In the world of business, it’s common to face seemingly opposed, bad choices. But, instead of choosing the least-bad option, it might help to think differently. Roger L. Martin offers two fabulous books, The Opposable Mind and Creating Great Choices (co-authored with Jennifer Riel), in which he suggests using an integrative thinking approach to resolve the least-bad option dilemma.

Integrative-thinking emphasizes harnessing the constructive tension between two ideas to generate a unique, more attractive option.

For product professionals who regularly face a series of conflicting choices, developing your critical and integrative thinking skills and learning to think differently might save your organization and make your career.

INTEGRATIVE THINKING IN ACTION: A CASE STUDY

A product leader in a global electronics manufacturer unit supplying retail point-of-sale systems pondered her business unit’s next steps. After four years of a tug-of-war battle with an unrelenting competitor on price cuts and new-product rollouts, neither organization had gained ground. To this longtime product professional, the situation was one of mutually assured destruction, as both organizations were navigating declining margins and incurring resource strains.

As she stared at the latest ideas for pricing promotions proposed by her sales and marketing team, along with the most recent product investment ideas from her product management team, she realized it was past time to tackle this conundrum by taking a different approach. Pricing cutting was addictive and self-destructive. And innovating your way out of a pitched battle with a tenacious competitor was an exercise in futility. It was time to get outside of the organization’s four walls. After all, the truth is always in the market, and nothing important happens in the office (NIHITO).

Fast-forward several months, and our product leader found herself in front of her organization’s management team explaining her product team’s findings. Management was confused and initially resistant to the ideas she was suggesting.

“I was talking about something foreign to them, and I knew this would be challenging to sell. Yet, what we learned was so important that I needed to gain at least grudging support to prototype our idea.”

WHAT THE PRODUCT TEAM OBSERVED

During a series of client visits, product team members deliberately focused on studying the bigger picture of client operations beyond their unit’s immediate products. What they saw pointed to some creative new ideas.

“It’s hard to go into client visits and not focus only on our products. This time, we elevated our altitude and observed the broader client operations. We saw a series of store-level technologies that didn’t play nice with each other, generating many inefficiencies when it came to analyzing and leveraging data to make quick decisions at the store level. And while there were the typical price, feature and reliability comments about our systems, you could tell by observing and listening that we weren’t the problem keeping these business owners awake at night.”

The proposal to leadership suggested that the organization explore playing a systems integrator role for this community of clients. The effort included startup costs to acquire new talent and facilitate systems integration with outside companies. Additionally, our product leader proposed forming a customer council for this group and hosting their initial meeting at company headquarters.

“We saw an opportunity to help a focused group of customers solve a big problem. While I couldn’t tie revenue to my ideas initially, this initiative—when successful—would effectively reduce the competitor to an afterthought.”

The top marketing and sales executives were intrigued by the customer intimacy approach. The management team gave grudging approval for the project for the balance of the year, with the expectation that a tighter business case would be produced before investing additional time and effort. The results were eye-opening for everyone.

Initially, customers were surprised at the offer to be involved in their more extensive store-level systems activities, but they recognized the sincerity of the offer. Before long, our product leader’s organization helped its clients create specifications for new systems and outline operational changes that eliminated bottlenecks and improved information flow speed.

To the outside observer, these efforts were incongruous with the organization’s mission to sell more systems and licenses. However, what happened next carried the day for this new approach.

The customer community was so impressed with the investment and results to automate that they began almost reflexively purchasing systems. Price negotiation disappeared and the competitor was more often not even considered in the process. Jump ahead by a few years and this strategy was so successful that the formerly pesky competitor exited the market, unable to gain ground with typical price or product development approaches.

Score one for thinking differently!

INTEGRATIVE THINKING AS A HABIT FOR SUCCESSFUL LEADERS

The most successful organizational leaders I have encountered are relentless about seeking counter-intuitive approaches to business challenges.

They resist the rush to choose between traditional tactics and instead strive to reframe challenging situations as “what if?”-type opportunities.

In every circumstance in which I’ve observed the application of integrative thinking, it didn’t happen without the individual or group silencing the reflexive, pattern-matching portion of their brains and creating opportunities for new ideas to flood the system.

In the case study, the product leader never would have conceived of the new idea without breaking the habit of asking customers about their satisfaction with her unit’s products.

Instead, she and her team members stepped back and just observed. And what they saw convinced them that their customers had much bigger fish to fry than worrying about her unit’s offerings.

While her unit was focused on creating the next version, running the latest price promotion or building a new, low-cost product, their customers were barely treading water trying to tie systems together to run their operations more efficiently.

This concept of stepping away from the perceived visible choices—whether to cut costs or innovate faster or both—and striving to understand the real burdens or issues in the situation is a hallmark of integrative thinkers.

