TLDR;
Do you ever feel like your team is stuck? Like you’re hitting a wall and just can’t seem to move forward?
In this episode of the Uncommon Leadership Podcast, I, Michael Hunter from Uncommon Teams, am talking to Melissa Appel, an executive product management coach, advisor, and author.
We get into an uncomfortable but essential truth about leadership: a leader’s behavior might be the very thing holding their team back.
Melissa shares a story about a leader whose fear-based culture brought an entire company to a halt, and we dive into the psychology of why punishing mistakes is the fastest way to kill innovation.
But it’s not just about the problem.
We give you a powerful two-part solution for navigating change and overwhelm, from a simple framework for regaining control to a game-changing mindset for solving any problem.
If you’re ready to stop blaming people and start fixing systems, join us as we uncover the uncommon leadership insights you need to get your team unstuck for good.
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Why This Podcast Is a Must-Watch:
Solve Your Biggest Leadership Challenge: Learn the real reason behind a stagnant team and how a simple culture fix can help.
- Find Clarity in Chaos: Get a simple two-step framework to handle overwhelm and uncertainty by focusing on what’s in your control.
- Fix Broken Communication: Discover the key to getting through to everyone on your team by adapting your communication style to theirs.
- Make Better Decisions: End pointless debates by learning the secret to making objective decisions: aligning on an obvious goal first.
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About the Speakers
Melissa Appel
Executive Product Management Coach & Advisor @Product Culture | Co-Author @Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders | Helping CPOs and teams move from Reactive to Proactive roadmaps
Melissa Appel is an expert at untangling complex, “gnarly” problems across various industries. As a product coach, author, and speaker, she helps CPOs and executive teams deliver real value by getting the right people in the room and asking the right questions. Melissa focuses on the underlying people and process issues that are often the root cause of product problems. Her coaching and advisory work greatly help product leaders improve their organizations and build high-quality, effective teams.
Michael Hunter
Founder @Uncommon Change | Interlocutor / Curious Host @UncommonLeadership Interview Series | Author | Change & Innovation Partner
I’m Michael Hunter, the founder of Uncommon Teams. All my work is driven by a single mission: to help leaders, CXOs, and founders build uncommon teams.
These are the teams where every person feels valued, psychologically safe, and confident to bring their authentic selves to work.
Drawing from my experience with leaders across six continents, I’ve developed a battle-tested framework that is always precisely customized for you, helping you greet change like an old friend.
My deepest satisfaction comes from helping leaders not just envision their legacy, but truly inhabit it. By integrating your whole self into everything you do, you can discover ease, freedom, and a resilient leadership journey that creates a safe organizational culture for everyone.
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Presented By: UncommonChange
Transcript:
Michael Hunter
Whether you want more innovation, more easily, you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, or you simply know that something isn’t quite the way you know it can be. You are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every single day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams, and cultivating the resilience, adaptability, and ease necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving. I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams, and today, we’ll uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead today. Joining me today is Melissa Appel.
Melissa has been working in product management for over 20 years and is now a product coach, author, and speaker. She recently co-wrote “Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders”, which cool cover you can see in the her background, right by the purple dragon. And she’s so good at pointing exactly there.
I’m so impressed. Welcome, Melissa.
Melissa Appel
Thank you for having me.
Michael
When did you first recognize that integrating your whole self, bringing that into everything that you do, might be a valuable approach?
Melissa
Early in my career, I was mystified by politics, which I think a lot of people are. How does it work? How do people just know what to say in different scenarios? But eventually I learned that the secret is simply getting to know your colleagues as fellow human beings. And that also means being transparent yourself. So it’s not to say you should be completely open book, right? It takes time to develop that kind of trust.
And it doesn’t mean that you should tell everybody everything all the time. But you should be honest about what your goals are, what your frustrations are, what your concerns are, and also take the time to learn about what other people’s goals are, what their motivations are, and just who they’re as a person.
Michael
What does that balance, look, sound, smell, feel, taste like for you?
Melissa
The balance between revealing everything and sharing a little bit?
Michael
Yes. Revealing everything and hiding everything.
Melissa
Yeah. I mean there’s certain things that maybe you don’t want everybody to know about, like the reason for your doctor’s appointment, right?
