Do you know your leadership style?
Your leadership style plays a crucial role influencing & shaping your career as a PM. Setting yourself up for success ought to start with understanding your style & the traits governing it.
Intersection of Leadership & Product
I’ve been talking to quite a few PM aspirants off late who seem to be looking for a mentor. Over the initial calls with them I make it mandatory to ask this question, use it to gauge their understanding of product management as a craft:
“Describe what attracts you to product management in a few words”
It is not really a surprise how the answers seem to be skewed towards these:
all tactical work
technical overlaps
solution-first mindset
And less towards these:
strategic alignment
goal oriented
outcome driven innovation (ODI)
And, this isn’t to typecast / pigeonhole / call out / label someone as right or wrong. It’s about a notion that someone could carry, the narrative that could lead to wrong expectations which is the scary and the most dangerous part of it all.
A fun yet real way to describe the whole intersection of product management and leadership, is this post from Dan Olsen:
Source: https://twitter.com/danolsen/status/806643945719533568
Indeed, as for any PM with great responsibility comes zero power. So, with all the reason and common sense kicking in and the whole gamut of analytical powers vested in you, a question ought to strike you hard at this stage.
“If it’s really true that a PM has zero power, then where and how does leadership fit in to one’s workflow and also why in the blazes is it even termed leadership in the first place?”
Leadership Styles
The authoritarian style of leadership was prevalent until recent times and it thrived on dictatorial control, being demanding, levels of strictness combined with lots of rigidity. Often these leaders could have been found adhering to or resorting to these over their workflows:
Here’s a list of things YOU, YOU & YOU HAVE TO DO SO AS TO GET US OVER THE LINE HERE
Ok, I HOPE YOU FOLLOWED WHAT I TOLD YOU?
Please DO EXACTLY AS I SAID, NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS
You got the gist of what I said, “NOW! ALRIGHT THEN, ACTION STATIONS”
No, I don’t have time for your questions, JUST GET THE WORK DONE – BY HOOK OR CROOK
This was so typical of the BOSS – SUBORDINATE culture that seemed banal to many orgs. across industry verticals up until the early / mid 2000s.
Post that, and especially owing a lot of the startups cropping up at various parts of the world, a culture with a bout of an understanding was built on:
how effectively teams ought to collaborate
how they ought to align
how they ought to build accountability given the goals
how they ought to stay motivated all throughout
When it is a team of < 20 people in it, the amount of troubles faced when working towards a goal could be limited and within reason with a lot of room for experimentation (chop and change) so as to find a common ground, an optimal path that works well given that setting. And, as the startups scaled to become bigger, the leaders ensured that almost all processes that defined their successes became a cornerstone and got adapted / deep-rooted into the culture of the org.
One major change was the fall of the authoritarian and the rise of a collaborative style of leadership where every concerned person in the team actively participated in all the internal rituals and was given enough bandwidth to make suggestions with a higher probability of being heard and getting noticed.
Also, the domain of product management catching up like wildfire gave birth to a culture, an understanding where teams could have their own motivations aligned to contributing their best towards achieving outcomes. And as for the role of a PM, one ought to be damn comfortable with that entire setup & culture.
The best part of it all is we are in a state of continuous evolution with the current one merely representing one such stage of an entire mammoth cycle spanning eons of improvements & betterment.
Fast forward into 2023, this is the PM’s way of life:
Source: https://twitter.com/1sprintatatime/status/1658802850368040960?s=20
As of today, PMs are found juggling much more than they did a decade ago as the demand of the role has fanned out into covering a wider perspective.
Actually, the VENN there again could get more complicated if one were to include how a PM is regularly found interfacing with external stakeholders, leadership, EXECs / C-Suite.
So, given this scenario of operative complexity, what’s the best way to lead teams towards success when ensuring alignment to those higher business objectives?
Here’s a version of the Leadership Matrix concerning Alignment vs Autonomy:
Let’s go over each of those quadrants:
NOTE: The classification is suggestive of the leadership styles as pertaining to a plot of autonomy vs alignment. This is not to say there are only these 4 leadership styles known to man. Neither is it indicative of how one is far better than the other. If anything, it ought to be dependent on the situation a leader finds himself in.
PM & Collaboration for the WIN!
Given how product management as a craft has evolved over the years and how the PM’s accountability & ownership seems to have changed for the better, collaboration easily ought to be the cornerstone of success.
Also, the amount of time a PM spends interacting & influencing all other teams within an organization over his regular workflow “seamless collaboration” ought to be a given any day. And as one is referring to collaborating seamlessly and being able to influence a whole lot of teams and members with nobody directly reporting into the role, it is natural for onlookers to think how a PM ought to have some kind of magical abilities / powers using which all the chaos is cleared up, total order / harmony is restored in a jiffy.
So, the one quality that every PM ought to develop and pin on is “Empathy”.
Being empathetic to your comrades across the entire workflow and anyone else that is directly or indirectly concerned with it ought to be deeply embedded into any PM’s approach. Going about it all with a calmer demeanor while working with people, situations, tasks goes without saying.
One of those lines here that’d be good for “ok, now repeat after me”:
“Yes, I am a product manager and empathy happens to be my default trait & an unparalleled strength”
When collaboration could mean having to rub shoulders and work with many people all at once, time stands testimony to the fact that there’s not one person in the world who is absolutely pin-point perfect or brilliant over every aspect of work. Also, when individual brilliance could get some people to standout and shine over some situations, it could be quite possible that the lack of comfort comes by pretty clearly over dealing with some other areas of the workflow.
Given the Dilbert cartoon, it looks like one person is being labeled, tagged owing to a straight comparison over just one parameter. Well, even if that had some truth, the very fact that you are a team ought to supersede anything else.
Also, why would someone be on a team if they are consistently incompetent?
Maybe he is a designer and is super-creative which is not quite your strong point as you come from backend development and given how you would have to design something you may find your foot stuck at GETSTALT principles and succumb to it right there.
Collaboration could take a major hit with these kinds of sentiments being voiced freely.
If anything, one ought to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses well and collaborate efficiently towards a goal.
And the values that leaders hold close to their heart, stand by, believe in do play a major role & go a long way in the making of strongly coupled, totally bound, cohesive team that forms the essence of a culture to die for.