FIVE TOOLS TO PROMOTE INTEGRATIVE THINKING IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

The dicey issue for integrative thinking is teaching people to break their pattern-matching approach to solving problems. Our brains love patterns, and they create deep grooves. But there are five tactics that I’ve seen yield remarkable results for those striving to jump-start individual and group integrative thinking.

1. Hit ‘Pause’ on Common Responses to Problems

Organizations run in cycles. From annual strategic planning efforts (anachronistic in this era) to the routine of quarterly promotions and new product launches timed with industry events, the pattern repeats while the world changes. As a leader, learn to recognize and challenge this pattern. Use “why?” coupled with, “How might we change and do something unique and valuable with that money/effort?”

2. Apply Multiple Framing Techniques to Problems

How you frame a situation determines the type and aggressiveness of the proposed solutions. Groups will almost invariably offer a different set of solutions for a situation framed as a problem rather than framing it as an opportunity.

The next time you encounter a problem that seems to point to two less-than-great choices, reframe the issue and develop alternative solutions. What if you framed the situation as an opportunity? How would you respond to create the best outcomes for both your company and your stakeholders? What problem are you trying to solve?

3.Conduct Association Exercises

This technique is a personal favorite for breaking the back of traditional thinking. For example, if you are trying to respond to low or declining customer service ratings, identify an unlike company in an industry far away and ask, “How would X company strengthen our customer service?” Challenge a cross-functional team to explore how this far-removed company does such a great job and then look for ideas to apply to your environment. The goal isn’t emulation, but idea-prompting.

4. Observe. More.

As outlined in our case study, cultivating the ability to observe situations objectively offers a potential treasure trove of ideas and insights.

Designers are experts at studying individuals in their environments. Design firm IDEO famously studied the use of shopping carts in grocery stores in a made-for-TV example of how an item many of us use every day—the shopping cart—might be reconceived.

While the “Deep Dive” feature on the “ABC News Nightline” broadcast is dated, the approaches employed to think differently and apply integrative thinking are timeless. In another example, a company specializing in data management software observed “a day in the life of data” and quickly discovered costly bottlenecks and manual processes that, when fixed through added technology and professional services, saved significant time and manual labor.

5. Employ Parallel Thinking Techniques

I love Edward deBono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ approach to parallel thinking. The approach emphasizes harnessing the collective brain power of groups by helping them focus on a single issue or topic instead of the usual conflux of opinions, facts, political agendas and emotions that overpower most group discussions.

THE BOTTOM LINE

While there are many tools to promote creative thinking and problem-solving, the most critical opportunity is recognizing the need to think differently about a situation. Seemingly common sense, it’s challenging in practice to pause and then make the effort to explore alternatives. Know that your pattern-grooved brain and the dominant logic in your organization are significant obstacles standing in the way of innovation and success. But in a world undergoing systemic change, it pays to put in the effort to think differently.

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“THIS ISN’T A PROBLEM; IT’S AN OPPORTUNITY” is a cliché with oomph. It’s a simple, oft-referenced statement masking a powerful tool called reframing. The essence of reframing is to encourage us to look at situations from different perspectives in search of unique and improved solutions.

For individuals involved in the world of design and design thinking, reframing vexing problems is a standard part of the process. For the rest of us, a bit of design thinking focused on reframing is invaluable in our daily labors. In my experience, effective leaders at all levels are masters of reframing when it comes to tackling the vexing issues and challenges of organizational life. Here are some examples you can leverage and build on in your workplace.

Reframing in Action

Here are three situations where reframing can create potentially remarkable results.

1. Challenging Conversations

Most of us dread difficult feedback or performance discussions, or meetings with managers seemingly resistant to the idea of change. For many, just the idea of confronting these conversations generates considerable stress that feeds our desire to delay or avoid them as long as possible.

Reframe:

Accept and internalize that challenging conversations are where problems are solved and the seeds of innovation are identified. Recognize that the sooner you move to tackle these conversations, the faster you create new solutions or uncover opportunities to innovate.

Approach the challenges in a positive spirit of issue identification and mutual problem-solving. There’s a strong chance that the employee with the performance issue doesn’t want to lose his or her job. And there are likely some good reasons why your managerial counterpart resists change. Once you’ve framed these as opportunities, you open up the lines of communication for productive dialogue.

2. A Competitive Threat

Competitive threats tend to induce a bad case of organizational tunnel vision where everything is viewed through the lens of this threat. Meetings to discuss the threat sprout like dandelions in a June Chicago lawn and many companies respond with what Jim Collins references as, “the undisciplined pursuit of more.” These chaotic situations burn critical organizational energy in unproductive ways and often work to help the competitor succeed.

Reframe:

One potentially helpful reframe is to recognize the competitor has exposed their strategy and where they are committing resources, leaving other areas potentially vulnerable. Instead of focusing on the question, “How can we match their strategy?” reframe the question to some variation of “Where can we solve problems for our customers that our competitors will be too distracted to pay attention to?” or “How can we minimize the value of what they are doing by drawing upon our unique strengths and relationships?”

