Becoming an inclusive leader

In this five part mini series we’re going to take a look at how you can become an inclusive leader. We’re going to go deeper into each of the topics covered in my talk at Product Tank London. Each article in this mini series will contain self coaching exercises that you can use to understand and develop your own style of leadership.

What topics are we covering in this mini series?

• Becoming an inclusive leader (this article)

• Understanding your values

• Limiting beliefs and cognitive biases

• Defining your principles

• Privilege and power

If you would like to watch my talk that was the inspiration for this mini series, it’s available now on YouTube.

Introduction

In this first article in the mini series, we’re starting with an overview of what leadership is, before taking a look at my relational model and how that applies to leadership. This provides an accessible framework you can use to guide the development of your leadership skills and mindset. It’s worth noting that whilst this article provides an overview of your relationship to others and to your context, the remainder of this mini series will focus on developing your relationship to your self.

This article contains the following sections:

• The difference between management and leadership

• Clark’s relational model

  • Your relationship to your self

  • Your relationship to others

  • Your relationship to your context

• Leadership as a social dynamic

• A self coaching exercise comprising questions you can use for reflection and journalling

By the end of this article you will have clarity on what is leadership, your own perceptions around it, ideas on where you need to focus first, and what is holding you back from becoming an inclusive leader.

The difference between management and leadership

First up, let’s get clear on the difference between management and leadership. Both concern ways that we work with other people. It’s common to confuse the two, but each has a different role to play.

Management is about controlling for outcomes. When you are managing people, you are working through others to achieve a particular goal. Management is pushing for certainty - a certain piece of work will be delivered to a certain quality at a certain time.

Leadership is about adapting to change. When you are leading people, you are influencing and persuading them to behave in certain ways. Leadership is about embracing uncertainty - we don’t know what lies ahead, but this is the direction we’re going in and we will deal with whatever comes up together.

Problems arise when we confuse management and leadership. Often as product professionals we need to engage in these skills for different purposes:

• Failure to manage can lead to poor execution - missed deadlines, products released riddled with bugs, Sales teams unclear on what they can sell to partners, and so on.

• Failure to lead can exacerbate the downsides of uncertainty - feelings of hesitation and confusion about strategic direction, lack of motivation and engagement, low levels of innovation and creativity.

To be effective as a woman in tech, you need to develop both your management and leadership capabilities.

Clark’s relational model

I developed this model in response to a need to understand the nature of the relationships we develop and maintain throughout our professional and personal lives: my clients feed back that this model is helpful in framing areas they need to work on.

There are three different layers to this relational model:

• Your relationship to your ‘self’

• Your relationship to others

• Your relationship to your context

These are expressed as concentric circles, with you at the centre. This indicates a direction of relational development - you need to start with understanding your relationship to your self, then to other people, and then to your context. This can be revelatory to many people when it comes to leadership: there is a misconception that leadership starts with your followers, and is indeed, all about your followers!

Leadership starts with your ‘self’.

Why does this matter?

Being a leader can become part of your identity - how you see yourself. For many women, even those already in leadership roles, they experience acute identity crises as they do not see themselves as leaders. They’re not even sure if they’re allowed to say they want to be leaders. This means women are not stepping into leadership, because of their own limiting beliefs (systemic barriers are also at play, but outside the scope of this article). If this resonates with you, I want you to know that it is ok to want to be a leader. It may help to identify why you are reluctant to embrace that aspect of yourself.

Let’s now look at each of these relationships in more detail, through the lens of becoming an inclusive leader.

Your relationship to your self

When it comes to developing the relationship with your self, the key skill to build is your confidence. This comes from your beliefs about yourself as well as your practical abilities. The good news is that you can change unhelpful beliefs through repetition of new beliefs that serve you (more on that in a future article). Repetition is part of practice - the other part being application of theory. I cannot emphasise enough that you cannot intellectualise your way into feeling confident. Yet I hear from many women who tell themselves that their confidence is going to come from being an expert (which is a form of power - more on that later in the series too), and developing their mastery of a subject. I hate to burst the bubble on this one but I must if we are to address gender inequality in leadership: we only have to look at men to see that mastery is not an absolute pre-requisite for confidence. Having courage and putting it into practice is.

