5 tips from Mark Zuckerberg on how to run a company and manage your team

Here’s some of his most notable advice for managing teams and running a business:

Be lean

Zuckerberg famously proclaimed 2023 a “year of efficiency” for Meta, saying he wanted the firm to “flatten” its organizational structure by way of “removing some layers of middle management.”

“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” Zuckerberg said in an internal Q&A last year.

Meta cut 11,000 jobs in November 2022 and slashed another 10,000 in March 2023.

Founders, don’t delegate

Zuckerberg said one of his “most controversial” leadership tips for business leaders is to avoid delegating responsibility.

“I kind of think the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can,” he said earlier this year.

“That’s something that I guess I’ve just gotten more confident in over time, is just sort of feeling like hey, yeah I can go deep on all this stuff and push it in a direction that I think, and yeah not everything is going to go well in the near term but you just learn, rinse, and repeat,” he added. “Do good work over a long period of time.”

Allot time to read up before meetings

Zuckerberg, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is particular about his meetings.

“I actually like trying to have a rule… for every hour of meeting that I have, the team sends out the pre-reads in advance,” he told Forbes last year. “I want to have at least an hour to read the materials and think about it. And then I want to have at least an hour to follow up with different people after the meeting.”

Execute, execute, execute

You’re probably worrying about the competition too much, Zuckerberg says.

Instead, focus on executing.

“I think most companies probably focus too much on competitors, and maybe even focus too much on ideas,” he said in the Forbes interview. “And I think at the end of the day, a lot of what makes great companies great is the ability to just relentlessly execute, and efficiently execute and do that rigorously and just get better and better at it all the time.”

Move fast

Meta announced new company values in 2022, one of which was “Move fast.”

It’s an abbreviated version of what is perhaps Zuckerberg’s best-known saying, “Move fast and break things,” a mantra from Facebook’s early days.

Over the years, the directive morphed into “move fast with stable infrastructure” in 2014 before becoming simply “move fast” in 2022.

That year, the company came to define moving fast as “acting with urgency and not waiting until next week to do something you could do today” and “continuously working to increase the velocity of our highest priority initiatives by methodically removing barriers that get in the way.”