Regardless of the question, you select, the one you are likely not choosing is the most common (and weakest): “How fast can we match their offering?”

3. Talent Selection

Many of us frame talent selection around the question, “Who’s the most qualified for this position?” And while this is understandable, it fails to take into account many important issues, including what your organization might look like in a few years and how you’ll be successful in adopting new technologies or shifting to new markets.

Reframe:

I unabashedly encourage organizational leaders to look for the best learners, the most open-minded individuals, and individuals who thrive on exploring the new and different as part of the talent-selection process. Instead of asking, “Who’s the best qualified for the job?” where the focus is on evaluation against some potentially dated or limiting job description, ask “Who’s most likely to help us move from where we are today to where we need to go in the future?”

This issue of reframing your criteria for talent selection helps you avoid hiring clones and minimizes your risk of hiring individuals who aren’t well-suited to helping you rethink (reframe) and reinvent your organization.

Help Your Team Embrace Reframing

These four approaches can help you jump-start reframing on your team.

1. Encourage Solution Development Using Multiple Frames

When your project teams or functional groups are navigating a tough decision, encourage them to use more than one frame to identify potential solutions.

In working with an engineering team stumped over an important and very technical issue, the manager encouraged them to shift from “This is a problem” to “This is an opportunity” and develop a unique solution. Using the opportunity form of framing, the team identified a completely different approach that likely never would have emerged with just the negative framing. It involved unpacking some assumptions and rethinking their design, but that’s what reframing is supposed to do.

2. Increase the Field of View

Often, we get bogged down in the minutiae of a problem, and our thinking becomes constrained to the small, almost microscopic, view. Instead, much like playing with Google Earth, zoom out and look at the bigger picture.

An organization struggling with a revenue shortfall focused initially on identifying where sales and marketing were falling short with their execution. By zooming out, they were able to locate a bigger issue with changing customer tastes.

I like to continue to increase the field of view so that I can see the issue in the context of the environment, marketplace, and even the world at large. Too many of us view the world only through the lenses of our industry and competitors when the real threat or opportunity is likely somewhere outside that field of view.

3. Reframe the Problem by Rethinking the Question

Although implied in these reframing activities, strive to deliberately challenge the question you are asking and either increase the field of view or challenge the assumptions behind the question.

I love the example provided by Tina Seelig, a creativity and innovation expert at the Stanford Design School, in a recent Fast Company article. She uses the question, “How should we plan a birthday party for David?” and the reframe “How can we make David’s day memorable?”

This example reflects a fundamental reframing of the problem. The problem isn’t the birthday. It’s creating a memorable day. Now that you’ve permitted yourself to look at the problem differently, the ideas can and will flow.

4. Try “Why?” and “Why Not?” as Powerful Reframing Tools

Most of us have heard of using “five whys” to help crystallize a problem or challenge a solution. You keep asking yourself or your colleague “Why?” until the situation achieves a new level of clarity (or they storm off with steam coming out of their ears!). My alternative is the equally simple (but not simplistic) “Why not?”

Asking “Why not?” helps uncover false assumptions and self-limiting beliefs, and it is, in itself, a direct reframe, leading to new veins of idea gold as individuals and teams let go of their constraints.

The Bottom Line for Now

Learning to reframe is a behavior worth developing. It frees you to think beyond the constraints of the moment and to look at situations from many perspectives and varying heights. It’s a powerful tool for stimulating curiosity and promoting innovative thinking on your team. It’s energizing to think beyond the perceived limitations of any situation. And it just might be the difference-maker for the big problems in front of you.

The post How Effective Leaders Use Reframing to Tackle Challenges appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

Lock in those thoughts for a moment. Take notes.

Got those locked in your gray matter or scribbled down in front of you? Now review those behaviors.

I’ve run this exercise live in many workshops, and I suspect your results are similar. Terms that speak to respect, feedback, coaching, direction-setting, words/actions matching, and trust and credibility make up the bulk of the lists. Something called “authenticity” shows up as well, although the definition is just a bit squishy. Most of these are important, timeless leadership behaviors and attributes, and we all aspire to display them in our own endeavors.

However, the world is changing faster today than at any other point in civilization. And while these behaviors are inviolable, they aren’t enough when it comes to navigating change and uncertainty at scale. Along with these tried-and-true behaviors, all of us must cultivate and master a new set of survival skills as leaders. Our companies, teams and careers depend upon it.

Leadership Lessons from Video Gamers

Gamers learn to master new tools and tricks through experimentation and repetition. In massive online role-playing games, teams assemble spontaneously to combat adversaries and threats. Individuals assume roles as leaders or contributors, depending upon the situation and their skills. They might die a few times on the way to success, but they work hard to master new skills and acquire and learn how to use new tools on the fly.