You don’t have to tell everybody everything. But I think that sometimes people appreciate a little bit of transparency and a little bit of honesty, and that’s how you build trust, right? You build it over time, you reveal a little bit, you hope they’ll reveal something, you ask some questions, and you get to know each other.
And you know, being true to yourself, having integrity, being honest with yourself and doing what you feel is the right thing to do, I think, is about bringing your whole self versus telling everybody everything about you.
Michael
To people who maybe aren’t so comfortable doing this yet, how would you suggest they can get started?
Melissa
You can get started with something innocuous like, Hey, this last weekend I, you know, went to the grocery store and there was a really long line because they were out of sidewalk salt. ‘Cause it’s the winter or whatever it is, right? Something, just something a little bit, and see how the person responds.
A lot of times, you have to get things started in order for other people to join in and reveal something about themselves. The chit-chat a little bit at the beginning of meetings is not just fluff. It’s helpful to ease tensions, and you know, make a little connection so you can start with something little and you know, see where it goes from there.
Michael
For people who are worried about getting everyone to participate, how important is that we get everyone to say even just one word about what might be going on for them right now, versus letting people opt out maybe forever?
Melissa
Yeah. There is a difference between people’s willingness to share in a giant group versus one-to-one.
So just like when you need to make a big business decision, or when you want to try to. Influence people to get aligned on a solution. You might need to do a little one-on-one with people. And not everybody should be forced to do something they’re uncomfortable with or to share openly, but a lot of times, people are more comfortable in those one-on-one meetings.
If you’re trying to get alignment among a big group, we can call that shuttle diplomacy, but it also works when you’re just trying to get to know people. And, there’s also like, in online meetings, for example, I worked with someone who did not want to speak up in meetings, but she utilizes the chat.
She like put things in the chat that she wanted to say, and I would notice that and bring them up because it was important, and we should talk about that even though she wasn’t comfortable saying it out loud. So there are definitely different accommodations that you can make for people who communicate in different ways.
Michael
How do you suss out what those different communication preferences are when you’re, especially when you’re just first meeting someone or start working with a group of people?
Melissa
It’s a good question. Sometimes you can ask them. Like, if you’re working with somebody, even a peer or an executive, what’s the best way for me to communicate with you?
How do you like to consume information? Should I email, should I Slack? Should I set a meeting? Some people will know what their preferences are. Some people won’t. So sometimes you just have to observe. Like this person never speaks in meetings, but when I’m on one-on-ones with them, they’ll talk the whole time.
So that’s probably the best way for me to communicate with them. And even if you’re not, if you are a manager, you know the thinking is that you should adapt your management style for the different people on your team, but that’s also true when you’re working with cross-functional peers across the company. You may need to adjust your style for them so that you can make sure to make those connections.
Michael
Absolutely. Tactically and strategically flexing outside our preferences can be so useful, bring such benefit. At the same time, it costs synergy to move outside our preferences. How do you choose for yourself, and how do you help the people that you’re working with discover how to balance that in any particular moment?
Melissa
That’s a good question. This goes back to being your kind of true self, right? If you are an introvert, if you don’t like speaking in front of crowds, you shouldn’t necessarily be expected to do that all the time. You know, trying to figure out where that balance is and where you can meet in the middle is sometimes helpful.
I know different people have different leadership styles, so some people will, you know, be the loudest voice in the room. And a lot of times that’s seen as leadership, right? I have the opinions, I’m saying the things I’m in the room. But there are other people who prefer those one-on-one conversations.
They set everything up in the background through a whole bunch of work, you know, that nobody sees, so that they don’t have to say anything in the meeting, so that people are already in alignment coming into it because of all that work they did. So I think that if somebody’s leadership style is not as visible, and you notice that it’s helpful to be an ally, right?
So if you can help somebody out who, maybe, you know, they’re reaching the limits of what they’re comfortable with, but there’s something else that’s needed, you can help them or you can look for your own allies to help you.
Michael
I like that on both sides. When we’re just starting work with a group, maybe we’re a new manager or just joining any team, how can we start to uncover what these hidden undercurrents of leadership styles and preferences, and all the undercurrent of politics and everything is going on?
