How to build an empowered team when everybody feels disconnected.
Cultivating engaged teams, especially right now, is thoughtful work that often requires you to look inward.
Hello,
You’re witness to my semi-regular habit where I look at the challenges faced by product leaders today and attempt to process and pick them apart through the lens of culture and strategy. Whilst I care deeply about data, you’ll see that I tend to bang on about topics such as balancing data with instinct, diversity, creative thinking and taking a human lens.
I’m starting with all the product leadership 101 stuff, but I take requests—if there’s something you’d like to read, let me know! As always, your comments and feedback on Substack help make this, and future posts better. I’d love to hear from you, and thanks for reading.
Ben
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Today, many leaders are operating at the edge of their abilities, and employee engagement has been challenged more by this pandemic than at any other moment. Maintaining an engaged team takes great skill in the ‘remote-era’—and to me, the key to good engagement, is an empowered team that is in control of its destiny.
But empowering a team is hard. It’s a constant concern for leaders when they are operating at the edge. Am I being overbearing? Am I being directional enough? Am I creating enough space for the team to succeed? Am I being neglectful?
The most thoughtful leaders I know ride this edge constantly, and it’s even more present when a team is spread across multiple locations, or is new and still finding its footing as a group of people, with diverse backgrounds, experiences and expertise, come together. As I’ve written about before, there is a knack to being a great product leader. One of the most important ways to get the most out of the expertise you have hired (and the vision and strategy you have set), is to empower the team to win.
What the heck does this mean? How do you empower a product team to gain the full benefit of all the hard foundational work you’ve done? What are the leadership behaviors you should model?
Here is some advice I’ve picked up along the way.
Focus on the problem, not the method.
Where I’ve seen many leaders struggle is in the transition point from execution to leadership, often around the director level as people transition towards greater responsibility and away from execution, but increasingly at every one. New leaders can be too prescriptive about how to solve the problem, rather than give the team the problem to solve. This is tricky. Often you want to help as much as you can, but in being prescriptive about methods you end up with a team that is less able to work together to solve the problem, and you underestimate the value of the powerful, diverse expertise you’ve worked so hard to bring together. If you want a way to practically model this today, consider what the fundamental question at the heart of every problem is—focus on that question with your team.Celebrate successful outcomes.
When you are ready to celebrate the success of your team, in the outcomes of the work, you reinforce the value of problem solving together, and clearly telegraph what you are looking for—great teams celebrate the outcomes, but spend less time rewarding people for the potentially unhealthy inputs to the work. If a solution can be reached with less work, and the team is happier, healthier and more energized to work together again, this helps the team to be more empowered as leaders in the work.Evade or neutralize executive intrusions.
As a product leader this is a constant challenge. We all talk about it. Inevitably a senior leader in your organization (or sometimes even you), will have ideas that can—through the sheer weight of their seniority—send the team off on a wild goose chase and cause the team to spin. The net effect is that the team feels both disempowered, and is less inclined to be candid with you about their priorities, you might not notice it, but some trust is often broken here. Where you can, your job is to try to protect the team from those executive intrusions. Use your user research skills, and Socratic reasoning to ascertain what is behind executives’ curveballs, look to the data to provide evidence for the choices you and the team have made, and encourage a healthy data culture that values expertise and opinions, but ensures that evidence provides a clear rationale for your choices. Consider enrolling the executive team, where you can, in voting / stack ranking exercises to provide a greater degree of scrutiny on every idea. As a product leader, you should get used to negotiating with peers and executives, but you should attempt to elevate the most junior, and underrepresented voices to the same level as everybody else as you seek to get the most out of the entire team that is contributing to your product work (sometimes this includes people who aren’t part of the team at all).Build alignment and enroll the team in the vision.
I’ve talked about this before, but the days of ‘divide and conquer’ and ‘command and control’ leadership are over. You’ll struggle to keep a team, especially in a talent market like the Product one, when you don’t enroll everybody in the journey and ensure you are actively winning over advocates for where you want to go. The more you can co-create together, the more you can softly build alignment, the more empowered your team will be.Self-reflect on how you contribute to the problem.
This is the hardest one to get close to and really see. Usually, if the team isn’t delivering the results you were hoping for, the problem is you. This can mean you aren’t seeking enough feedback or creating the space for candor. This can mean you are being overly prescriptive about methods. Or it can just be that you’re being a jerk. Being a great leader requires constant self-reflection. If your team aren’t being honest with you, find someone who will.Find the edge of everybody’s comfort.
Empowered teams are constantly challenged and rarely stuck with the same work. This means in your development of them, promotion pathway planning and in the way you delegate work, try to understand the edge of your team’s comfort zone and help them build affinity with the position they wanna play. Is it out in front where they’re really challenged? Or is it somewhere in the middle where they’re able to act with more safety?Model trust.
This is an obvious one. Trust them, they’ll trust you. That’s how it’s built.
It’s not easy—especially right now when everybody is working from home—with so many distractions, to develop greater engagement. You’ll need to be thoughtful about the best team rituals to put in place, how you can create space for people to advance, and when the right moment is to be directional vs collaborative.
Even in an office environment, creating diverse, empowered, and ultimately engaged teams, that work together and build the psychological safety to fail and succeed together will yield better results, and over time better set your team up, ready to take on the next challenge—and this year, who knows what that might be.
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In the spirit of learning I love to read comments, builds and things that will make these more useful—and would love to hear from you, feel free to drop comments below, or get in touch. Unlike other crap DJs I also take requests for what to spin next.
this is really good, ben. thank you!