Ask Women in Product: Do you have tips for learning and developing soft skills around leadership, negotiation, and influencing?
This week, Bhavika Shah, Amy Lin, and Emma Carew Grovum share their tactics for developing and using soft skills to lead, negotiate, and influence.
Answer from Bhavika Shah, Product Manager at Pluralsight
“Soft skills” are of maximum importance in the role of a product manager. As PMs, we need leadership, negotiation, collaboration, and communication skills in our day-to-day work, and there’s always room for improvement. To be in any role that requires a high level of influence, especially without authority, means you need to master these skills.
What’s hard about these skills though, is that they are not easy to measure. You can’t say, “Today I have X much leadership, and tomorrow I have Y more.” The best way to know where you’re at and what you need to work on is by reflecting on what you could do better in your interactions with others and by collecting feedback from those around you.
Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on these skills intentionally in a few different ways, and here are the tactics that have had the most impact for me.
- Learn from others
There are a ton of books, articles, podcasts, talks, etc. out there about leadership and many other soft skills. Consuming some of this content gives you an outside perspective on important facets of these skills and equips you with tried-and-true tactics from other people’s real-world experiences.
Here are a few of my favorites:
- How to Win Friends and Influence People — Dale Carnegie
- These 13 Exercises Will Prepare You for Work’s Toughest Situations — First Round Review
- Master the Art of Influence — Persuasion as a Skill and Habit — First Round Review
- The Art of Letting Other People Have Your Way: Negotiation Secrets from Chris Voss — The Knowledge Project Podcast, Episode 27
A couple of negotiation resources that I’ve heard good things about:
- Getting to Yes — Roger Fisher and William Ury
- Never Split the Difference — Chris Voss
Not everything you encounter in this category will be useful — in fact, there’s a lot of fluff. The good content, however, stays with you and can have a huge impact on how you work with others, so it’s worth spending some time reading and listening.
You can also learn from others who model the qualities and skills you aspire to have or improve. If you see someone who communicates well through challenging conversations, take the time to pick their brains about their strategies and learn what you can adopt.
2. Put others first
Leadership, negotiation, and influence are often about the people around you, not just or even mainly about you. In every situation, stop and think about the other people who are involved:
- What do they need or want?
- Why do they need or want that?
- What do you have to offer them?
It’s hard to take the time to think through these questions before starting each conversation. However, I’ve found that when I take the time to prepare in this way, the conversation is better for all parties, and I’m happier with the outcome. It’s takes effort to develop the habit of spending more time asking questions and listening, but doing that is the mark of strong leadership, influence, and negotiation.
3. Ask for feedback and reflect
The best way to know where you have room for improvement when it comes to many of these skills is by reflecting on how specific interactions could have gone better and asking for feedback from the people around you.
There are a few questions to ask yourself when you come out of a conversation that might not have gone your way (or maybe even one that did):
- Did I achieve my goal in that interaction? If not, why not? If yes, what did I do right this time?
- What could I have done differently? What might have been the impact of doing that?
- How was I perceived in that interaction? Am I happy with that?
I’ll admit that focused self-reflection is easier said than done :) However, when I have reflected immediately after an interaction and then again after a bit of time has passed, I have clearly seen what I could have done better. This insight, in turn, allows me to decide how to improve intentionally.
I’ve also benefited greatly from feedback from my peers who have participated in or witnessed a difficult conversation that I’ve led. Some examples of interactions that a product manager will likely experience include:
- Negotiating with other teams on the timeline for cross-functional deliverables;
- Influencing the appropriate resourcing decisions for my team;
- Leading the team through a major pivot on priorities.
In these types of interactions, the product manager is often leading the conversation, pulling together different perspectives to reach the shared outcome that best helps the team achieve the collective goal. I get feedback from others who participated in those problematic conversations by asking what I could have done better and how they felt others perceived me. Having an open rapport with teammates who will give you honest feedback will help you go much further in developing these skills.
Soft skills are challenging to master because a technique that helped you with one person may not work with another. With practice and insights from past interactions, you can adapt by first understanding the context then tailoring your approach accordingly.
A final thought: these skills can be challenging to master because a strategy or technique that helped you in your interactions with one person may not work with other people. With practice and insights from past interactions, you can adapt by first understanding the context (through good question-asking) and then tailoring your approach accordingly.
Answer from Amy Lin, Product Manager at Codementor
Any effort to lead, negotiate, or influence requires effective communication. While it’s easy to agree that communication skills are paramount for product managers, the term itself can mean so many things. Communication skills help you get your ideas across, let you describe and contextualize your vision for others, and get people on the same page. Sometimes being clear and concise is not enough — you need to lead and influence while not being directly authorized to do so. That’s where your leadership skills and ability to influence kick in.
If you think these skills are the missing puzzle pieces in the way you communicate, here are a few tips to help you be better at influencing and leading your team.
1. Listen between the lines
You usually feel a need to influence people when there’s a difference of opinion between you and another person, and you need to be better aligned. To influence and then lead your teammates, start by figuring out how far you are from each of them. You do this by listening carefully to what they really mean when they say something.
For example, if a developer says a feature will take much longer than expected to code, do you understand how they came up with the estimate? Have you said anything that would have given them the impression that the feature must be built a certain way?
The more you practice listening between the lines, the more you’ll see beyond what a person literally says.
2. Ask, don’t assume
We see from the above example how communication can go wrong. In your mind, a feature might be simple to implement, but its scope, design, or functionality can be misunderstood in so many ways that your developer thinks it’ll take much longer. Ask questions to better understand what they’re thinking when they’re coming up with the estimate; don’t assume they are fooling around by giving you false estimates.
