At some point in your company's lifecycle, the role of the founder has to change from the person doing all the things, to the person leading a team who is doing the work. This transition can be difficult and requires a different set of skills than what got you to that point. This talk looks into ways you grow into a well-balanced leader, taking care of your team, your company, and yourself.
← All talks
Turing Fest 2020
The Well-Balanced Leader
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Hi. My name's Emily Tate, and I'm chief of staff at Mind the Product. And I'm gonna talk about being a well balanced leader. I remember when I got into leadership and I came out of a world of product management. I was a really good product manager.
I knew how to evaluate opportunities. I knew how to work very closely with my engineering team to get things done and build products that my customers loved. So naturally, I thought that the next step should be to move into leadership. That's what you're supposed to do in your career, right?
You learn a craft, become really good at it, and then move into the leadership role. Life level unlocked. I got the promotion and was put in charge of a product team. One of the team members was very senior and was basically being demoted.
Rather than trying to work with her and see if there was a way to use her skills, I crossed my fingers and hoped that she would find another role and move on. Another team member that I inherited was a little bit more junior and not quite living up to the role that he could be.
But I was more concerned with being liked than being a good leader. And so I let him get by with things that weren't great, didn't really challenge a lot of the things that he was doing, and just wanted to be encouraging rather than challenging and direct.
He didn't end up doing very well in the role, and our product floundered as a result. This happens with a lot of people as they move into leadership, whether it's from a big company and an individual contributor role or from a startup founder who is moving into a scaling mode and building your team.
We take people who are really good at doing, at building the products themselves, at being the coders, being the designers, and we put them into a role that requires a completely different set of skills. This is not the easiest thing to do. And especially when we're first moving into these roles, we end up in a mode where we feel like we have no idea what we're doing.
The impostor syndrome is doubled. So today, I want to share some things that I wish I would have learned going into management and some skills that I've picked up along the way. The key thing that I've learned is to be a good manager, you have to balance the needs of three groups, your team, your company, and yourself.
If you skew too far in any direction, you might keep things going, and you might even have some success when it comes to metrics. But you might not be getting the most out of your team, your product, or yourself. So starting with your team.
In order to effectively manage your team, you have to actually give up control. This can be especially hard if you've been with the product from the beginning. If this was your baby, your brainchild, handing it over to someone else to start to put their fingerprints on it can be incredibly difficult.
I remember the first time that I handed over one of my projects to a team member that I had hired. It was an effort that I had been thinking about for years, and I had a very clear vision of what I thought that our customers needed out of this set of functionality.
My team member took this project over, did research himself, and started to craft from his perspective what he thought the customers needed, and it looked completely different than what I would have built. It was so hard not to jump in and try to steer him in the direction that I wanted to go.
And at the end of the day, he ended up building something that was probably better than what I would have built myself. Neither were bad. They were just different. And by giving your team the ability to put their fingerprints on your product, you're opening up a world of lots of different ideas and different ways of building things.
The next thing with your team is to give your team room to fail, but safely. As leaders, we often have a lot of experiences that our teams don't. We can see the potholes that are ahead from a mile away, and our team members might not have that same insight.
And like parents, we want to step in and protect them from harm and protect our products from harm, protect our companies from harm. But sometimes people need to fail in order to learn. So ask lots of questions. Dig in and ask them to help explain why they think something is a good idea, what their thought process was, what research they've done that has gotten them to this point.
And sometimes if they believe in something, you have to let them try it, even if it's not what you would have done or even if you can see where it might fail. Obviously, don't do this on things that are going to be detrimental to your business, but opening up space for people to make their own mistakes and learn from their own failures will make your team even stronger and set your business up for resilience.
You see a lot the concept of the turtles when they hatch. The eggs are laid further inland on the beach. And when the eggs hatch, the little turtle hatchlings come out, and they have to make their way to the ocean. It's a big deal. You can see videos of this online.
They're very cute. But the biggest thing is if you pick up one of those turtles and just place them in the water, they're not strong enough to survive. They have to go through the struggles of getting through the sand on the beach in order to build the strength they need to be able to make it in the water.
That's what we have to do with our teams as well. We have to give them the ability to get through the struggle so that they can swim on their own. The other big thing with the team that I would say is give feedback early and often.
