ATTN: Product Leadership Criteria

Post-Globalist Bottoms-Up Criteria for Success

Organizational Change Management meets M&A

Over the last decade of my career in product, I had opportunities to define roles and what I thought was best route to deliver the most value. Professionally, I’ve been through a handful of org transformations, climbing up and down the tree forming, re-establishing, and scaling product teams to deliver global data platforms and premium digital experiences. 

Flipping over the org chart changes the enterprise to a relationship-driven network tree, root to leaf.

When a large tree acquires a start-up sapling, the M&A lawyers, bankers, and equity holders are bought into a persuasive story: that the sapling won't kill the tree, the tree won't kill the sapling, and they'll grow larger and faster together.

After the transaction, depending on the deal, constituents experience gains, character-building experiences, and identity crises. In my leadership experience, post-merger integration, re-organization, and change management happens at the edge. At the edge, the autonomous sensing nodes of the network are either a liability or asset in the organizational tree. Your culture is only as strong as your weakest link.

In every product team I’ve helped to seed, expand, or reinvent, I believe effective organizational change management was at least 40% of success. In order to be the heart-brain of a healthy sense-making culture, product should adopt design-thinking principles, get out of itself, and be naive. In order to unearth and articulate insights of external or internal user personas, manage expectations, address pain-points, negotiate compromise, and generate delight across the board, a product organization must be smart and emotionally intelligent enough to have brave conversations about frequently-neglected, highly likely, and highly impactful subjects.

I recognized that people with leadership qualities - or those with a product mindset - are dispersed throughout the organization, and are not necessarily all VP or director-level, or even managers. Proactively distributing leadership cultures in organizations involves some salesmanship. Leadership is the process of “transferring confidence from oneself." From confidence in yourself, the mission, the team, the product or service to...someone else, persuading them to buy into the story.

Communicate Attention & Joy

Storytellers excel at communicating a narrative, and maintaining attention. As a people manager, unless I have a moral or legal obligation to not communicate something to my direct reports, peers, or individual contributors, I tell them everything I’m thinking and feeling. For the sake of transparency, first I must be certain I have appropriately identified what I'm feeling. 

Leadership involves self-work. Gray rhinos must be discussed transparently, at all levels. Unfortunately, this degree of vulnerability and truth-telling may be even more challenging in heavily regulated, government, non-profit, and human service operating cultures.

I believe a public or private leadership culture that is not able to define and articulate the vision will struggle to attract and keep attention, is likely not spending its resources (time, money, energy) wisely, resulting in an inability to manage departmental conflicts, and thus displays unhealthy behaviors in inappropriate venues or inexplicable decision-making. The result is tragicomical. In fact, it's such a common experience, it's laughable.

Laughter is a Social Ritual

Rituals, ceremonies, call-and-response, and (in)formal relationships, mark culturally accepted organizational norms of leadership and team members.

The crowd at the Comedy Cellar and Fortune 500 employee town hall are both hopeful, somewhat skeptical, and, if already loaded at the Cellar, potentially hostile. The hosts of both are expected to deftly manage and direct attention with their voice and stagecraft.

Power dynamics inform humor and emotional intelligence. In order to achieve Life-Work Balance in the “post-pan”, Generation Zoom will have to be brave and focus more attention on gray rhinos. Walking the talk, manifesting a productive vision, especially when the individual or community’s honesty and self-interests are being challenged is the balance part.

Gain power by laughing at your own trauma. Or weave a funny, meandering story about leadership!

Organizational habits and behaviors that we typically describe as “culture” are a function of generations of colleagues and constituents forming, storming, norming, and performing.  It is the “way we do things around here” or “how people talk” or “the way things work.” That includes minutiae like acronyms and jargon (i.e. verbal memes) critical to establishing a shared understanding of an event, object, or person, or power dynamics.

It takes will and skill to ruthlessly demonstrate joy and good humor.

Value Criteria for Leadership

Eventually, I coalesced on a heuristic which evolved out of my own professional operating environments and personal interests. I thought a set of criteria could be applied to help evaluate both the desire and ability of employees (or executive board members, city mayors, constitutional officers, etc) to lead their fellow humans, colleagues, constituents, and users.

To justify an acquisition, spreadsheet math predictions must demonstrate free cash flow exceeds arbitrary hurdle rates. The limits of due diligence only provide directional insight into the morale and appetite for change of human capital. Any inorganic change runs the risk that the leadership culture and strategy may be orthogonal. 

I think an effective leadership culture involves the art and science of communicating and propagating emotion and sense-making throughout the organization. That can be a catch-phrase crystallizing a punchline, or a funny meme going viral. The appetite for satire, self-deprecation, and emotional vulnerability all define organizational sense of humor. Comedy has pushed norms, tolerances, and permissions for generations. Humor reflects an on-going power dynamic and changing ergonomic environment. Anti-fragile leaders direct attention to social needs because they are neglected and highly likely to be highly impactful.

An antifragile leadership culture has to ruthlessly and joyfully shepherd constituents, users, and talent through the paradigm shift of the next Industrial Revolution. In my opinion, some critical themes for the Zoom Generation include fostering a local community sense of democratic vision, healthy development of internal/external conflict management, and normalizing kindness all around. The result should be an intelligent, joyful, and ruthless organization.

Thinking about the results for your own organization (or municipality) can be revealing. 

If an organization is healthy, growing, and expected to continue that way, it’s likely the answer is “yes” to all. Demonstrating will and skill of each criteria increases the likelihood of will and skill at subsequent criteria. It's so simple, it's easy. Like parenting and data science. If user, market, and colleague consensus is that the leadership culture can articulate and communicate the vision and mission, then it will attract and retain talent, resources get allocated responsibly, fiefdoms buy in to the strategy, and people execute the plan, generating more desired outcomes for everyone.