Melissa
So, as far as leadership style, I think there’s some observations to be made, right? So does this person tend to make decisions quickly and leave out important pieces? Do they tend to dwell forever and never come to a conclusion? Do they need something really pinned up tight and presented, or do they like to have a conversation?
You can find those things out over time by trying different things, right? If you wanna have a conversation and they look impatient, they’re looking at their watch, they’re looking at their phone, they probably want some sort of tighter communication. So, looking for those clues. Those specific clues, you know, even people who aren’t necessarily good at picking up social cues, right?
If you say, like, if they’re looking at their phone or their watch, they’re probably bored, to try to have that rule set in your head so that you can start picking up those cues. And then those one-on-one conversations, you can often get a lot out of it if you’re working with, like, a high-up stakeholder, somebody who’s maybe higher up in the org than you are, you can also do some research and ask other people, right? Hey, I have a presentation for so and I feel like I’ve seen you present to them what worked, what didn’t. Do you have any suggestions? So it’s a little bit like creating a product, right? You do some research, you try things, you test and iterate, and you see what works and you see what doesn’t work, and you try to do the best you can.
Michael
I like that analogy a lot that every relationship we’re building is a product that we’re building, and whatever works for us to understand what our customers are asking for and right, what they are really asking for that they don’t know to consciously ask for, so that we can delight them are all the same things that are probably gonna work for us in understanding who someone is, how they work best, and how do you interact with them in a product way.
Melissa
Yeah. We actually talk in the book about stakeholder interviews as being essentially the same thing as a customer interview. If you are doing an interview with your stakeholder, you should, instead of pushing your own agenda, you should find out how things are going with them, right? What’s the biggest problem you’re trying to solve? How is your team measured? Those kinds of things to find out about their perspective and their worldview before saying, What do you think about this?
And you do the same thing in a customer interview. You ask broad questions before you get specific to find out about how they think, how they work, what’s working, what’s not working, because they can’t necessarily tell you what the problem is. They can maybe offer a solution that may or may not be the right solution, but you can suss out what the context is by asking broader questions.
Michael
Had a thought that just disappeared. Okay. So, of all the things that we could do to get started and becoming a little more comfortable, showing up as who we are, what do you find is most valuable, most of the time, for most people?
Melissa
I think in order to show up as you really are, you need to build trust. So you need to trust other people. They’re not going to, you know, whatever, make fun of you, we’ll take it to junior high. But, you know, it’s, it goes into the psychological safety, that you have to feel comfortable sharing something without worrying about what the other person’s going to do with it.
And I feel like that, that helps define trust, that you trust them, that whatever it is that you say or do, they’re going to, you know, not like that. They’re going to accept it and work with you rather than, you know, telling you’re dumb or, you know, saying, that’s not right.
And people, you know, people do that. Different people have different styles, but I think building trust is the first step to be able to come to a situation as your true self, and that involves getting to know people and making connections.
Michael
How much do you find that needs to be done, or is most productively done by sharing of ourselves versus employing curiosity about them?
For example, talking about the stuffed animals I have in my background versus asking, is that a Lego to learn? Did she build that yourself? How long did it take? And all kinds of questions like that.
Melissa
Yeah. I think it’s both, right? If you ask somebody about themselves and they’re not sure about you yet, they might not fully share with you.
So it needs to be a little bit of both, right? Definitely being curious and asking other people questions. Dale Carnegie’s key recommendation in ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ is, you know, you can win more friends by asking about them than by talking about yourself, but at the same time, you need to make sure that they feel comfortable sharing with you, and that involves a little bit of a two-way sharing.
Michael
So, it’s a give and take, just like with everything else and software.
Melissa
Yeah. Yeah. It’s an iteration, right? That you don’t wanna just tell them everything about them, about yourself, and then so what’s up with you? And the same way, the other way, right? It can feel like an interrogation if you’re just asking them questions and not revealing anything about yourself.
They’re like, Why are you asking me all these questions? So it has to be a little bit of a back and forth and an iteration over time to build trust. You can’t do it in just one sitting.
Michael
We’ve gone through a lot of tools and strategies already for building cultures where people feel safe and empowered to bring their unique talents into everything that they do.