(WARNING: I’m not saying you could decide how long it’d take to build something. However, as you become more familiar with the technical aspects of your product, you do get a better sense of how technically complex something might be. For example, changing a line of text on a static web page shouldn’t take a day of effort.)
3. Find common ground by staying focused on shared goals
Stay on the same side as the people you work with. The scenario I mentioned in the example above can be tricky and touchy, and the last thing you want is your developers seeing you as anything but collaborative. You need to let them know you are firmly on their side.
Communicate why you need to build something within a specific timeframe and make it clear why this feature would lead us closer to the shared goals. Yes, you heard me right. The developer isn’t working for you; You are working together, side by side, towards the shared goals for the product. You are not against them; you are supporting them so you can, as a team, move closer to your goals together.
4. Don’t treat it like a zero-sum game
Once you all agree on a specific goal, you can see how you can make things happen. It’s not a zero-sum game, so explore possibilities that will help everyone move forward.
For the example above, your next step is to prepare for a bargaining session between you and the developer. Throughout the discussion, keep your goals in mind. (In fact, you should always know why you’re building something; not just for this scenario).
The question is always: “Can we still achieve the goal without X?” Here’s how this conversation could go down:
Me: OK, Jean, can you tell me which part of the feature is the most time-consuming?
Jean: That dynamic image generator. We have not dealt with this kind of image processing before, so I need time to investigate how to implement this.
Me: If we replace it with a default static image, can we complete it within two weeks?
Jean: Yes, without a doubt.
Me: Then it’s okay for us to get rid of that dynamic image generator. It’s just there to give new users a welcoming, personalized feeling. Our main goal is to educate new users, so they have the information they need to start navigating their way through our site. We can still achieve that goal without the fancy image generator.
Jean: Cool, then I’ll start right away.
Me: Awesome, I’ll talk to Pete about the default image and will let you know when you can expect that.
5. Treat your team with respect
If you encounter a scenario you’re unsure how to deal with, fall back on this rule of thumb: treat your team with respect, always.
Put yourself in other people’s shoes — if you were in their place, what would you be thinking? How would you like to be treated? As product managers, we coexist with our teams; we would not be able to build (great) things without our teammates. Always be open to other opinions even though you might not agree. As long as you can find common ground, you can find a way forward.
If you encounter a scenario you’re unsure how to deal with, fall back on this rule of thumb: treat your team with respect, always.
Finally, each of the tips above requires work. Don’t be discouraged if your initial attempts to develop these soft skills yield mixed results. Soft skills do not come easily to everybody — and that’s totally normal. You’ll find that as you consciously apply each of these tips and reflect on the results of those interactions, you’ll get better each time. Good luck!
Answer from Emma Carew Grovum, Product Manager at The Daily Beast
Take a minute, close your eyes, and think of the best boss you’ve ever had. Think about what it is or was like to sit across the table from this boss. What made her a great leader? Write down a list of attributes that you admire about her leadership style. Now circle the three to four items that are the most important to you, that you feel the most attracted to.
For me, these are the traits that stand out:
- Vision: how they see the big picture
- Planning: how they go about reaching their goals
- Conflict resolution and crisis management: how they solve problems along the way
- Negotiation: how they find a way forward that works for all parties
Vision
If you’ve never put together a personal development plan or used the SMART goals model, I would highly recommend it. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound. This is a great exercise to help you create a vision, set goals that help you realize that vision, and make a list of concrete steps you can take to achieve those goals.
Even if your workplace doesn’t use a formal goal-setting process, it’s still a good idea for you to craft your vision (what does success look like in six months, in a year?) and set your goals.
Planning
Once you’ve got your goals set, you can start making two lists. The first list is every actionable item you can think of to support those goals. They can be one-minute tasks; they can be one-hour tasks; they can be one-week tasks. Just write them all down. I often encourage people to make a list of a hundred items to start. The second list is a list of the resources, buy-in, decision-making, and support you need from your manager or leadership team to succeed.
Share these lists in a one-on-one with your manager or a small meeting with your leadership team, but also share them with anyone you manage. Being transparent about the plan for achieving your goals is one of the keys to being a good leader.
Keep track of your progress in a weekly journal or planner or Google doc so that come review time, you can easily sum up the work you’ve been doing and how you performed over time. (I call mine a “Ship It” journal and I use this journal of badass ladies throughout history to keep track of my work).
Conflict resolution and crisis management
A coach recently introduced me to a concept called “LAVA” as a way to navigate tough conversations. The acronym stands for Listen, Acknowledge, Validate, and Ask. Practising the LAVA concept means you’re having empathetic and productive conversations, and you close each discussion by asking for action items and next steps. This approach often works because you are asking the other person to help you move forward with a solution.
Come to the negotiation armed with as much research as you have.
Negotiation
Finally, here are the negotiation tips that have helped me the most :
- Make a list of the things you are willing to negotiate on. If it’s a compensation negotiation, this list may include: training budget, more vacation or flex time, professional development time and resources, etc.
- Be passionate, but not emotional. Be assertive, but not aggressive. It can be hard to find the right balance (and honestly, as women should we really even need to consider these factors?)
- Do your research! Come to the negotiation armed with as much research as you have. You don’t have to put all of your cards on the table to start, but it is good to have the evidence ready to support whatever you are asking for.
- Avoid counter-productive language. You’ll have better results with negotiation if you avoid words like “always” and “never” and “should” and “shouldn’t.” Good negotiation comes from the same place as improvisation. Use “yes, and…” or “yes, but…” to pivot and keep the conversation going.
I hope these tips help you in your efforts to develop your soft skills. You’ve got this!
Thank you to Sara Rosso for editing this piece.
