High-Impact Interpersonal Skills for Product Managers

Skills and a lot of key skills are required to become a successful product manager. Whether the role is a traditional product manager or a growth product manager, it’s no easy task to fill that role. To deliver outstanding products, the successful product manager needs many different skills and must also possess inherent qualities necessary for surviving the rigours of the job.

The most common skill that people would say is a communication skill. But is communication is enough to be a success in the product managers role or do you need any other skills as well?

Well, only communication skill may not be sufficient but few more interpersonal skills in your kitty will be mighty effective.

Focusing particularly on interpersonal, we’ll look at a range of topics including:

· Influencing without Authority

· Persuasion

· Delegation of Responsibilities

· Coaching Teams

Influencing without Authority

Influencing means the ability to change someone’s views, attitude or behaviours in a positive way. It’s a way to get things done without using authority by changing their beliefs to gain support and get them aligned to a common goal.

So how do you communicate in a way that “gains support”?

The ability to influence springs from the notion of power. There are three ways you can think of power

1. Position Power — this is a power that someone has because of their position in the organization.

2. Expert Power — this is power based on someone’s expertise, their skills and knowledge.

3. Person Power — this is a power that someone has because of how others think of them. If they are respected, valued and trusted then people are far more likely to listen and respond positively to them.

For Product Managers, the third power source is particularly interesting in the context of interpersonal skills. A person can have the power to influence others largely because they have developed trust and credibility with those they seek to influence.

Alongside these notions of power, several skills can be developed to help you to influence more effectively. Here we will consider:

· Active listening

· Being interested in others

· Aware of body language

· Assertiveness

· Building rapport

Hence influencing skills are a combination of various inter-personal skills. When brought together, these can help you to be effective in changing someone’s views, attitudes or behaviours, in a positive way.

Persuasion

Persuasion in the workplace entails convincing others to follow a course of action, to agree to a commitment, or to purchase a product or service. Employers especially value persuasive skills in their personnel because they can impact so many aspects of the workplace, resulting in increased productivity.

Aristotle is said to have separated the means of persuading someone into three kinds of “appeals”:

· Ethos — the credibility of the person making the persuasive argument. How convinced are you by the person

· Logos — the use of logic to support a claim. Do the facts stack up?

· Pathos — the emotional or motivational appeal. Does the argument appeal to the emotions? Language choice can affect people’s emotional response.

Stanford University Professor Bob Sutton argues that leaders should adopt this approach to influencing:

Argue as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong.

The two sides of this approach mirror the notion of advocacy and inquiry. Advocacy is making your

thinking process visible. It’s about expressing your view and how you arrived at it. The inquiry is about how questions are raised and answered. It’s about allowing people to inquire into one another’s reasoning and understand the conclusion they have reached.

Being persuasive also means being able to sell a message. This is an important aspect of persuasiveness for several reasons. Selling a message can mean:

· Convincing colleagues of a particular approach.

· Bringing employees on-board with your ideas.

· Persuading customers to buy your services or products.

For this, you have to build your credibility because people buy from people. You need to be clear about distinguishing between features and benefits. Often there is a tendency to talk “features” rather than finding out benefits from the client. Ask both clients and employees enough questions to discover what it is they need from you. Hence being truly persuasive means focusing on benefits.

Delegation of Responsibilities

Delegation is giving responsibility to someone to carry out tasks that you might normally do yourself. By delegating you give others the authority to do things, but you remain accountable for the outcome.

Why delegate in the first place? There is a common tendency for leaders to try and keep hold of tasks, activities and processes. What’s wrong with this? Well, the famous industrialist Andrew Carnegie provided a powerful answer to this question:

“No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.”

This quote from Carnegie makes two good points. Firstly, to grow you need to trust other people to get important things done. Secondly, when you do delegate and someone is doing the tasks really well, give them the credit for what they are doing.

When you delegate clarify what is required and expected. Specify the outcome and key things that need to be achieved. Always specify what is to be done but don’t detail how it should be done. Allow freedom for the individual to work out how they might achieve the result.

Provide support and encourage them to ask questions to have a clear understanding. Be available and listen and provide your feedback and motivate them.

Coaching Teams

There will be many occasions where a colleague doesn’t feel they are capable of having a particular task delegated to them, or it may be the first time they have experienced the delegation process. In both of these situations what might be needed is coaching support.

In the first scenario, your colleague may need coaching to develop their ability to handle the task. In the second, they may need coaching to help them understand how delegation works.

There may be several other reasons why someone needs coaching. Perhaps to help with:

· New skill development

· Confidence building

· Understanding the process

· A way of reflecting on and improving their practice

· Support during the management of a change program in the organization

· To develop as a leader

· Career development

A coaching need is a development need. Such needs tend to be fairly specific and are best addressed with clear goals or focus.