What else do you employ as you’re working with teams?
Melissa
So, I can give some examples too. You know, I talked a little bit about psychological safety, and some people define psychological safety as something like being emotional all the time, and that’s not it at all. It’s, you know, creating a culture where people are not afraid to make a mistake.
Not afraid to say what they really think, not afraid of retribution. And that actually takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of reflection about how you respond to things. So, for example, I had one client where they always talked about wins as being a group effort, but they just talked about mistakes and failures as being pinned to specific individuals.
Now, I don’t know if that was something they did on purpose or something they did by mistake, but the problem was that made people afraid to take any action, do anything risky or innovative, ’cause they were afraid of being called out on it if it didn’t work. It also caused people to point fingers and blame others, and throw people under the bus.
And so thinking about how you deal with mistakes or failures, right? If you go the route that a lot of software engineers do and say, Okay, something went wrong, let’s do a retrospective and figure out what happened. Not to blame people, but to prevent it from happening again in the future.
And to take the individual people out of it. Okay, maybe it was somebody’s fault, but they’re probably acting within some sort of system, or, you know, they didn’t have the right information. Whatever it is, let’s change the system so that doesn’t happen again. I also had another client where the CEO got mad anytime anybody on his executive team made a mistake.
He tended to fire people or demote people. And so the executives never wanted to make a decision because they never want to be held responsible for something, because then, you know, they feared the kind of retribution, and this propagated to the entire company. It basically broke the, brought the entire company to a halt because no decisions were being made.
No initiatives were moving forward, right? They got into this analysis paralysis because the executives wanted perfect information before they were willing to make a decision, but we know that’s pretty much impossible.
Michael
So in that case, what had you been brought in to help them with, and how did that end up adjusting this whole analysis paralysis, don’t make me make a decision dynamic?
Melissa
Yeah. I was brought in to help a group of product directors with stakeholder management. And as I got into it and talked to people, it was really just one key stakeholder, which was the CEO. And the executives on his team wouldn’t make decisions, and what that translated into is that every meeting you had with an executive was them grilling you and asking you questions. Questions you couldn’t necessarily answer, and then you answer those questions, next time there would be a new slew of questions.
Like nothing was ever good enough. Nothing was ever right, and it was essentially an impossible situation because of the way that the CEO had set up that culture where people were so afraid of making mistakes that they wouldn’t make decisions, and that translated into them asking, you know, impossible questions for the people trying to move these initiatives forward.
Michael
Were you able to make any help them shift this at all?
Melissa
I wish I had more time in this contract to help do this, but sometimes, you know, the person at the top, if they’re creating a certain type of culture, it’s hard to get out of that. Which is why it’s really important for leaders to really think about how their actions translate into how the company operates.
The same CEO is annoyed that things aren’t moving fast enough, but isn’t looking at his own behavior to see how he’s at least in part causing that problem. So it’s the kind of thing where, you know, you can’t change people who are not willing to change or who don’t see a problem.
Michael
Yes. If you’d had the opportunity to work directly with that CEO with willingness on their part, how would you have started helping them gain the visibility into their own actions and the effect that was happening on the entire company?
Melissa
Yeah. It would be a series of questions, saying, Hey, you know, when somebody makes a mistake, how do you handle it? And just getting them to think about what they do. Thinking about an example of when they’ve done that and trying to get them to come to their own conclusions, versus just saying, Hey, this is bad. You should stop doing that. Because when people feel involved in the idea, then they take on the idea as their own, versus just getting defensive.
Michael
If you had been able to help people farther down the chain, interact more productively with people up the chain, what suggestions might you have them start with?
Melissa
Somebody has to take on the responsibility of making a decision in order to move a project forward. It can be a career limiting move if you’re in this kind of company. You know, it’s a balance between make a decision and get something done versus don’t get blamed for things. But, I had a example where the culture was not the same, but I had a, I was working with an engineer who was hesitant to reduce the scope in a certain way in order to deliver something for a large client.
And I said, Listen, I will take responsibility over this decision. If anybody comes to you, you can send them to me. We just need to get this thing done. And he was happy with that. So sometimes it’s a matter of defining how decisions get made and who’s responsible for the decision. And if the group can agree on how the decision should be made, then we can just go ahead and make them.
