Chapter 17
IN THIS CHAPTER
Breaking down what makes a great product management leader
Understanding how your strengths and weaknesses contribute to your leadership style
Your role as a product manager may be a tactical role where you do lots of detail work with the team and make meaningful contributions to the team’s effort. Alternatively, you may step up to be a product leader, creating and driving the strategy while inspiring and guiding the team. For some product managers, the former is what they enjoy best and what leads to a rewarding career. But for other product managers, their passion is leading the team and the overall effort. Stepping up to do so takes a combination of courage, tact, and skill. Although cultivating leadership skills can enhance both career paths, this chapter is particularly targeted toward product managers aspiring to a leadership role with expanded responsibility. The chapter provides some insights into what it takes to develop into a leader.
A number of characteristics and abilities turn great product managers into great leaders. Following are the most important ones for you to develop in yourself:
Tenacity: The ability to keep going despite facing difficult people and circumstances is critical. As a product manager, you encounter situations that seem insurmountable, and tenacity is the key to breaking through. The effort isn’t a one-time activity or meeting. It’s succeeding in the long-haul with a vision and campaigning to achieve your goal.
Hiring managers instinctively look for tenacity in product managers. When faced with an obstacle, did the PM give up or work through it? One great approach if you have what appears to be an insurmountable challenge is to break it down into smaller steps and affect as much change as you can.
Leadership style is a very personal thing. It is highly dependent on your own personality and what you are good at. Anyone can be a great leader: introvert or extrovert, highly analytical and detail oriented or big-picture thinker. The key is to be authentic about who you really are rather than trying to be someone you aren’t. This section covers two different leadership styles as well as handling stress and communicating like a leader.
There are two primary factors to consider when determining your leadership style: concern for results and concern for people. Leaders often tend to be stronger and more focused on one than the other. The result is that their leadership effectiveness varies quite a bit. Look at Figure 17-1 to understand how people perceive leaders depending where their leadership focus is.
Product management is a stressful job. You have conflicting demands. The path forward to success isn’t always clear, and you often have to go back to your stakeholders and ask them to make changes. Change can induce stress in them and you. This section covers how to deal with stress within yourself and with others.
Because doing your job often means making stakeholders’ jobs more stressful, over time, your arrival in someone’s office or even your name on an email can induce a stress response. To counteract that, you must become the most positive and complimentary person in the office. A 5:1 ratio rule can help you overcome the stress deficit that you create in others. The basic rule is that five positive interactions can offset one negative interaction. Both this chapter and Chapter 18 frequently reference taking people to lunch; that act counts as one positive interaction. Here are just a few other ways to get to five:
What other ways can you think of?
Humans are hard-wired to react to danger, stress, or conflict (real or imagined) with one of three instincts: fight, flight, or freeze (see Figure 17-2).
Because you can’t stop the stress process from happening, your goal is simply to acknowledge that it’s going to happen and work through each stage until your harried stakeholder gets back to a calm state where you can both deal with the new challenge in front of you.
Following are of the top ways for calming down stakeholders:
You aren’t immune to stress reactions. Plan for them. If you feel your blood boiling, are stunned into silence, or find yourself walking away, tell people that you’re trying to digest the change and ask them to give you a few moments to compose yourself. Work out exactly the steps that work for you, and then put your plan in place. Over time, your co-workers learn that you have a certain way of dealing with stress and respect that you can manage your way through the situation.
The key to building confidence is to recognize that your emotional reactions are part of your human nature. Building confidence is discovering how to work with your natural tendencies to turn each of these situations into an opportunity to exercise your courage muscles. Instead of giving in to your first instinct of fight, freeze, or flight, work on a deliberate and conscious approach to facing difficult situations. Your solution to facing difficult situations combines both sincere and genuine concern for the people involved and the results you’re trying to achieve. When you do both, you’ll be practicing true leadership. The results you can achieve over time may astound you.
The old axiom that people perceive you based on how you perceive yourself is highly applicable in product management leadership. If you think of and view yourself as a leader, you’re more likely to project the qualities of a leader. Similarly, others sense when you don’t think of yourself as being capable of leading.
As a product manager, you need to practice thinking, acting, and communicating like a leader at all times.
Give credit, take blame. Leaders are the ones that give themselves permission to give others credit for what has gone well. They also take the blame when things didn’t work out as planned. Leadership doesn’t come with a red hero cape. It comes with a huge dose of humility.
If you think giving others credit makes them the leader, try this exercise: Next time something good happens in the group, be the first person to give someone else credit. Since leaders are the ones that are supposed to give credit to others, over time, you become perceived as the leader.