Want to empower your team? Listen.
Product leaders can help teams succeed through communication.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’ve been communicating.
In 2020, as teams go remote, and strategies quickly shift, communication has become mission critical. On the team I lead at Hudl, I’ve asked PMs to take more ownership of our communication. If we lead by listening, we can empower our teams through uncertainty.
Leaders who hit outcomes empower their teams.
Product leaders are accountable for outcomes, but we rely on our teams to deliver them. This reality scales up and down to apply to leadership at all levels.
The most effective PMs empower teams across the business.
The accountability pattern applies to outcomes beyond engineering and design teams. End-to-end product leaders are also accountable for a go-to-market strategy. This means that PMs need to empower sales, marketing, customer success, legal, finance, and supply chain teams to deliver aligned outcomes for the customer and the bottom line.
With so many teams to align, it’s likely not all teams define success in their roles the same way. To get aligned, you need to know what success looks like to those teams.
Effective leaders start by listening.
Experts say over 50% of effective verbal or written communication is listening. By listening to understand the constraints of their teams, leaders can empower teams to hit achievable outcomes.
What does listening look like?
If you’re at the start of a project, or you’re stuck in a rut, you might want to set up a “listening tour.” Powerful insights arise when feedback is invited by a team lead.
Product leaders can unlock the power of listening by asking the right questions. Questions like “What does success look like for you?,” “What is your planning cycle?,” “How can I unblock you?,” signal that leaders want to set their team members up for success.
What does empowerment look like?
It starts with transparency and trust. Listening yields valuable information about team planning cycles, success metrics, and preferred communication channels. Make it visible! Align teams by publicly clarifying outcomes and milestones, and entrusting teams to be accountable to them.
Most importantly, continue to share information. Leaders maximize the impact of their team by reducing knowledge silos. Sharing information about users and the business empowers teams to speak up with new opportunities or risks.
It all sounds simple. But across a complex, cross-functional team, doing it becomes mission critical.
If you want to improve your communication, reflect on failed outcomes.
When your team has failed to deliver, look at your own communication. Leaders often misunderstand the constraints of the teams they depend on because they failed to ask the right questions early. Teams often lack empowerment when they feel unclear about goals and the level of accountability they have.
Ask, How could I have listened earlier? How could I have communicated to align and empower my team?
By asking these questions to yourself, your manager, and your team, you’ll practice accountable listening. Most importantly, you will signal to your team that you want to empower them to maximize their impact, and set them up to succeed.
