# Advice for new managers

**Author:** Aaron Epstein
**Type:** Essay
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/2s-advice-for-new-managers


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One of the most difficult things about starting a company is that you have to create both a product that people love and
a company where people want to work *at the same time*. It’s usually not enough to *just* have a great product, or
*just* be a great place to work, because great people build great products, and great people won’t tolerate a bad
environment for very long.

People leave managers, not companies, yet while most founders are obsessive about trying to build a product that people
love, many first-time founders raise a bunch of money and start building a team without any management experience at
all.

I was one of those first-time founders who had to quickly learn on the job, so here’s some advice I wish someone had
given me when I was just beginning to grow and manage a team at [Creative Market](https://creativemarket.com/).

**Delegate\!** As a founder you’re used to doing it all, and it can be scary to shed responsibilities you’ve always
owned, but you can’t scale yourself and focus on the highest leverage opportunities until you get things off your plate.
If you think you’re going to have to work especially late or can’t get to the things you need to in a given day, take
that as a signal to delegate to your team.

**Create growth opportunities.** Great people often care about personal growth way more than money or any other tangible
benefit you could offer them, so the flip-side of delegating your responsibilities is that you create opportunities for
people on your team to do new things, learn, and grow. Don’t hoard them all for yourself.

**Invest in your stars.** Similar to how it’s much easier to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, it’s
much easier to keep an existing star employee happy than find a new star. Go above and beyond to make sure your stars
feel valued, appreciated, and rewarded.

Set a high bar. Great people want to do big, meaningful things. Push your team with aggressive goals, and you might be
surprised what they will accomplish.

**Lead by example.** Teams embody the characteristics of their leaders, and the things you care about will be the things
your team cares about. If you sweat the details, your team will learn to sweat the details too.

**Your team’s success is your success.** Get satisfaction and the feeling of accomplishment from the success of your
team. As an individual contributor, it’s easy to look back at the end of a week and feel good about all that you’ve
directly produced. As a manager, you’re responsible for the accomplishments of your team, which can be a difficult
transition for a lot of people. The advantage is that you can scale yourself and your vision.

**Deflect all credit and absorb all blame.** Use “I” when talking about a screw-up, and use “we” (or better yet,
specific contributors’ names) when talking about successes. A little recognition goes a long way to make people feel
valued.

**Share the big picture.** It’s important for people on your team to understand how their work and role fits into the
big picture of the business, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’ll give them a sense of purpose and motivation
to understand how they’re contributing to the success of the business. It’s easy to take it for granted that your team
is clear on this, but this is one of those things where you want to constantly make that connection.

**Repeat yourself often.** You should feel like you sound like a broken record about the things that are important to
your company — your mission, your vision, your KPIs, etc. You think about it all the time, but the people on your team
don’t, and most people need to hear something many times before it truly gets ingrained in their memory. You’ll know
you’re repeating key messages enough when every single person on your team will be able to explain them to a complete
stranger exactly how you would’ve said it.

**You’re in charge.** It can be uncomfortable telling people what to do if you’ve never done it before. But you are the
leader, and everyone on your team will be looking to you for direction and guidance, so own it. People want structure
and direction, so don’t be afraid to use phrases like “I need…” and “I want…” to shape your team in your image.

**Focus on the What, not the How.** Communicate your vision for what success looks like, to give your team a framework
and goals to guide their decisions and work. It’s a way for you to “be in the room” when the work gets done without
micromanaging the work.

**Set deadlines and hold people accountable.** When you give someone a task, ask “by when?”, then add a note to your
calendar to follow up to make sure it’s complete. If standards or deadlines are not being met, give direct feedback to
change future behavior.

**Verbalize your thoughts.** Simply saying things like “I’m disappointed in this work” is extremely powerful in helping
people directly understand where you stand. People aren’t mind-readers, so rather than just jumping into solutions when
giving feedback, state your feelings out loud to be clear and direct.

**Manage for the employee.** My favorite interview question for manager candidates is “How would you describe your
management style?”, where the best possible answer is “it depends on the employee”. Each person has a unique combination
of experience, motivations, personality, etc, and it’s up to you to take the right management approach that helps them
succeed and maximizes their contribution.