Michael
Which I can imagine in that kind of culture would be another decision no one wants to make.
Melissa
Say that again?
Michael
I imagine in that kind of culture, like of this company, where we’ve been talking about that, this would be another decision that no one wants to make.
Melissa
Right. Nobody wants to decide how decisions are made, but it’s a less risky decision to decide how decisions are made than it is to make the decision.
You know, if the group gets together and they say, actually, you know what, the only safe thing to do is let the CEO make all the decisions, and see if the CEO is okay with that. If he’s happy with that, great. We’ll let him make all the decisions. If he’s not, then he has to think about how to unblock decisions from being made.
Michael
This seems like a key thing that you just said, that it’s not an all or nothing thing. There’s, if this decision or problem or question or quandary is too big or scary or impossible to solve, then look for a smaller one. And if that’s still too big or scary or impossible to solve, then go to a small one.
Eventually, we’ll get down to something tiny enough that maybe it’s, can we all agree that we’re gonna have lunch today, we don’t have to go together? Can everyone, maybe that’s something that everyone’s willing to make a decision on, and then that’s, there’s a foundation for doing something a little bit bigger.
Melissa
You can use the, if you can agree on a decision making process, you can do a proof of concept with the kind of lower risk decision, right? You know, find something where it’s not, you know, the future of the company isn’t depending on it. It’s whether to assign this one person to this project or this project, or, you know, whether to, you know, make the future change for this customer versus this customer.
Something where it’s not like deciding on the future strategy of the company. You wanna take a lower risk decision to try out the process. And we talk about decision making processes in the book as well. Thinking about, there’s different kinds of ways to make decisions, right? There’s directive, which is the person at the top makes all the decisions.
There’s everybody votes on the decision, and whoever gets the biggest vote, that’s the democratic way, but you might not get a perfect decision. And then there’s what we advocate for, which is participatory decision making where there’s one decision maker, but they have the responsibility of getting input from the rest of the team and coming up with a decision that then the rest of the team will agree to move forward on.
And then you have to figure out who that decision maker is, and it could be different depending on what the decision itself is, right? If it’s a strategy change decision, that’s probably the CEO. If it’s a button caller, right? That could be the engineer. So, depending on what kind of decision, you can have a method to figure out who’s responsible, like who should be making the decision.
Michael
Why do you advocate for that option over all the other decision making algorithms?
Melissa
The directive decision making has one decision maker, but at a very large company, that person, it’s nearly impossible for them to have all the context for all the decisions. So, that might not be the right person to make every decision.
The Democratic way, you just get, everybody gets a vote. It may not; people may not be making their choice in the same way, and making sure that each decision is made based on all the right inputs is important, and not everybody has the same information. Then the fourth one is consensus, which is everybody has to agree before a decision is made.
And that nearly always never makes a decision ever at all. So, the participatory angle is the advantage of the, in the single decision maker of the directive approach. But that decision maker can be something different, somebody different in different scenarios, which makes things run faster.
Michael
And there, an explicit part of that framework is that they are obligated to get information from everyone else versus trying to make it on their own and assuming that they have all the information. I’m fascinated that in the way you just described these four types of decision making, the directive and democratic methods both have the same problem: that the person making the decision probably doesn’t have all the information.
I never would’ve thought that a dictatorship and a democracy had the same failure point.
Melissa
Yeah. Yeah. It’s one thing they have in common.
Michael
So, this is starting to help you understand what is the business value of creating these cultures where everyone is bringing their unique talents into everything they do, and doing that, feeling safe and empowered to do that.
Melissa
Just like the directive decision making model has only one person and what they know, and maybe they’ve, asked around also. But, enabling a culture where everybody feels safe in participating just brings more ideas to the table, and it makes people able to speak up when they see a problem, and that can prevent all sorts of risks moving forward.
If people are afraid to speak up, they might not say something that would be either a great new idea or a problem with the situation, and then you’re just going without, again, without that complete information. So enabling and allowing everybody to participate will improve the completeness of the information that you have in order to make decisions and come up with ideas.