As I've looked back over my career as a leader, every management regret I have was a result of withholding feedback. I've had employees that I thought I could just steer in the right direction with a little bit of light feedback and they weren't getting it.
And the more that I tried to give them this light feedback, the further off they went from where we needed them to be. And by the time I had to give them actual feedback, it had built up over several months and was incredibly difficult.
It was a painful conversation for me to start. It's a painful conversation for the employee, and it's not fair to them because they could have been so much better had they gotten the feedback they needed early and often. There's a book that's really popular called Radical Candor.
I highly encourage anyone who is leading a team and especially those who are leading businesses to read this book. It's by Kim Scott, and it talks about the concept of radical candor. I tend to fall fall into what she calls ruinous empathy where I don't want to give people negative feedback, and so I let them get away with things that they probably shouldn't because I don't want to give them hard notes.
But moving to a space of radical candor where you are challenging directly and caring deeply about someone will allow your team to flourish and grow beyond what you could have ever imagined. If you're having trouble thinking about how to give feedback, a framework I really like is the SBI framework.
This looks at the situation, the behavior, and the impact, and allows you to give feedback in a way that feels less personal but is getting the point across. So for instance, if I was giving some feedback to someone who interrupted me while I was presenting things to a client, I might frame this feedback in the way of saying, when I was presenting a solution to a client, the situation, you interrupted me and questioned why we were doing this at all.
The behavior. This made it look like our team was not aligned and calls into question our credibility. The impact. By framing things in this way, it allows people to see that the impact is not just that my feelings were hurt or that I had a problem with you interrupting me.
It actually had a negative consequence for our business as a whole. The other thing I look at is performance reviews. I have a very simple performance review framework that I use that I think is really helpful in conversations. Basically, I line up two to three successes of the time period that we're doing, two to three greatest strengths updated each time with the things that this employee is really good at, and two to three growth opportunities that change each time with commentary.
I used this with an employee at one point who had a lot of potential but wasn't quite living up to it. We wrote out the things that he had been really good at. He was a very creative mind, talked about all of the successes he had within his creativity, but then started pointing out areas where he could be looking differently.
We outlined not only what needed to improve, but also how I could help him improve in those Because his failure to improve in those areas was again a bit of my lack of feedback. We talked about things he was going to try, areas that I was going to give him to improve, and opportunities I would help him open up.
Six months later, we had another discussion around this, many discussions along the way, but had another formal sit down to talk about his development plan. And he pulled out the piece of paper where we had outlined the actions and had been checking them off as he went.
Giving him that very tangible written feedback gave him something to anchor on that then he could use as he intentionally went about growing, and he became a very high performing product manager. Skills matrix are always helpful as well. When I use a skill matrix, basically looking at the role that the person is in, what skills they need, and then I have the employee fill out the skills matrix on their side while I fill out one on my side, and then come together and see where our assessments align and
where they differ. The spots where we have differences of opinion, particularly when the employees think that they are doing better than I think they're doing, highlight a real opportunity for us to have better discussions, get more proactive feedback, and work together to improve their career.
At the end of the day, being a good manager means having tough conversations. Every step of the way, there are going to be things that you have to convey that are hard, and you have to push through that feeling of wanting to be liked, wanting to be the pal of everyone on your team in order to make them better.
Another tip I've learned in leading people, I learned from one of my favorite managers, a woman named Lauren Gilchrist. She used the phrase, do you need me to help you fix this, or do you just need to vent? Oftentimes, when employees come to us with things that they're struggling with or challenges that they're having, we as leaders want to jump in and help them solve it.
When someone brings us a problem, we want to have the answer. We want to have the solution. But we have to sometimes just let them sit back and vent and ask them the questions that they need to be able to work through their problems for themselves.
So along with your team, you also have to balance the needs of the company. This one is also very difficult for us as leaders, particularly when we have been in the weeds with the team from the beginning. Because as the team grows, as the team scales, your relationship with the team will change.
No matter how much you were in the weeds and in the trenches with people up front, as you start to grow in your leadership and the company starts to grow, the angle with which your conversations happen take on a different tone. Where you might have just been stating an opinion before, now that opinion starts to come across as a directive from the CEO or an instruction from a senior vice president.