**Understand that everyone’s different.** Just because you may be an achiever that’s self-motivated to get things done
doesn’t mean that everyone else on your team is. Get curious to figure out what drives and motivates each individual on
your team, rather than assuming everyone’s like you.

**Hire slow, fire fast.** It’s the thing everyone says and few have the discipline to do, but hiring well is the most
important thing you can possibly do to positively impact your business and your team. Great people want to work with
other great people, so resist the temptation to fill open positions with mediocre candidates, and don’t settle. You
should be thrilled about each new hire.

Hire for hunger. It’s great when a potential candidate walks in the door with all the skills needed to succeed in the
role, but passion for your mission, business, and team will do more to drive an employee to make a big, long-term impact
than any specific skills they may have. Passionate employees will be quicker to teach themselves new skills too,
especially as your business changes and grows.

**Set your team up for success.** It’s unfair to expect even the best people to hit the ground running on day one
without being properly onboarded. As their manager, it’s your responsibility to invest the time early on to set
expectations, show them the ropes, teach them about your business, train them, and provide clear direction and a
well-defined role. Anything less will diminish their ability to succeed.

**Your trust should be earned.** Don’t just assume that new and more inexperienced team members will hit the ground
running and understand your expectations from day one. Make them prove themselves first by working more closely with
them and frequently reviewing their work until they’ve earned your full trust.

**Shield your team from distractions.** Provide structure, focus, and clear goals for your team to maximize their
ability to execute on the strategy. They should come in to work each day knowing exactly what they’re working on and
exactly what they need to do, and any other distractions should be deflected to keep from derailing productivity,
wasting time, and knocking the team off course.

**Include your team in decision-making.** If you’ve hired great people, you’d be crazy not to include them in important
decisions. Define the decision-making process upfront to set expectations for your team — will it be a decision by
committee, will someone else on your team own the decision, or will you gather feedback to make the final call yourself?
Listen to their thoughts and opinions with an open mind, make sure everyone feels heard, then decide the best course of
action. It may even go against the consensus of the team, and that’s ok so long as you’ve defined the process and
expectations up front. Even if your team disagrees with the final call, by including them in the process they will
better understand the decision, feel like their opinion was valued, and be able to get on board to help support the
decision going forward.

**A little professional tension is healthy.** Differing perspectives help make teams and products better, so a little
professional tension can be really valuable to help push your team to think about things in new ways. It should be
net-positive though, so if it’s forcing too many decisions to get stuck in the mud, or if the tension moves from
professional to personal, then you need to take action to eliminate it quickly before it drags down the team or blows
up.

**Show your work.** Explain your decision-making process. Whenever you take a controversial action or make a difficult
decision, it’s especially powerful to fully explain how you arrived at that decision so your team can understand your
thought process and rationale, and ultimate help support the decision.

**It’s ok to not always know the answer.** Ask questions, probe, and admit when you don’t know the answer to something.
There’s nothing wrong with saying you’ll need some time to think or learn more before making an important decision.

**Have consistent 1-on-1s every week.** These are for the benefit of your employees, so you should let them drive the
agenda each week. From your side, it’s an opportunity to set aside some focused time each week to talk privately, get on
the same page, and ask open-ended questions like “how are things going?”, “how are you feeling?”, “what are your
thoughts on the big news that was announced earlier this week?”, “what’s your opinion on X?”, etc. Prioritize these
meetings in your schedule, go out of your way to keep from canceling or rescheduling them whenever possible, and your
consistent time and attention will send a signal to your team that you care about their happiness.

**Ease the maker to manager transition.** As you scale from a team of individual contributors to a more structured org,
the maker to manager transition will challenge your best people. Just because someone is an outstanding individual
contributor doesn’t mean they’ll be an outstanding manager right off the bat, because it requires a completely different
set of skills and experience. And during the transition, their instinct will be to take on both their prior maker and
their new manager duties – spending 75% effort on making and 75% effort on managing – a 150% workload resulting in less
than 100% output in each area. Put structure in place to allow them to focus on being a manager first and foremost, and
take maker duties off of their plate.

**Create a career path.** Every 6 months, ask your employees where they want to be in their career in the next 2–3
years. Work with them to put together a plan, help them get the skills and experience they need, and guide them on a
course to get there.

