared. The change we made to our decision and review meetings was to ask the organizers to send out any presentations or documents the day before so that everyone got the chance to process the information in advance.

And as a reviewer, I felt I needed to choose my words carefully in front of such a big crowd, which meant I couldn’t be as casual and direct as I would have liked.

We resolved to find other ways to invest in design education and building relationships, including sharing a detailed write-up of the meeting notes and hosting more leadership