Emotional intelligence (EQ) is presented as a critical, often overlooked "missing skill" in product management, complementing technical expertise. Developing EQ, particularly self-awareness, is essential for effective product leadership and overall success.
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hi my name is Kate Leto and I'm an
executive coach and I work with product
leaders and Executives of organization
organizations all over the world and I'm
here today to talk to you about
emotional intelligence and why I really
feel that it's the missing skill in your
product stack just to give you a little
bit of context as to where all this is
coming from So based on my 25 years plus
experience in in and around product
management I've kind of come to a point
where when I talk about product
management with my clients I always
describe it as a practice kind of like
how a doctor practices medicine and a
lawyer practices law in my mind and
based on my experience we in Prague
management have this vast virtual
toolbox of methodologies and Frameworks
and tools and we use it to try to solve
some really complex problems and
sometimes it works and sometimes it
doesn't but it sure takes a lot of
practice and within our product practice
I view I view it as having two distinct
but connected skill sets one is a our
technical skills which is what we do and
the second is our human skills which is
how we do the work
so just used to a little more context
about what I mean by technical skills
and human skills so technical skills you
know the work that we do every day you
know we talk about road maps and put
those together we talk a lot about okrs
for organizations and our goals and our
kpi there's a lot of conversation that
we have around our MVPs and what those
might be like how to build a great road
map or how to build it a great prototype
how to actually find out more about what
our customers think through testing um
with a B testing multivariate testing
all these things are hugely important
and a big part of the foundation of what
our product practice is all about and
what we do so they're great they're
foundational they're important to us
however they're not everything there's
also how we do the work and the human
skills and this is where I really think
emotional intelligence comes in skills
like being able to coach and Mentor
skills like having Conflict Management
um and resolution capabilities teamwork
leadership skills emotional
self-awareness empathy all of these are
crucial skills that we bring into the
way that we work every day and seeing
that this is a talk about emotional
intelligence and product management I
want to make sure that we're all on the
same page with a definition on emotional
intelligence so this is coming from The
Institute of Health and Human potential
and they say that emotional intelligence
is the ability to recognize understand
and manage our own emotions and
recognize understand and influence the
emotions of those around us
and you may be familiar if you're
familiar with emotional intelligence um
you may be familiar with a guy named
Daniel Goldman who is a psychologist a
best-selling author he wrote a book of
all about emotional intelligence in 1995
that really popularized the concept and
in that book he argued that our EQ which
is our emotional quotient or our
measurement of emotions is actually more
important than our IQ and achieving
success be it personally or
professionally and over the last few
decades he's really dug more into
emotional intelligence and evolved the
definition and he and if his colleagues
have come up with the concept that
there's really four components of
emotional intelligence self-awareness
self-management social awareness and
relationship management and within those
components are all the different skills
that I had just mentioned on the
previous slide about our human skills
and how we do our work emotional
self-awareness empathy organizational
awareness adaptability positive outlook
the ability to and skill to influence to
deal with conflict all of these things
are skills of emotional intelligence and
when you think about it our technical
skills and our human skills our
emotional intelligence are already
intertwined you know if you want to
build a road map and get that out there
it's not just about the technique it's
not just about the software you're going
to use or how you're going to prioritize
it's having the emotional intelligence
to get that done it's having the
self-awareness to be able to raise your
hand and say okay maybe the thing that
I'm really pushing for here on the
roadmap is out of my own best interest
not the best interest of my team or my organization
organization
it's also having things like influencing
skills to be able to bring those
challenging stakeholders and the rest of
your team with you on what you feel the
vision of the roadmap is
it's even having conflict resolution
skills because we always know there's
going to be some kind of tension or
conflict when it comes to putting
together a road map
also when it comes to hiring I actually
I wrote a book called hiring product
managers and it's not about the
technical side it's not going to give
you the five steps or Frameworks to go
out and hire people but it does address
the emotional intelligence that's
involved in how we approach hiring right
for because everything from how we write
a job description to the interview
questions that we ask to how we consider
the interview the candidates performance