This can be illustrated with a familiar example: learning to ride a bike. You could read books and take courses on how to do it, but you also need to get on the bike and actually ride it! The key is to start small with one step, and build up from there gradually. That’s why kids start with sit-on bikes they roll with their feet, moving up to bikes with stabilisers and pedals, before the stabilisers come off.

It’s very common to feel fear when starting to practice something new (fear of falling off the bike and getting hurt!) - but that shouldn’t hold you back. There’s a very good book by Susan Jeffers called Feel the Fear, and Do It Anyway, which discusses the emotion of fear, how it can hold us back from what we truly desire. Fear is an emotion, which means it’s a physiological response to stimuli. That stimuli can be external, coming from our environment, or they can be internal such as our thoughts. Identifying the thought that is driving your fear can be instrumental in overcoming it.

Another example, this time from my coaching experience, is a junior PM who wanted to develop her technical skills so she could lead her team of back-end engineers more effectively. She did not come from a technical background and at first lacked confidence to engage with them. Through coaching we worked on a strategy to gain both the theoretical knowledge (such as one-to-one sessions with her tech lead where he would walk her through the systems architecture, and taking online courses), and practical application of that knowledge. Gradually she developed her confidence through asking questions in sessions, even if she thought they were basic and would slow the team down, and using tools such as Postman to interact with the APIs. She finally realised how far she had come when she was live demoing how an API worked to the CTO, who was also a founder - she was overflowing with infectious confidence that inspired her audience.

Your relationship to others

Turning to your relationship with other people, we can divide this homogenous blob up into different groups: your team, your peers, your boss. As you develop as a leader you will learn that you also need to consider your non-work relationships and how they impact on your identity and performance: partner, family, friends, communities, sports teams, and so on.

The key skill to build at this level is trust - how you trust others, and how they trust you. Trust comes from vulnerability, which forms when you share information about yourself with the risk of social judgement and consequences. A key piece of advice a coach once gave me is 'share the scar, not the wound’. The current zeitgeist is to ‘be your authentic self’. But I urge you to be careful. Oversharing personal information runs the risk of exposing raw issues that you are still dealing with. Do not share anything that you have not yet mentally and emotionally processed, and come to a place of acceptance and peace.

My personal example of this was my decision to be open about my diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. I took many months after receiving my report to deliberate how comfortable I felt with being open about it, and with whom. I had to come to terms with it, and I went through all the emotions typically associated with great loss: anger, sadness, confusion, disbelief, and finally acceptance. Through this I also re-educated myself, unlearning the internalised ableism I held for the past forty years. I weighed up the pros and cons of ‘coming out’ and decided that I wanted to be open about it to show that autistic women can succeed, and break the stereotypes and stigma associated with ASD. However, this process took many months: it would have been too raw to discuss immediately after my diagnosis with all my emotions swirling. I can be a leader now because this experience provides strength, not weakness.

Trust is also only possible when there is psychological safety. This arises when people feel respected for their individual differences. A fundamental element of this is understanding your privilege, and how that has afforded you advantages or influenced your opportunities in life. We are big on valuing individualism in western democracies, so the key here is recognising that everybody’s lived experience is different, and not assuming that because you have had a particular experience, that is universal. We will cover off more about privilege and power in a future article in this mini series, because this is the crux of how you become an inclusive leader.

Your relationship to your context

The last relationship to consider is how you relate to your environment, culture and situations. The environment is always changing: how do you react? Feeling fear, uncertainty and confusion is natural, and to become a great leader is to acknowledge these feelings are there - not deny them. However, as many great mindfulness and meditation teachers will attest, there is a space between your feeling (or thought) and your reaction. In that space lies choice. Consider the following scenario and the options available:

You are managing a team where there are roles that are facing redundancy. Your job is to speak to each individual and inform them of the process. You fear your own job is at risk, and whether you would be able to find another job in a competitive market. As you speak to each team member to tell them what is happening do you:

• Express your concerns about your own job, talk about how bad the job market is and how they should start looking now, tell them you can’t help them because you’re too busy;

• Get the conversation over with as soon as possible, push questions back to HR, and put them on garden leave so you don’t have to talk to them again until it’s all over with;

• Consider what your team member needs, be prepared to answer any questions or support them with their reaction, reassure them and give them hope that whatever happens they will be ok, and suggest ways that you can help them navigate this period.