Welcome to the new world of leadership—a perpetual exercise in leveling-up skills in preparation for a sudden threat or emerging new opportunity. As an executive coach, I’ve observed individuals in a variety of roles who have cracked the code for leading and succeeding in this environment. They are adept at helping groups succeed at navigating change to seize opportunities or fight off unanticipated adversaries. And while many of these individuals lack the heft of titles that suggest leader, they are leading by their actions. To a person, these professionals display what I describe as the seven level-up skills.

Success as a leader (and as a contributor) in this era of change requires a new performance gear for all of us. The individuals poised to survive, thrive, and lead in this world are those who cultivate and apply these seven skills.

The Seven Level-Up Skills

1. Rewire—Every cell in your body screams fight or flight in the face of unanticipated change. We have to learn to ignore those instincts and seize the opportunity inherent in an unanticipated change in our company, industry or job. Leaders in this era frame change as opportunity, not obstacle, and they infect their teams with this attitude.
2. Relearn—Most companies look at the world through the lens of their industry and history. Tomorrow’s leaders must help their teams and companies see the world more broadly, spot trends and environmental changes that foreshadow threats or opportunities, and then move their teams into action.
3. Retry—Tomorrow’s leaders must attack their challenges in the spirit and format of the scientific method. Instead of giving hollow lip service to experimentation, they must teach their teams to take risks and leverage failures in pursuit of future successes.
4. Rethink—One core behavior for leading in this new world is to adopt the approaches of modern warriors who are challenged to build rapid trust in life-or-death settings with perfect strangers. The term “caring” will be added to the lexicon of essential leadership behaviors.
5. Recommit—Guiding teams to high performance accelerates your career and saves your organization. Tomorrow’s leaders must be adept at quickly bringing groups to a level of high performance, regardless of circumstances.
6. Reorient—People with political power decide what gets done and who does it. Tomorrow’s leaders must be students of power and politics, striving to cultivate and project power for the purpose of generating positive change and innovation.
7. Rebrand—A powerful personal brand has never been more important, yet many people fail to understand how others see them. Effective leaders will not only tune in to how people perceive them, but they will also deliberately manage their brand personas to grow power and strengthen their effectiveness. These skills are at the core for all of us when it comes to developing as leaders. The hard work of learning and mastering these skills defines the level-up challenge in front of us. Consider the very real case of Amy (name has been changed). As a senior product manager, she changed the fate of her organization by applying the level-up skills. I suspect most product managers will recognize this situation.

The Case of Amy

Amy was worried about a problem that no one else seemed to see. Her team was responsible for identifying new product and service ideas and bringing them to life. In her assessment, there was nothing new on what was a jam-packed product roadmap. The approved projects were either extensions of existing product-line offerings or crafty repackaging initiatives for older products that the company wanted to move down-market to new price-sensitive audiences. While every item on the roadmap had been vetted and approved by executives and enthusiastically endorsed by the customer council, it bothered her that the totality of the company’s development efforts concentrated on tuning and tweaking ideas from the past. She intended to solve this problem.

The Situation

Amy’s instincts were good, but her problem was larger than she imagined. Her company was wired to optimize around industry customers and competitors knew well. Armed with the confidence gained from many years of success, management had little inclination to change the formula.

The scorecard metrics showed high marks and the historically strong financial results suggested that the company had cracked the code of sustaining success. While Amy looked at a roadmap of projects focused on tweaking the past and saw red flags, the tone emanating from the company’s top leaders and managers was one of optimism about the organization’s bright future.

In this environment of success and optimism, to gain support for her concerns, Amy needed to maneuver carefully or risk being labeled a naysayer. Get it right, and she would strengthen her position in her company and likely enjoy career growth. Get it wrong or mismanage the process, and she risked being marginalized—or worse.

In Amy’s Words

“I concluded that it would be politically naïve to ’cry wolf’ about the dangers I saw in the company’s future while everything we were doing seemed to be working. Instead, I focused on what I could control, and that was the work of my team. I knew that I needed to help them change their perspective and gain new insights that would pollinate new ideas, so I sat down with them and let them know the following:

• The bad news was that I was cutting the budget for attendance at industry-focused events and workshops.
• The good news was that I was allocating this budget for use in exploring new markets and technologies. They were initially confused, but I shared my belief that our company’s success and our team’s growth and further success required fresh ideas, and that the best way to get these ideas was to move outside of our traditional industry and customers.

I identified some potentially interesting events in industries far removed from our own, and I gave the team an assignment to spend time looking at seminars, workshops, trade associations, and other events that might serve as test cases for our new work as anthropologists.

The team surprised me with the volume of ideas they generated. We down-selected to three different settings where we could attend and observe. We set up three teams of three and agreed to visit the events and note big trends and noisy issues. We would identify interesting business approaches that were working for market innovators and leaders and look for ideas or insights by talking with as many people as possible. My only requirement was for everyone to take detailed notes and share their findings with the group when they returned.