You have to be very cognizant about where your influence lies. And as the team grows, conflict will grow. You have to stay above the office gossip, but not out of it. I once worked in a team where as I grew in leadership, I started hearing some rumblings of contention that was going on within the broader team, not directed necessarily at me.
It was actually directed at at some of our upper upper management. But when I discovered this was going on, I realized that I had a responsibility not to join in on the conversation, but I couldn't also just ignore it and let it go.
I had a duty to the company to raise the fact that we had team members that were really unhappy and really upset. Doing this was a very difficult thing, and it ended up opening up a lot of conversations within our team about how we work together, and how we raise objections, how we give feedback to leadership as well as to each other.
But if I hadn't been paying attention to that office gossip and the things that were going on, I wouldn't have known this was happening. And of course, the hardest of this fact is that sometimes you just have to be the company spokesperson. Even with difficult decisions, even with decisions that you don't necessarily like, sometimes you have to just convey the company line and push things forward that are best for the company even if they might not be popular.
I think we've seen a lot of this in this COVID time with things like furlough discussions and, team cuts. Those are really difficult things to do. And a lot of times as leaders, we don't want to do them, but we know that we have to as a company.
And so having open and honest conversations about what's going on can help you have a better relationship with your team and help support the company as well as what your team is needing. And of course, the thing that we often forget about as leaders and particularly as founders is taking care of ourselves.
Again, when we start into leadership, we are usually coming from a place of doing. We're coming from a place where we're really active. And all of a sudden, we move into this leadership role where we're not doing the things that necessarily gave us joy at the beginning.
So how can you think about the things that you did when you were a doer and find joy out of that in your leadership role? You have to find ways to find fulfillment in your new role as a leader. So when I think about this, I think about doing some self reflection.
As I started moving further and further from the day to day doing and hands on actions within my product and within my companies, I realized I needed to find the things that brought me joy within my role. So find your joy within the role that you have now as a leader and as a company founder.
It's a really exciting time. Break down your old role into tasks. Think about the things that you used to do. Prioritize them from the thing that you loved the most to the things that you disliked the most. What tasks did you revel in doing on a day to day basis?
And what things would you rather just push off to the side? Take those top items and ask yourself, why did I love this? What about this brought me joy? And then see if you can intentionally craft ways to capture that why in your new role.
So for example, when I was a product manager, I loved doing prioritization and scope management. I loved getting into the details and figuring out how we could get out the minimum amount of functionality that would solve the problems for our users. And I realized the reason that I loved that was because I was finding ways to provide value fast.
So the way I started thinking about that within my new roles as I was leading was to help the team with journey mapping and story mapping my initiatives and looking for ways that I could help the team accelerate decision making and provide value fast.
Another thing I enjoyed doing in my roles was coaching and mentoring product managers. I loved working with other people, helping them solve their problems, talking about different solutions that we might have, and realize the things that were bringing me joy out of that is I like helping others one on one, and I like talking shop.
I like geeking out about product. I now work for a company where that's what I do all day long is talk about product management. So as I thought about how I could bring that into my role when I wasn't doing product anymore is to find a new head of product to mentor.
I make time for a Slack discussion a week within public Slack channels on product management and make a goal to write one article a month or do a talk or do something that keeps me within that product realm. Those are things that I can tactically do that help me capture some of those things that I miss now that I'm not doing product management anymore.
And of course, I couldn't talk about, taking care of yourself without talking about self care. There was a really great talk by a woman named Roshie Proven at a product tank event where she talked about having empathy as a superpower but then having it as an overused superpower that can actually harm your own mental health.
She said, if we invest too much of ourselves in the experience of others, it can become difficult to detach and stress and anxiety will build. As leaders, we care deeply about our teams. We want to see them succeed in business and we want to see them succeed personally.
But if we take on too much of the weight of what our team needs and too much of their own personal, personal struggles, it can cause us to not be able to help them and support them effectively. So try to find those ways to interact with your team, care for your team, but not get yourself burdened down by their day to day burdens.
And the most most important thing that we can do for our teams and for ourselves is be a model for balance. Particularly in startups, we have the ability to go all day long. The hustle culture and the grind culture can wear people down and burn people out.
And particularly in times like now when the world is stressed, it's important that we as leaders model balance and model turning off and taking care of ourselves so that our teams will follow. At the end of the day, you're trying to be a well balanced leader.
