Leadership Style and Skills

Monday, November 4th 2024

I was at a company where my direct manager and skip, the CEO, had both differing skills and difficult styles for them to report into, I have been spending time on leadership.

The vantage point I am bringing is self-leadership: my own form of leadership to navigate and ideally influence those above me when their perspectives are opaque and disjointed.

From this I have been working on a framework to help with these situations.

Product Management is Leadership

One of the challenges I did have in a prior role was the Head of Product referred to a canonical view of PM as "solving user problems" and product sense.

But while this is a foundation craft and skill that is needed, I would define Product Management as "leadership."

He did not, and I struggled trying to manage upwards, my own self-leadership, for him or, if he felt appropriate, for me, to then take on the leadership role.

The vacuum is felt when there isn't strong communication presence from Product.

To me, Product Leadership, as is all leadership, has a shared outcome: people know where they are going, why, how, and when.

This is not the same as Program Management.

It's very tricky because most people a) do not want to align on their own; b) upper management, including in our case the CEO, are often constantly changing based on the latest trend and winds.

This, by definition, makes Product Leadership a tricky spot: everyone largely knows that don't have to listen; the CEO, in this case, had her own perspective antagonistic to the HOP.

The leadership style in place was not the right one, which was to retreat into the background.

I would bring it up with the HOP, and he'd often reference how difficult this was to do, how there were missed opportunities to do, how the overall organization could not support a change in plan.

At the same time, when I identified spheres of influence that were going counter a productive direction, because he, himself, believed that alternative narrative had no merit, he couldn't entertain the fact that other people, 50%+ in fact of the organization, had bought in.

I diagnosed this and said that this is because there is an absence of an alternative roadmap -- one which should be coming from him.

I sensed that there was not real appetite from him to do this, so I offered to do it with him over a weekend or to block out a week because this was essential to do.

But...this was not something he wanted to do. Not be explicitly saying no; but by saying nothing to these offers.

In the same vein that we don't get to pick our parents, we don't get to pick our leaders.

As crappy as childhood, as well as present-day drama with parents, often is, most people would acknowledge that they can't let the past be the rudder for the future. They find a way through various forms of self-leadership.

So it is with product management with leadership.

What do you think of how I am framing the situation/problem space?