Michael
So, if I was to make an analogy, that if we’re judging the best book of the year and everyone, all the judges only read nonfiction, probably gonna have a hard time giving the best fiction book, or poetry, or anything other than specifically nonfiction, other than maybe by random chance. At the same time, if we have an expert on fiction and nonfiction and genre fiction and poetry, and screenplays, and all the other things, coming to some decision can be really challenging.
Which I guess brings us back to decision making of what framework do we choose to make the decisions so that we can incorporate all of these diverse viewpoints without going into the analysis paralysis of trying to rationalize and come to a consensus across all of that.
Melissa
When you’re choosing the best book of the year, it’s a little bit more about just opinion, but if you’re choosing the best idea to move forward with on your product, you can probably compare that to what your goal is and what your strategy is.
I advocate backing up and making sure that everybody is aligned on what the goal is, what the objectives are, what the strategy is, what the vision is, so that you can make a better decision about how to move forward, so that it’s not just opinion. And having diverse people in the room from different functions, from different backgrounds, can help spot things that a homogeneous group would not necessarily see, like a certain risk or a certain, you know, new idea that nobody else had thought of. And so, aligning on what the goal is, is the first step, and then figuring out how to accomplish that goal is the second step, and that makes it a lot less about opinion and more about what we think will create the most value and drive towards our objectives.
Michael
Yes. Okay, that makes sense. It’s not just what is the best book of the year, it’s what counts as a book? Is a screenplay a book? How do we define best what criteria are we judging on? Is it strictly everyone’s opinion, or are there more concrete or constrained categories that we are aggregating into a decision, or what is the process that we’re using to make a decision? Guess we always go back to that.
Melissa
Because if you talk about the goal of picking the best book as being the one that made the most money, now you’re like, okay, now I know how to make that decision because I get some data and I say, okay, which one made the most money?
That’s the best one. If you have a more subjective criteria, like which one was the most enjoyable, for whom? Is it the best kids’ book? Is it the best? Who’s the audience? And, how do you define what enjoyable is? So if you don’t have those criteria, then it’s hard to make an objective decision.
Michael
Which are all the same questions we always have with products. Even if, regardless of how much data we’ve gathered, it always ends up being a subjective decision by someone at some point of deciding that this data aggregates up to a particular value. This data aggregates up to particular value, and that value is more important because of some set of reasons, which I find we often try to pretend our objective, and always there’s subjectivity at the bottom of it.
Melissa
You mean like it’s just hard to gather enough information to be able to answer the questions you need to make the decision?
Michael
Unless the criteria is strictly, which button color gets the most clicks, that’s the one we’re going for. And there’s going to be subjectivity involved. Deciding which clicks do we include if people are clicking multiple times because they don’t know the difference between single click on double click for a webpage versus in the file explorer in the operating system.
Does that count as two or should it count as one? All these are subjective decisions that go into what seem to be an objective metric.
Melissa
Right? But then you have the goal, right? So if the goal is that they didn’t get to the next page, then it doesn’t really matter how many clicks there are, right?
That you wanna look to how many people achieved the outcome? And then there’s also, you might need to make a hypothesis saying Hey, we don’t have information on this. We can’t really gather that information until it’s launched, but our hypothesis is that if we do it this way, we’ll have this outcome.
So then you test it, you say, let’s do it that way and see what happens. And if it doesn’t work, let’s do it the other way. And so that’s when you can make a decision and do something and see whether or not it worked. Amazon has this concept of one-way door versus a two-way door. If that decision is reversible, let’s make the button this color versus that color, then it’s an easy decision.
You just do it, and if it doesn’t work, you do it the other way. Some decisions may be one-way doors where you can only make the decision once you can’t come back. Those are more difficult, and those you may need to do additional tests before making that decision.
Michael
That’s a nice distinction of reversible versus irreversible. It helps make clear the risk where one aspect of risk involves a decision.
Melissa
Yeah.
Michael
Is that maybe a primary reason of creating these cultures of mitigating risk?
Melissa
Mitigating risk is the reason to create a safe culture?
Michael
To create a diverse culture. Yeah.
Melissa
Yeah. I think that’s one reason, because the more people of different perspectives you have looking at a problem, the more somebody might see something that could be an issue, like a risk, but on the other hand, there’s also just, you get more ideas because people have different experiences and they might remember something from their own background that other people haven’t experienced, and that might spark some creative idea.