While the teams were off observing and learning, I worked with facilities to turn a small, unoccupied office on our floor into our idea room. My intent was to capture the key observations, insights, and ideas on flipcharts in this room and leave them visible as tools to build new ideas off of over time. I didn’t know how important this room would be for us.

As the teams returned with their notes, we set up a series of debriefing sessions. The rest of the group was encouraged to ask questions, and all findings, questions, and raw ideas were captured on flipcharts in our idea room. While the first session was a bit unstructured, the team enjoyed discussing and exploring the activities and trends of markets different from our own.

After we completed the first cycle of visits and debriefing sessions, something interesting happened. The team members began to ask important questions, including “How might we use that approach?“ and “How might that technology help our customers solve some of their vexing problems?“

The questions again generated a series of brainstorm ideas and the need for more investigation. We down-selected to a small number of interesting-sounding explorations and the teams self-organized to dig deeper into the ideas. As they uncovered additional findings, they noted them in the idea room, which soon captured the interest of executives and other colleagues in the company. Part of our job became leading regular briefings in the idea room, describing various insights and explorations. This proved critical for gaining executive support for the next step of turning ideas into formal explorations or experiments.

Fast-forward 10 months from our initial team meeting. Our exploration and experiment led to one new product idea for a new market that received executive approval and two new strategic partnerships intended to help our current customers solve some big problems we would not have uncovered without our new worldview. Additionally, we uncovered some great approaches to serving customers in other markets that we used to strengthen our own support processes. The concept of looking outside our industry was so well received that we now include current customers in the processes. In turn, they replicate this for their own businesses, relying upon our help as valued partners.”

11 Reasons Why I Love Amy’s Approach

Amy’s approach incorporates the entire spectrum of the level-up skills, and it is frankly brilliant in fomenting a quiet revolution in the company’s approach to innovating.

1. Amy recognized a looming problem for her company that was mostly invisible to others.
2. She was politically adept enough to understand that simply voicing the problem would be ineffective and would label her as a negative influence inside a company where everything worked fairly well. She did not have the political heft to gain serious consideration for her agenda. Instead, she needed to finesse the situation.
3. She managed what she could control—the work of her team—while building political capital.
4. She took the time to gain her team’s support by providing context for the situation and framing—but not dictating—the approach. She framed the need to go to other markets and let the team decide where to look and invest.
5. The visible content in the idea room helped create memories to stimulate further discussion and a means for building on ideas.
6. Instead of positioning the work of exploring new markets as a task, it was defined as a process intended to lead somewhere. For the team, it became a mission.
7. Team members were empowered by the freedom to look for new opportunities.
8. The process ultimately connected the observations to her company.
9. She built critical political capital by sharing the findings and ideas with executives and other stakeholders. The political capital was used to translate ideas into actions in the form of experiments or further exploration.
10. The process ultimately yielded tangible actions in the form of a new product idea, new service approaches, and new partnership opportunities.
11. The process was legitimized by the inclusion of customers in the exploration work.

The Bottom Line

Leadership is always relevant, and the right behaviors are absolutely necessary for success in guiding and motivating others. However, it is essential to move beyond just the foundational behaviors that occupy the traditional narrative for leadership and focus on cultivating the skills necessary for survival in a hostile and foreign new world. The seven level-up skills offer a tangible starting point for you to rethink and revise your work as a leader.

The post Rethinking Leadership: 7 Critical Skills Leaders Need in a World of Change appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

One of the most common and damaging traits among leaders is the compulsion to prove they are the smartest person in the room.
Many well-intentioned leaders don’t realize this bad habit affects them. Unfortunately, a few small behaviors contributing to “smartest person in the room syndrome” can stifle team creativity, curb innovation, and derail any hopes of developing a high-performance environment. Recognizing these unhelpful traits can be challenging, but if you identify them and resolve to improve, you can focus on putting your team – not yourself – in the spotlight.

The desire to improve your leadership effectiveness will help you self-diagnose and take some simple but powerful corrective actions.

• • Defining smartest person in the room syndrome
  • Characteristics of the smartest person in the room
  • How to overcome smartest person in the room syndrome
  • What to do if your boss is the smartest person in the room

What is Smartest Person in the Room Syndrome?

The term “smartest person in the room syndrome” describes people, typically bosses or workplace leaders, who seem to have an inflated ego or want others to perceive them as “better than.” Unfortunately, this is a common and detrimental trait for many leaders. People with this behavior may not even realize they are displaying these harmful behaviors.

Characteristics of Smartest Person in the Room Syndrome

Always having the last word. Leaders who struggle with smartest person in the room syndrome often operate with a false belief that being in charge means always having the answer. That false belief can drive you to assert your opinion as the final word, and it teaches people to suppress their ideas and wait for solutions from the person in charge. If you’re frustrated with your team’s lack of creativity or active discussion about ideas, perhaps you taught them to wait for the last word.