But if you get any of these out of balance, it can become detrimental to the way that your team interacts, the way that you interact with yourself, and the way that the company succeeds. You have to pull them all into balance. And when you find that balance, you'll unlock the value of a high performing team.
Feel free to, reach out to me. I am on Twitter at the daily m. I'm on LinkedIn, or you can join us at mindtheproduct com if you want to learn more about product management and the product management community. And I look forward to seeing you all in the q and a sessions.
Thanks, Emily. Super stuff on a whole bunch of things in in leadership. Think that well, a lot of them get overlooked. But we'll dig into that in a minute with Emily. First up, just a quick thank you to some of our partners, our platinum partners, Amazon, Current Health, Deliveroo, and Mailchimp.
Okay. We're gonna bring Emily back in now. So, Emily, are you are you still here? I am here. Hey. How how are you doing? Doing pretty well. Good. Good. You're in in London. Right? I am. I'm in London, and it's been a drizzly rainy day today.
So, looking forward to some good conversation to lift the spirit. Yeah. How how, first of all, on a on the the way that the mind of product team are working right now, what way are you so everyone's working from home, I guess, but you don't you already have a service semi remote situation?
How does that work? Yeah. Mind the product has been nearly full remote since the beginning. So it started off with a very small group of people, classic startup. Everyone was working from home and came into London one day a week for a team day.
And as the team has grown, we've kept that culture. So it wasn't a huge shift to COVID levels of remote. The things that we did notice, though, was in taking away that one team day a week where we got together and interacted, had those conversations that are just easier to do in person, doing a lot of the things that involve sticky notes on walls, even removing that one day a week of togetherness changed the dynamic.
And so I think that we, as much as anyone have had to relearn how we interact with each other, where we use Slack versus jumping on a phone call, how to get those personal connections, and keep those personal bonds strong while we can't be physically together.
Yeah. Yeah. Phone call. Interesting. It seems like phone calls were were a thing we all used to do, and then suddenly everyone started doing Zoom all the time. I'm a huge fan of phone calls, to be honest, at the moment. I we, yeah, we we've been doing the same thing at Turing Fest.
Lots of but lots of Zoom, and then wherever possible. Yeah. If we can do audio only, if we could do phone, there's definitely a little bit of I guess there's a bit of extra burden if you you know, if you're just on a video call all day long, much in all the zoom has been amazing for us all, I think.
Yeah, it's definitely good to have a break. I do you do you with with the team or or just on your own? Do you do your calls when you're in your office or do you go walking? I really like to go for a walk while I'm on the on a call.
It depends. Yeah, it depends on the situation. I love getting out for a walk. And when I was in person with teams, I often did a lot of like walking one on ones. And my friend, actually one of the speakers from later in the Turing Fest lineup, Eli Montgomery, we used to take long walk and talk conversations around offices that we worked in.
And it was a great way to engage different parts of your brain. Having that physical activity when you're not just sitting changes the way that your brain works. And so we definitely, a team, have started doing, not in any sort of group calls, but with one on one calls, definitely enjoy a good walking meeting, particularly if you don't need to look at anything.
Like, if you don't need to be looking at data or spreadsheets or a presentation, there's no reason not to even just walking around your around your house or around your flat. It it kind of allows you to disengage from these sitting in one spot all day.
Yeah. Yeah. I I mean, for I've been I've been working from home like everybody else, but since the lockdown eased up, we've had, you know, coffee shops and things back open. And I'm spending a bit of time in my favorite coffee shop, probably just an hour a day, but just to have a different space.
I think it's amazing that we've all learned a lot about how physical space affects us. Yeah, physical space affecting us as well. I think the other big thing, and I learned this when I started with Mind the Product, I was actually remote from Texas.
So the rest of the team was here within an hour of London, and I was six hours away from a time zone perspective. And I started learning a lot about the way that I think and the way I work through problems and the way I interact with people.
And as much as I love the remote culture, I really missed the thing where you just kind of turn your head and say half of a phrase to somebody and it helps you clarify the thinking that you had and you can go back to what you're doing or looking across the table and seeing a confused look on somebody's face and being able to ask them like, hey, what's going on?
Do you need any help? And particularly as leaders, that's one of the big things that I know, and especially with my junior team members, having that physical view of if someone is struggling or feeling available. Even within our team, one thing that I hear a lot from our team is like, we know you're really busy, and so I didn't wanna bug you.
