The 5 Ps of a Leader’s Hierarchy of Needs

Introduction

Unlike a lot of professions where knowledge and skills set are generally accumulated from scratch, leadership or management is usually an expertise that one acquires based on an already existing solid base of knowledge. The base depends, of course, on your profession, and in order to be a competent leader this base has to be maintained and broadened throughout your career.

In this article I will focus on the components of the base required to be a successful technological leader or manager today.

The 5 Ps of a Leader’s Hierarchy of Needs

The 5 Ps of a Leader’s Hierarchy of Needs is a five-tier model of a leader’s needs. These can be illustrated as hierarchical levels within a pyramid, as shown below.

The needs at the bottom of the hierarchy must be satisfied before you can attend to the needs higher up. Let’s explore the hierarchy, starting from the bottom up.

Professional Leadership

At some point, you begin your first position in your professional field. You utilize all of your prior experience — graduate studies, courses, projects to handle the tasks in the new environment, and more. Your first tasks allow you to become familiar with the technicalities, and after a while, you can handle more and more complex projects. You are making progress with your professional development plan!

Being a technological lead or manager, you don’t have to be the best developer in your R&D organization. What you will have to do is preserve enough technological skills to be able to converse, understand solutions, occasionally offer solutions, ask guiding questions, challenge the solutions of the team members, and — most importantly — support decision-making processes in your group.

A considerable portion of decision-making consists of the ability to make logical trade-offs between multiple solutions — or even more often, between solution and reality. Moreover, you should guide your team members to challenge their solutions and navigate to the best ones.

In a managerial position, you will often get further and further away from actual implementation details, but here are some skills that I would strongly advise you preserve:

• System design
• Software/hardware architecture
• Resources and costs
• Relevant technological best practices
• Healthy infrastructures
• Quality control
• Maintaining and ongoing system support

The common denominator for the above skills is that these are usually not the first line of interest or understanding for Individual Contributors (ICs), and these areas are where your competence can bring the most value.

People Skills

I am an introvert by nature. When I was an IC, the perfect day for me was spending it in the corner of the office, deep into solving another technological puzzle.

As a leader, working in a private bubble is no longer an option. This is true not only for managers but for all experienced content contributors. As soon as you are able to overview the high-level architecture of the whole system, you cease to be an IC and become part of the group managing the project.

There are two main interfaces that you encounter on a day-to-day basis.

• Inbound
  These are the people that you work with or manage within your immediate team. “Team” in this context can be a team that you are leading or a team working on a common project with you. These are the people that you spend most of your waking hours with during the week. A leader is in charge of team members’ professional results, professional success, personal development, and mental health.
  
  Each one has a different set of strengths and weaknesses, and as a leader you have to get to know them, recognize them, and learn to work with each and every one of them. The personal attitude of a manager and the ability to create a personal relationship with different people is one of the most influential factors for an employee in a company.
  
  Moreover, as a leader, you are also in charge of helping them work effectively together as a team.
  
  As a leader you encounter multiple interfaces on a daily basis. Each one is different and you should learn how to develop a professional — and sometimes personal — relationship with each and every one of them.
  
  Even more difficult is to remember to let go, trust your team, and empower them to make mistakes and grow from them.
• Outbound
  The amount of new and existing interfaces that you have to interact with on a daily basis is enormous. This includes customers, peers, product managers, project managers, other development teams within the company, marketing, designers, third-party providers, security aspects of the product, and more.These interfaces are even more complex than inbound ones. Unlike inbound interfaces that are focused on a common goal, outbound interfaces might have a different prioritization and focus. People skills are only one of the tools required to bring all of the pieces of the puzzle together.

Project Management

While each part of your organization might be an incredibly high performer, the overall internal and external dependencies and the ability to work together are crucial for the success of larger projects. Project management is a whole different profession, but as a Technology Manager you should be familiar enough with project management concepts to see and be able to manage the overall big picture.

The complexity of projects is increasing exponentially in today’s ecosystem, so managing only “my part” quickly becomes irrelevant. Each project participant has to have a good grasp of project management skills to be able to contribute to the project’s process.

So why is project management so important? Here are the main reasons why:

• An extended sense of responsibility for all the project’s participants.
• Better integrations and dependencies planning.
• Better prioritization.
• Quicker Agile cycles — recognition of errors, scope changes, dependencies delays, etc.
• Delivery of velocity improvement.
• Better time estimation and management for the whole project.

Product Ownership and Responsibility

It is important to realize that the ultimate success of your work is not only technological prowess, but also understanding and providing business logic required by customers. In this facet of the role, you will need rudimentary product management skills — understanding the needs of the relevant ecosystem and providing solutions even before customers know what their requirements are.

An additional aspect of product responsibility is understanding that you are in charge of your product from inception to post-delivery and support. Even if you are part of a large organization and your team is not in charge of developing a specific part of the system, the success or failure of the whole flow is still your responsibility.

It is important not only for the leader to embrace those concepts but to propagate them through the organization. Your company’s customers’ satisfaction is your responsibility, so you have to deal efficiently with any dependencies or bumps you encounter along the way.

Presentation and Outbound Leadership

As an R&D leader and representative, one of your functions is to enable your R&D organization to be seen. They should be proud of what they do and present their unique experiences and results to the entire industry.

Below is a partial list of activities that you can engage in to achieve this goal:

• Professional blogging.
• Participating in or initiating a unique professional podcast.
• Active participation and presentation at various meetups/conferences.
• Knowledge sharing sessions within your company and the industry as a whole.
• Outbound Customer Support roles.

What is even more important to remember is that you as a leader not only have to be a single contributor to the outbound leadership, but to also engage and encourage your group members to participate and contribute to this effort as well.

Wrapping Up

The biggest takeaway here is to remember your roots — especially when switching positions or companies. It may seem that you are joining a completely different place — with a different area of expertise, set of rules and procedures — but it’s important to always remember your base value and leverage it to get to the next step of your professional journey.