Verbal and non-verbal cues. Leaders telegraph their smartest-person-in-the-room persona through verbal and non-verbal responses. I’ve observed senior managers portray what is perceived as disinterest or disdain for team members’ commentary by interrupting them mid-sentence or maintaining a facial expression that seems to ask: “Why are you using up my valuable oxygen with this stupid idea?” While a leader may not intend to communicate disregard or disdain, team members will pick up on visible and audible cues. If your team members are less than enthusiastic about sharing new ideas and approaches, perhaps you’ve inadvertently shot them down too many times.

One-upping your team members. A closely related cousin to the first two behaviors is the leader who listens to team input but fails to acknowledge good ideas. One top leader had the unique habit of responding to input with her own feedback in a seeming point-counterpoint battle that employees interpreted as either arguing or trumping their ideas. In reality, she was using an unrecognizable form of active listening to translate what she heard into her own words. But that’s not how her employees saw it.

How to Overcome Smartest Person in the Room Syndrome

If you see these traits in yourself, you should feel proud that you recognized them. Recognition is an essential first step to addressing and changing these behaviors.

Ask more than tell. Questions are powerful leadership tools and much more effective than orders in most circumstances. Train yourself to respond to ideas with questions that help you and others better develop their ideas. Strive to understand before offering your own perspective.

Shut up and let others decide. While you never have to cede your right to veto an idea or approach, use this power sparingly. Through questioning and building upon the ideas of others, you can often encourage the modification or adaptation of someone else’s approach without throwing your weight around. If you must, use the line-item veto.

Look for the beauty, not the flaws, in ideas. Some people see the beauty in an idea, while others find the flaws. A micro-managing boss sees the flaws and hammers people for changes to minutiae. An effective manager acknowledges the beauty inherent in ideas and focuses questions and efforts on realizing that beauty. A simple discussion around risks may be all you need to address potential flaws.

How to Help Your Boss

You may find yourself in the uncomfortable position of recognizing these traits in your boss. Working with the smartest person in the room can be stressful, and it can be challenging to manage these relationships while trying to stay productive and positive at work.

Resist the urge to argue. The temptation to argue is one of my weaknesses, and it’s often wrong. Take a deep breath, close your lips, and think. If you must talk, ask clarifying questions. It never hurts anyone to seek first to understand.

Manage upside-down. Construct an effective feedback discussion with behavioral examples if your boss is generally well-intended and receptive to team input. Indicate the business or performance consequences of the smartest-person behaviors and suggest one or more of the previous techniques. Offer to observe and look for opportunities to apply these techniques. Agree on a mechanism to signal an improper behavior and suggest a different course on the fly.

It takes personal courage to offer feedback to your boss. Remember, the operating assumption is that you sense they are interested in strengthening their performance and growing as a leader. Some leaders will not take your feedback kindly. Tread softly, and if the ice is firm, proceed. If not, move on to the next option.

If the boss isn’t approachable, use judo. A little psychology can go a long way with a challenging boss. Start by positively reinforcing your boss’s ideas, then suggest approaches to strengthen those ideas. Of course, these approaches will match your original suggestions, but you’ll have reframed the idea as your boss’s.

Facilitate idea development and proactively discuss risk. A calm discussion will allow you to ask clarifying questions and—at the appropriate time—suggest exploring the risks. List them on a board or flip chart. Highlighting risks may be enough to gain cooperation from someone who believes they are always right.

Summary

Powerful internal drivers push some people to assert that their opinion is correct. From compensating for a lack of self-confidence to falsely believing that being in charge means being right, this need to assert is a performance- and environment-killing habit. Learn to recognize your tendency to do this and use discipline to resist that temptation. If you work for the smartest person in the room, strive to be just a little smarter by managing the psychology and resisting the urge to argue. The effort is worth the potential improvement.

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I wear my respect on my sleeve for the many dedicated product management professionals who work in what I believe is one of the most difficult and critical roles in today’s fast-moving technology and B2B organizations. Product managers shoulder a tremendous responsibility to guide organizational resources, facilitate strategic choices, and lead execution initiatives—often with little or no formal authority. If corporate roles were Olympic athletes, product managers would be the decathletes. 

While admittedly biased (based on my years as a product manager and as a leader of product managers), I firmly believe these talented and well-rounded business professionals represent some of the most valuable assets in a firm’s talent pool. Few positions outside of the role of product manager demand mastery of a broad spectrum of leadership, communication, and management skills as prerequisites for success. 

From understanding the “voice of the customer” to assessing and recommending strategic choices…to building the relationships and systems needed to drive execution across organizational silos, the product manager is truly an executive-in-training. 

Of course, not every product manager is destined for (or even desires) a role in executive leadership. And many who are interested fail to properly develop the critical soft skills needed to grow into and succeed as one of a firm’s top leaders. The most effective product managers and mentors of product managers recognize the importance of mastering the portfolio of informal leadership skills, and they constantly focus on creating and participating in developmental experiences that help those skills emerge. 