I didn't wanna ping you and ask you a question because I know how busy you are. It's like, well, I'm not too busy for the team. Like, that's what I'm here for, and that's what we're aiming to do. And so I think kind of breaking those habits of feeling like we can't have the ad hoc connections and everything has to be in the boxes of scheduled meetings is a really difficult thing to do.
Yeah. Yeah. No. We've we we have one of our team members, Marcus, is over in on the West Coast of Canada, which he lives in this very beautiful place. But from a time zone perspective, it's definitely a challenge. He's so he's up at, like, I don't know, five AM or something his time today.
But it's it's really highlighted the the difference between remote and asynchronous. They are very much not the same We'll have we'll actually have a couple of talks that are gonna touch on that later in the in the program. Nick Francis from HelpScout and Natalie Nigueli from WildBit, and possibly Andrei Vinitsky from Graphi.
But yeah. Have you do you do you have currently have any different people in different time zones? No. Right now, all of our full time team members are somewhere in the UK. So we do have partners we work with around the world in all sorts of different time zones, particularly around our product tank community from APAC to Europe to North America.
So the time zone perspective gets difficult. Yeah. You're covering the whole world. So one of the things I wanted to dive into a little bit, it's a question that's come in from the audience about that's something you mentioned in your talk, is the you talked about helping set people up to move from being doers to leaders.
Have you got any any examples of how anyone has helped you with that or where you've where you've helped someone make that make that transition? Yeah. So personally, the biggest help I had was, a former manager named Ben Newell, who really kind of pushed me into a lot of the leading rather than the doing.
And there were some candid discussions that came about around So when I started leading a team, actually my second time that I started leading a team, I had been managing the product myself and then took on a team from there and continued to grow it.
And so for a while, I was managing the team and doing at the same time. So part of my job was leading, part of my job was hands on doing. And as we kept growing and as I added more team members and as I added more junior team members who need more coaching, I kept wanting to do because I loved it, because I enjoyed crafting the features and working with the developers and getting into the details.
At some point, I know that Ben kind of sat me down on a one on one. He was like, I think this may be your last project. Like, this may be the last one that you can hands on do yourself. Because I wasn't doing anyone a service.
I was not available enough to the developers that I was working with, so I was becoming a bottleneck for them. I was not able to really do the project that I was working on justice and I wasn't able to give full attention to my team members and doing the coaching and the mentoring that I needed to help them excel.
And I think that that's kind of the biggest, having that realization of when it's time to step out. There's a podcast that I love. Most people are probably aware of it if you listen to podcasts at all, it was called Startup and it was actually documenting the founding of Gimlet Media, which is a major podcasting company now.
I remember at some point they did several seasons and Alex Bloomberg, the founder, got really open and honest about his journey into that CEO role from being a journalist and being a podcaster. And he was hitting a point where he was trying to be in the edit meetings and the story meetings and doing all of the things and wasn't giving justice to the CEO role that he needed to be playing.
And they actually did some live recordings with him and an executive coach that basically broke it down of, essentially we hit this point as leaders where a lot of times we're having to do the things that we're not actually good at. And so for Alex, it was finance meetings and all of those just kind of like management and company things and retreating back into the doing is a way to feel comfortable and feel like, oh, I'm not an impostor.
Because as we kind of enter that, the hard stuff of leadership, that impostor syndrome can get going like nobody's business. So you have to be able to of talk yourself out of retreating back into the doing and face the hard things head on.
Yeah. Question in from Rob Armitage. Let me just get this. So Rob's transitioning into the tech industry in junior going into junior level roles to begin with, but is keen to move into leadership in the future. And he's asking if you have any advice for cultivating leadership skills early on in your career.
Yeah, I think early on, there's lots of opportunity to cultivate leadership skills. It can be in, you know, there are lots of opportunities is a junior in a lot of companies to lead initiatives to lead different. It may even be something as simple like an office self care initiative or raising your hand to say, hey, I'm gonna organize a book club and start to exercise some of those organizational skills and leadership skills.
And as you grow, I would really look for the opportunities to mentor and coach, whether that's someone on your team, whether it's someone on another team, helping people work through their challenges and their problems without necessarily doing it for them is a big leadership skill that you need to build.