in the interview all is impacted by our
emotional intelligence and our
candidates emotional intelligence
so the cool thing is that much like our
the ability to learn new techniques or
new Frameworks we do have the ability to
also build our emotional intelligence it
takes a bit longer it's a bigger
challenge it takes a lot of discipline
but it is possible
and if you are interested in doing that
I highly recommend with starting with
self-awareness and building that as a
skill self-awareness in many ways is a
foundational skill in emotional
intelligence from that once we start to
build that and grow that we have easier
access to things like empathy and to
being inspirational leaders into being
good teammates and to being good coaches
and mentors so I want to make sure that
we're all on the same page with what
self-awareness is so I want to start at
that point this definition that I'm
going to share with you is from Tasha
Uric who is an organizational
psychologist who is a researcher and
obviously a best-selling author as well
and within her book Insight she talks
about self-awareness as having two
components so the first is internal
self-awareness which is the ability to
see ourselves clearly I I think we often
associate that aspect of self-awareness
when we think about it it's seeing
ourselves clearly knowing ourselves
there's also external self-awareness
which is how others see us and how we
fit into the world around us I think
that component to self-awareness is
something that we may not be as familiar
with and in her book Uric recommends
that we actually work on both of these
in tandem we need to have a balanced
level of internal self-awareness and
external self-awareness and we have when
we have that it really shows up in our
work as product people every day it's
going to show up in how we make
decisions because we're going to
understand what are where our
motivations come from it's going to show
up in your overall approach to work
because you're going to know your
superpowers and your Kryptonite and
you're going to know how to work with
both it's going to show up with how you
lead because you're going to be able to
be in a place where you can hold your
convictions as a leader but also have
the ability to stay humble and curious
and it's going to show up in how you
learn because you'll be taking
responsibility for your actions you're
going to build that muscle of being able
to look back to find to identify those
things you wish you'd done differently
and learn to move forward with them and
do it and try it differently next time around
around
so overall lots of good things comes
from self-awareness and it can really
help us with how we do our work as
product people so I want what I want to
talk about next is how you can start to
build your own self-awareness and start
to build it in a very simple pragmatic
way and build it into kind of a daily
routine and I call this a self-awareness
Trilogy it's knowing myself accepting
thyself and improve thyself
so we're going to start with know
thyself a very simple exercise that you
can do every day to start to get felt
better and build that is through daily self-reflection
self-reflection
so when I was doing research on my book
I found this interesting study that said
through daily self reflection we can
increase our performance by up to 23 and
I'm not talking about huge Investments
of time I'm talking about maybe five ten
minutes in the morning five ten minutes
in the evening if that works better for
you to grab a piece of paper and a pen
and write down the responses to us to a
few open-ended questions and I do
encourage you to write them down with
paper and Pen because our brain kind of
works differently when we do that but
ask yourself some simple questions and
respond to those in the morning ask what
do I want to accomplish today what am I
worried about today in the evening talk
about respond to the questions like what
worked well today what do I want to do
differently tomorrow what am I most
grateful for today bringing gratitude
into self-reflection is hugely powerful
now you may notice that none of these
questions start with why when you're
doing self-reflection it's really
important to take a step back from why
questions why
well if we knew why we did something or
why we didn't do something we probably
wouldn't have done it that way in the
first place and trying to challenge
ourselves with a why question so soon
after something happened can kind of
send our our brains down a negative
cycle and create negative self-talk and
a negative storyline that we have a hard
time breaking away from so with daily
self-reflection focus on your why
questions and do that in the morning in
the evening with even on your commute if
you're back commuting to work whatever
works for you just find a time that does
work for you and what we're going to do
then is through daily self-reflections
you're going to be able to identify some
key insights over time and I want you to
hold on to those because we're going to
put them to work in just a minute
before that though we're going to move
on to the second part of the trilogy
which is I accept thyself and you can do
that through identifying and accepting
your blind spots now it's really
interesting because I feel like in the
conversations that I have with clients
it's not always a challenge in getting
feedback to help you identify your blind
spot but what is a challenge is actually
accepting them as blind spots and
accepting that feedback there's another
great book that I want to point out it's