Here’s my short list of the top product manager soft skills to develop if you want to crack the ranks of senior leadership. 

Leadership Skills

Today’s emerging leadership model is moving away from the command-and-control style many baby boomers grew up with. It’s moving towards a leadership style that emphasizes flexibility and adaptability. 

The new model for leading focuses on creating the right environment for teams and individuals to succeed. It places a priority on the continual development of talent through coaching and mentoring. Early on, the successful product manager recognizes these leadership tasks as “table stakes” for success and works to strengthen his or her skills at every opportunity. 

Developing leadership skills is an intangible task many try to achieve by attending training courses, reading books, and observing other successful leaders. And, while these are useful steps to help an individual develop context for the true role of a leader, they are never substitutes for the experience gained through live-fire developmental activities. 

As a wise and experienced professional once told me, “Leadership is a profession with a body of knowledge waiting to be discovered.” Books and classes are important and valuable if the insights and approaches are leveraged to solve real problems for customers and organizations. 

In supporting the development of product managers, I encourage an approach that emphasizes the application of key leadership skills in diverse and challenging situations. Developing informal leadership skills by shepherding a new product to market is a formative experience for a product manager. 

This situation emphasizes the development of critical business planning, communication, negotiation, and execution skills. By the same token, managing an initiative to assess and create strategies for product offerings that are struggling helps develop critical-thinking and decision-making skills in the face of tough circumstances. 

While not inviting the “product-manager-as-project-manager” debate, I encourage product managers to recognize that execution inside an organization happens through projects. Additionally, I advise them to gain experience in developing and leading project teams. 

The experience of working to develop high-performance project teams teaches the product manager the importance of focusing on creating an effective working environment. Additionally, the time spent dealing with the many headaches and people-issues that often bedevil projects provides invaluable training. It teaches the reality of how challenging it is to drive results by leading without formal authority. 

 The practicing product manager or the product manager’s mentor must focus on an approach that emphasizes the development of key leadership skills and the application of these skills in a series of diverse leadership situations. 

Ideally, any leadership development program for product managers will emphasize gaining experience in leading informally, leading horizontally, and managing upwards. A constant focus on testing the product manager in new situations accelerates personal learning and development which is critical to emerging product manager leaders. 

Strategic Thinking

Like leaders, strategists aren’t born; in most cases, they are forged over time via the development of critical analytical skills. Few positions in a firm have the potential to contribute more to strategic thinking and development than that of the product manager. 

I was fortunate enough to enjoy early career mentors that challenged me to constantly think outside of my product and outside of my company…to look at the big picture…to tune in to my various audiences…and to develop and test strategic hypotheses while growing the business. This is a very different way of thinking than the typical “What are the top 10 features I can jam into my next release?” Too many product managers don’t learn to look beyond their narrow scope (product, market segment). Worse yet, too many don’t grasp the importance of their role as a strategist in the overall firm’s plans. 

The product-manager-as-strategist understands he or she must invest in looking at the big picture of market forces, customers, and competitors—and comparing this view to a company’s strategic priorities and capabilities. The effective product manager seeks to uncover unresolved client problems. Then, they develop programs and experiences that fill those needs and delight customers in ways that competitors cannot readily emulate. 

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle for the product-manager-as-strategist to overcome is the ability to look critically at his or her own struggling product offerings. They must conclude that, in some circumstances, the problems are not solved by investing more money, creating more features, or working on the next release. 

I know a product manager has evolved to an important intellectual level when he or she has the courage to confront a failing initiative with a strategy other than “spend more” or “develop more.” I’m particularly excited when the new proposal is clearly grounded in the “voice of the customer” and takes into account the prevailing and expected market forces. 

If you are a senior leader or mentor, it is important to encourage your product managers to think critically and to consider the external environment in formulating their plans—as well as to involve them in strategic planning activities. Ensure your interactions are heavily weighted toward asking strategic questions versus offering answers. Your own example will teach product managers on your team to think holistically about strategy when formulating plans. 

If you are a product manager seeking to grow your career, learn the art of asking questions. And remember to invest ample time in the market—observing customers and looking for unresolved problems. And most important, recognize that the sun does not rise and set with the products you manage. Rather, your goal is to uncover unique opportunities to create value for your customers. The true solution may be something that doesn’t remotely resemble the offerings you are managing today. 

Communications Skills and the Art of Diplomacy

A great product manager learns the skills needed to speak the language of executives, recognizing that every encounter is an opportunity. Regardless of with whom they are meeting, it’s a chance to build trust by understanding needs, creating shared perspectives, and building reasons for people and teams to move forward. 

The HBO miniseries titled John Adams, based on David McCullough’s biography of the same name, shows the mercurial and aggressive Adams. He jeopardizes any chance to earn France’s support for the American Revolutionary War with his demands for immediate action. His style and tactics nearly destroy the hard-won credibility that Benjamin Franklin earned over the several years he spent developing a mutually agreeable reason to oppose the British. 