And you don't have to wait until you're managing people in order to do that. Always look for those opportunities. The other big thing I would say is if you want to move into leadership is start looking at why decisions get made the way that they do.
This is a little bit kind of deeper than just pure leadership, but as a leader, a big part of your job is strategic thinking, strategy, decision making, and starting to not just accept decisions that are handed down, but ask the questions about how did we get to that decision?
What were the underlying factors that came into play? What's the information that led us to make this choice? And starting to see how other people pick apart problems will help you hone your own skills in decision making and problem solving. Yeah. Yeah. Totally, totally agree.
Another question in and probably the last we got time for for now. And it's it's one that's it kinda touches on something you mentioned, but it also is very prevalent for right now. So you talked about radical candor, talked about feedback being essential in in coaching, and that some of those conversations can be difficult.
And we I guess any of us that have had those on either as a leader or someone being mentored, know about it. What about in the remote environment? How does that I mean, it does change it. How does it does it make it harder, or how can you how can you mitigate the distance, I guess, in those chats?
Yeah. That's where the phone call is a huge help. It may even be fine to do it, like, over video. Those the the feedback conversations, particularly difficult feedback, is not good to do in text because you lose tone. Oftentimes when you're having really hard conversations, you may have to reframe things a couple times before getting it right.
And when you're trying to write that, you may write something that is really wrong and really can be taken the wrong And having the conversation in voice of some factor can help you see if the other person's understanding, hear their feedback, hear the things that they're saying.
And I I would say with with it being remote, again, the the, quickness factor is really important. Don't save up Yeah. Weeks and weeks of feedback and then give it all in one big session. And I have done that. I have had it done to me.
And it's an it's a terrible experience all around. It makes your life awful as a manager because that conversation builds up weight. And the more things that you put onto that conversation, the harder it becomes. Whereas if it's literally after a meeting, hey.
Let's hop on a call for a couple minutes and talk about how that could have gone better or talk about what you know, how you felt about that meeting, and and kind of have those short, easy conversations, not easy is the wrong word, but short quick conversations, is a lot easier than waiting until it builds up.
The other big thing I would say from a feedback perspective in the remote environment is be very aware of what you're putting into public channels. So the we are all in something to the effect of Slack or Teams or other asynchronous type of tools, And it can be really easy to just kind of rattle off feedback in public.
And it may not seem like a big deal to you, but it weighs really heavy on the it can weigh really heavy on the person that you're giving to in public. And so think about kind of corrections you're making, think about the way that things are, and and see if it's something that should be pulled into a direct message conversation or pulled into a voice conversation.
Cause a lot of times, again, the earlier in the career that someone is that you're giving feedback to, the more weight that they may put on it as well and feel like, oh, I'm being embarrassed in front of my teammates. I'm being embarrassed in front of my you know, in front of the company, which in reality, they're not.
No one's probably thinking twice about it, but it's a big deal to them. Yeah. It's also you never want anyone to feel like that you're deliberately embarrassing them. But we've all probably done the thing of posting something in a Slack chat that we are not in the channel we thought we were in.
So we're we're we're out of time, and we've got a ton of questions still coming in. So yeah. Guys, we need to get the questions in a bit quicker in the chat, probably. But, Emily, you will be back later on in in in the seven weeks ahead of us for TuringFest to on on one of the roundtables.
I think we haven't quite figured out which one, but we'll get to that. Yeah. So if people have if people do wanna catch up with you, they can maybe get you on the on the event platform or else catch you on Twitter. You're the daily m e m.
Yes. So yeah. So listen. Thanks so much for joining us, and loads of great stuff there. But, yeah, there's tons tons of stuff people still wanna know. So you're in demand, But, hopefully, they can catch you soon. And we'll see you back for a roundtable later on.
But for now, that's it. Thank you. Great. Thanks. Yeah. If you wanna ask questions on Twitter, I'll I'll do my best to answer them. Tag Turing Fest. Tag me. We'll see what we can cover. Super. Thanks, Emily. See you soon. Okay, guys. So we're we're that's just wrapping up with Emily.
We've got our next talk coming up in fifteen. We've got Ben Orenstein joining us to talk about pair programming. So we're going to take a quick break and we'll see you when that kicks off at three pm.