PM Chronicles, Vol. 1: Tough conversations & Emotional Intelligence
Early on in my career, I got yelled at by a developer I was working with. I was shook. He explained how frustrated he was with my lack of communication. I had tried so hard to be the PM that reads every book on the Amazon Best Sellers List for Product Management, so how did this happen to me? Every PM mentor I had always would recommend books to me. I loved it — I loved learning the best from the best, but there was always something that I didn’t come across often enough: Emotional Intelligence. While technical, managerial and general product management skills are all valuable and necessary, I often notice a lack of attention around emotional intelligence as a top priority for skills development among product leaders.
I’m going to walk through the following five emotional competencies 👆: Self Awareness, Empathy, Motivation, Self Regulation, and Social Skills. These competencies are provided by the Cognitive Institute, and they’ve been great objectives to strive towards achieving. They can sway outcomes, convince your greatest enemies — think of them as your Jedi mind tricks. I’ll be speaking as to what each one means to me and how it’s affected my career growth and development.
Self Awareness
To be honest, before writing this article, I had no idea what self awareness really meant. My wife is always telling me to be more self aware, but I just never grasped it. I took a quiz on this site and got a 36/40, so I started thinking I was self-aware. Then I read further and found that while 90% of people think they’re self-aware, it’s estimated that 10% actually are.
Self-awareness is being able to correctly identify your thoughts, emotions and behaviors, as well as how they influence your environment and those around you. It’s ultra-important because by understanding what external events trigger fear and shame within yourself you can create boundaries.
Because we know that difficult conversation or uncomfortable situation will come, it’s important to strive to be more self-aware with time. It’s been mostly an observation exercise for me, but I have learned that I’m able to identify situations where there are subtle triggers — triggers that I associate with really frustrating and fruitless outcomes. I can then reposition myself emotionally in an attempt to quell the situation.
Empathy
Here’s another one that my wife tells me I need to work on, and she’s right. I sometimes truly struggle with empathy, which makes it that much more important. Empathy is defined as the capacity to recognize feelings being experienced by others.
In today’s tough political and economic climate it’s difficult to gauge how empathy really helps the world. I find that if I reduce my empathy scope down to just my personal and professional relationships, I’m much happier, more emotionally connected and in tune with these people.
Nobody likes going through the struggles inherent to life. Sometimes people feel ashamed to talk through their struggles with their coworkers. Note: I am not advocating for deep-diving into your coworkers’ personal lives. I’m just advocating for truly listening and understanding. In the words of the wordsmith Logic: “Everybody people, everybody bleed, everybody needs somethin”.
Motivation
This one can be a bit tricky. There are really two main definitions of Motivation. I’ve found that working on both of them have spread copious amount of infectious positive energy around to my coworkers. FOR BEHOLD:
Definition #1: The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.
Definition #2: The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.
Focus on the why of things, ie. Why do you work where you work? Why do you do what you do? Ask yourself the why five times and eventually you’ll get to the root of it. For me personally, I am a product manager because I enjoy understanding where customers’ pain points are and developing products to address them. That’s my motivation.
Then, interestingly enough, in forcing myself to ask why, I get to my core — my own uniqueness where I feel I can really contribute to the good in this world personally and professionally. I then pull from that source the energy needed to get up, go to work, etc. Motivation has given me purpose.
Self-Regulation
Oh boy — now this one I’m reallllyyyy not good at sometimes. Self-regulation is typically confused with self-discipline. Self-regulating refers to monitoring over time and producing positive results with control of your emotions, while self-discipline refers to “The ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses; the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations to abandon it.” That definition literally sounds like the life of a SAMURAI.
Think of how this could influence your career. If you know what the right course is, you shouldn’t waver. If you’ve done the research to justify the direction you’re taking, stick to it! You can self-regulate by understanding when desperation and frustration will come into play, and recognizing that although you may have to cut a path through, you will do it. Imagine self-regulation as the driver for your interactions with others during a tough project, while self-discipline refers to your ability to make sure these frequent stand-ups with yourself actually happen, as well as taking action should things veer off course.
You’ve also got to be consistent, which falls under both self-regulation AND self-discipline. Product managers have processes in place because they work, and we have to keep following them in order for them to keep working 🤷♂️. Self-regulation refers to the ability to monitor and take an inventory of your emotions during these processes such that you can improve them further with regards to interactions with coworkers (and yourself) during the project.
Social Skills
I actually do have some social skills (🙏). Until I became a PM I didn’t really know how else to define social skills other than simply getting along with others. It may seem simple, but you have to expand your social palette if you’re going to master this component of emotional intelligence.
As a product manager, you can’t choose to only get along with certain people or groups. You have to get along with all of them at once, and you must be genuine. You have to be the emotional bridge that allows these people to interact with one another as well. Alignment is achieved quicker because you can be fast to recognize the needs socially of each person in the room and adjust your delivery.
“Reading the room” before acting also falls under social skills. You have to understand when to speak vs. when to pause, for example. Sometimes it’s very difficult to do this (it’s been hell ever since the pandemic and we’ll all working from Zoom where the internet connection is inconsistent and causes you to interrupt your coworkers all the time) but I find that patience helps me develop this more and more. I also focus on listening with the intent of understanding what people are saying to me.
This can pay off in droves. It has helped me immensely growing up in a home where my younger brother, 18 months younger than I, was into very different things than me, but we had all the same friends. I had the benefit of learning how to be socially present with different groups of kids at school. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve focused more on being genuine in my professional interactions.
Wrap up
The main point I’d wanted to drive home in this article is that I don’t see enough focus on EI in the workplace today. I haven’t ever been a part of an EI-specific workshop. This needs to change! The emotional and social health, behavior and well-being of each individual is precious and needs to be treated as such.
I hope to be a part of that change in suggesting that we do adopt more trainings and discussions around EI in my own product squad. It’s going to be super cool to see where it leads..