As a product manager, you may very well understand the “right” direction and believe that those who don’t share your opinion are blind to the obvious. Recognizing that no two humans look at the same picture and see the same thing is an important first step in understanding the need to develop diplomatic skills. 

Another wise person in my life once advised, “Seek first to understand and then to be understood.” This simple statement underscores a powerful philosophy that product managers and all leaders should apply in their day-to-day communications. 

In today’s world, developing a communication style that creates interest and fosters respect is essential for success. Diplomatic skills are crucial for a product manager’s career progression. Managing upwards, collaborating across departments, and leading diverse, distributed teams across generations and cultures are key. These skills help a product manager quickly advance beyond a mid-level role. 

Tying It All Together

It is remarkably easy to get caught up in the pursuit of day-to-day business and the “urgent-unimportant,” and forget that every day is a chance to advance your career. 

If you are fortunate enough to have a great mentor, consider yourself lucky. Pay attention to that mentor; listen and learn. If you don’t have a valued mentor or coach, it is incumbent upon you to take the initiative. Create the experiences necessary for you to develop and fine-tune the leadership, strategic, and communication skills needed to advance your career. 

Simply put, the role of product manager offers a unique foundation on which to build a successful career. And while the typical product manager career path is focused on hard skills, you’ll need to include soft skills if you want to achieve true growth in the field.
 

Resources for product manager career growth:

5 Ways to Become a Respected Leader in the C-Suite  
Level-up your Leadership Skills
Taking Inventory- Identify your Leadership Strengths (and Weaknesses) 

The post Career Growth and the Product Manager appeared first on Pragmatic Institute - Resources.

The benefits of a rigorous strategy program to an organization are like the benefits of a good exercise program to your body. You might sweat and groan a bit, but if you stick with it, your health and vitality improve tremendously.

Unfortunately, like fitness initiatives in January, most organizations have good intentions about strategy, but as soon as the budgeting is done, the interest fades. If this sounds like your organization, you are not alone.

Many organizations fail to recognize that strategy is a process not an event, and that an effective strategy program is motivating and galvanizing for employees, not distracting.

Six Frequent Strategy Program Misfires

Relegating strategy planning to the once-a-year off-site.

• Confusing strategy with budgeting.
• Assuming that strategy development is only for executives
• Developing a strategy plan in secret and keeping everyone else guessing about what it is.
• Confusing becoming a $x million/billion dollar company with having a strategy
• Investing a tremendous amount of time with outside consultants to put a team through a multi-month death march that results in a lot of paper and presentations and little substance.

These common misfires give strategy a bad name, and completely miss the reason why an organization should invest the time and energy in creating an effective and on-going program to define, shape, reflect upon and change strategy.

Six Suggestions for Creating a Healthy Strategy Program

1. Create a strategy process champion that does not have functional or line of business responsibility and charter this individual with defining a process that incorporates all of the major steps from market and S.W.O.T analysis through opportunity identification and plan development. The management team should be involved in defining and approving this process, with the CEO acting as the project sponsor to ensure timely and positive cooperation.
2. Communicate the nature of the strategy program and process to the broader organization and provide a rough time-line for the project’s major milestones. Describe how teams and individuals across the organization will be involved in the various phases of the project with tasks ranging from data gathering to market assessment, idea brainstorming and ultimately, strategy execution.
3. The CEO must ensure that the management team understands their role in the strategy development process, and that they are prepared to provide their personal support and resources to assist in the creation efforts. If the organization has a board of directors with an active strategy committee, the CEO should ensure proper communication of board suggestions or directives.
4. Once the strategy is developed and approved, the primary tasks shift to communication, education and implementation. The final phase of the strategy creation process is to define the communication program and to outline the structure and approaches to manage the execution process. Many processes fail at this critical juncture, because the strategy team believes that their work is complete once the strategy is approved by management or the board.
5. A strategy execution team comprised of the managers from all functional groups should assume responsibility for translating high-level objectives into departmental or team tasks. The CEO or COO should chair this team, conducting regular update sessions and monitoring actions, milestone completion and results. Care should be taken to keep the execution team focused on operational issues around strategy implementation.
6. An effective strategy program includes a commitment to monitoring results, gauging market acceptance and reporting on competitor reactions. Beware the tendency to treat the strategy as an unalterable con¬tract, and encourage teams to challenge the original premises as conditions change. The best strategy programs accept that they will need to constantly adapt to changing conditions.

The bottom-line

Managing an effective, on-going strategy program takes commitment, just like a fitness program. The benefits that accrue from ensuring that everyone in your organization has a common vocabulary about the business and its direction, and that they are involved in developing, implementing or refreshing the strategy, are tremendous. Managed properly, an effective strategy program can be a culture-altering event, and like the clothes that fit better as a result of your regular exercise program, the benefits from this alteration are palpable.

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