by another executive coach named
Marshall Goldsmith and he wrote a book
called what got you here won't get you
there and he points out that
often if we receive feedback about blind
spots it just doesn't align with our
self-view or view of ourselves and how
we fit into the world around us then
we're not going to accept it right we're
just going to disregard it
so he says in order to actually accept
your blind spots you need to ask the
right people ask the right questions
interpret the answers properly and then
you can accept the response is accurate
we don't have time to get into all of
that today but I'm going to focus and
introduce a couple of practices that you
can try to ask the right people
and the first is trusted critic is a
practice that you could try out on your
own so the idea here is you are actually
picking the people that you want to get
this feedback from okay and this group
of people small group of people people
could be three or four people who you
feel really have your best interests at
heart but they're not going to sugarcoat
any feedback they give you they're going
to tell you the truth okay could be a
little bit of tough love and you're
going to seek them out so the idea is
you're going to
you're going to hopefully start to
accept what they're saying as true
because you've identified the people
that you want to get the information
from they are people you trust but you
know there are also people that are
going to be honest and fair with you so
what you're going to ask your trusted
critics to do is to drop a list of what
they see are your strengths and
weaknesses and then you're going to do
the same for yourself okay so we're
going to have two lists of strengths and
weaknesses and you're going to come
together and you're going to compare and
most likely what you're going to find is
a gap because this is actually our
internal self-awareness and our external
self-awareness coming up together in one
simple practice right
The Wider the gap between their list and
your list means the more work you have
to do but that's totally cool because
again you're going to grab the insights
and the high level learnings from that
exercise and you're going to hold on to
them for a minute because we're going to
put them to work
but in the meantime I want to talk about
one other thing that you could try to
accept the feedback
um as true and identifying the right
people because you're going to be the
person that's doing this work you're
going to become kind of self-anthropologist
self-anthropologist
um and pick an hour a day a week
whatever it is and you're gonna sit back
and you're going to observe and you're
going to capture all the Casual comments
that are said about you you know you're
late Kate that's a great idea Kate you
already said that Kate dinner was great
okay all of these things at the end of
your observation period you're gonna
look at the patterns and maybe you're
going to see some things that surprise
you maybe you'll see a few comments
about how you've interrupted in meetings
and you didn't realize you were doing
that or maybe that you're not speaking
up in meetings and you weren't aware of
that as well so we're going to take this
data that and insights that we're
getting from self-reflection and from
our trusted critics and from
observational feedback and we're going
to put them at work to work and the last
part of the trilogy which is improve
thyself and we're going to do that by
doing what probably people do best which
is building experiments this experiment
Loop is kind of similar to build major
learn which I'm sure a lot of you know
about but it's learn act and adapt and
all you're going to do is you're going
to take those insights from these
different practices and you're going to
write it down and identify one of them
and simply capture that and add
something that you've discovered you
want to work on and you want to change
so high level what do you want to change
second thing in terms of act what's one
small action you can take
for the next week the next two weeks to
try to change that behavior to try to
change whatever it is that you're not
comfortable with and then you're gonna
check in right at the end of your
experiment period and you're going to
adapt what do you want to con what do
you want to try next how do you want to
continue to grow and change so what
you're building here is really a
self-awareness Loop and you're starting
this whole process of continuous
personal Discovery and I wanna I wanna
encourage when you get to this point
this is the hardest part this is really
where the rubber hits the road and it's
really helpful to have somebody to work
with you on this or just have somebody
to kind of hold you accountable on it as
well could be a peer coach could be a
friend at work could be a partner could
be a boss could be an external coach but
get some help with this because this
part is improving thyself as I said
River hits the road it's hard to do on
your own but it is possible and it is
feasible if you're really into it and
you're ready to make you're ready to
take the energy and dedication and move
into it so I've given you have very high
level look at emotional intelligence and
product management and self-awareness
and how you can start to build that on
your own if you'd like to find out more
if there's any way I can help I hope
you'll keep in touch check out my
website find me on Twitter sign up to my newsletter
newsletter
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