Hopefully it is obvious which is the better leadership approach. Unfortunately there are too many examples where leadership breaks down. What these examples demonstrate is that you are in control of your reaction, which brings me to the key skill you need to develop to manage your relationship with your context: decisiveness. You make a decision (choice) in how to react.

As a leader you must get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Every day will push you into the stretch zone, and sometimes beyond. To perform well as a leader you need to feel ok with not having all the information, with trusting your self, and with taking action in spite of this. This uncertainty creates risks, and to overcome this you can use a simple heuristic:

• What is the impact of taking this decision? This looks at who and how many people are affected, the consequences of action (or inaction), the costs, and so on;

• What is the reversibility of taking this decision? If the outcome is not what we wanted, how easy is it to roll back the changes?

A low impact, high reversibility decision can be made quicker than a high impact, low reversibility decision - where you need to more closely manage the risks. And this is where your leadership style needs to adapt.

There’s six main leadership styles, and contrary to popular thinking, there’s no right or wrong one. It’s about adaptation to the context. And here’s an interesting observation: leadership style is also about who makes decisions and how. Are decisions made centrally, by one person or a group, or are they decentralised and made diffusely? Are they high or low stakes decisions? Which styles are more appropriate depend on the impact and reversibility of the decision.

Leadership as a social dynamic

Now that we’ve explored leadership through my relational model, what’s also apparent is that it is a social process that takes place within groups in response to uncertainty. It involves direct interactions between you and your followers, and between you and your context. There are also indirect interactions you need to be aware of between your followers and their selves, your followers as a group, and your followers and their context. However, as Stephen Covey discusses in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, as a leader you need to focus primarily on the direct interactions because this is what is within your control to act upon.

Let’s look at what this means with an example:

You’re a product leader at a startup that has decided to pivot its products. The CEO has made a company wide announcement setting out what is happening and the reasons why. You follow up afterwards with your team to see how that message has landed and if there are any questions. Some members are accepting of the changes, but others are expressing their concerns and worries about the new direction. Many are feeling frustrated with working flat out on initiatives that are now going to be canned. How could you lead through this situation?

• You may become aware of your own feelings about the pivot, and that some feelings are helpful and others can be a hinderance. You can choose your reaction - and in this case you choose to look for the opportunities that the pivot could bring (your relationship to your ‘self’).

• You may have had a heads up or been involved in discussions on this for some time, whilst this is the first time your team is hearing it. Their immediate reactions may be different from yours. You are in a position to answer their questions, and relieve their fears and concerns. In doing so you can build trust with your team (your relationship to your team).

• You may also have seen this coming for a while because the data indicates that your previous direction was not working. Market research, product discovery and analytics indicated that the product had not achieved product market fit, and was unlikely to get there without substantial more investment. You might already have started discussions with your team on what this means, and so anticipated such a decision (your relationship with your context).

This example illustrates the power you have to make choices to respond to that uncertainty (decisiveness), in how you think, feel and behave.

We’re going to close out this article with a self coaching exercise where you can reflect on what you’ve learnt and how to put this into practice.

Becoming an inclusive leader exercise

I recommend completing this self coaching exercise when you have 30-60 minutes to yourself, free from distractions. Grab a notebook and a pen, and your drink of choice, and spend some time journalling your answers to these prompts:

• What does it mean to you, to be a leader?

• What makes a leader successful?

• Think of someone you consider a great leader. What was it that made them great?

• Think of someone you consider a bad leader. What was it that made them bad?

• How do you feel about stepping into leadership?

• What does that voice inside your head tell yourself about becoming a leader?

• Which areas do you need to develop as a leader?

• Think back to a time where you were a leader. What was it about that situation that made you a leader?

• Which style/s of leadership do you more easily adopt? Which ones do you find harder? What prevents you from adopting those least favoured styles?

If you get stuck you can use my relational model as a prompt to think about the different aspects of leadership.

In next week’s article we will dig deeper into your relationship with your self, starting with your values. We will explore what values are, how they can guide you to develop your leadership capabilities, and a self coaching exercise you can use to identify your own values. See you then!