Michael
Right. And that’s partly mitigating risk, but it’s also creating opportunity. Opportunity. Yeah.
A lot of what we talked about today seems like it’s helping people find their way through all the change, uncertainty, and overwhelm that seem to be life these days. Is there anything else? When you’re explicitly looking to do that, is there anything else beyond what we talked about today that you tend to employ?
Melissa
Yeah, I think that a critical piece, if you are facing change and uncertainty and you’re overwhelmed, there’s two things that are helpful. One is, breaking down the situation into pieces so that it’s more manageable to look at, right? To say, Okay, what does this change mean for me in my day-to-day life?
How does this change affect other people? What can I do to help? What are the components of this change? You know, I need to think about, say, you have a new CEO, right? You need to think about, Okay, there’s getting to know this person, there’s the changes they might bring on staff or strategy.
There’s, you know, how can I work with my team and prevent them from getting stressed out? So there’s different pieces of it. And then there’s also what’s under my control and what’s not. What can I control, and what is out of my hands? And a lot of times thinking about it that way is kind of a release for people, ’cause they say, here’s this. I can’t control whether or not the new CEO comes on board. It’s already done. I can’t control that. What I can control is how I react to it. What I can control is how I get to know this person to figure out what it is that they want and that they need from me, and how they communicate, and all this stuff.
So, figuring out, you know, what’s under my control or not can help a little bit. I think with the overwhelm.
Michael
What we controlled versus what we can’t sometimes is hard to discern. Especially, sometimes we have beliefs that may not be true. Like I can control what they think of me, which I’ve never found to be true. Yeah. How do you, for yourself, identify those distinctions, and then how do you help other people do that?
Melissa
Yeah. I think you have to take each thought individually and examine it, right? So if you say, I can control what they think of me, well, I can control my own behavior and how I present myself, but I can’t control what they think of me. But there is something that I can do, and that’s to show up in a certain way, or to be, you know, to try to be accommodating to a certain extent.
So thinking about each statement, right? Even just writing them down, what I can control, what I can’t control, and then just taking another look like, can I really control what they think? No, but I can control the inputs that make them arrive at that decision or that thought.
Michael
If we’re doing that, then that gives us we can take each of those statements to an extreme and see if it still holds true.
If I can, can I control what I think? What they think? Yes, I can do that. Okay. That means I can control everything what they do. Do I have that power? No. Okay. No. Maybe I can’t actually control what they think then.
Melissa
Yeah, but there’s something in there that you can control, right? So it may not be exactly that, but you can control something related to that, which is how you show up.
Michael
Right. Then, that’s a great way to get into the problem solving aspect of it. How do I find what can I control in this situation that we seem completely out of my control? Yeah. So as you said, we can always control how we’re breathing, how we are showing up, and that we choose to bring our favorite shirt or stuffed animal in our bag or whatever the thing is that helps us feel confident and comfortable in situations. There’s always things like that, that we could do.
Melissa
Yeah. And we can also control how we talk about the scenario to our team and our peers, right? So I’ve found, in managing teams, that a certain amount of optimism is helpful, so that people don’t get overwhelmed by change and so that people can help make their own decisions about how they’re going to act.
Not like extreme optimism, like, we’re gonna be fine, no big deal, when the company’s like losing lots of money every month. But it’s, Hey, listen, we’re losing money. But what we’re gonna do about is we’re gonna come up with creative ways to cut costs. So that’s a spin on it that’s less about ah, this is really annoying, and more about what are we gonna do about it?
And that’s something that I can control, which is how I react to a situation outwardly, even if in the inside I’m freaking out. Because that’s how you show up for your team and how you present, you know, what the next steps are in a tricky situation.
Michael
And this takes us nicely back to where we started, that we can always show up as who we are. We can have that vulnerability to say, Okay team, I know that you all are likely freaking out about this pronouncement that our CEO just read. I am too. I don’t know what it means yet. You’ll be the first to know what I do.
And in the meantime, here’s how we’re going to move forward while we figure out what this new commandment means
Melissa
Exactly. So you can express that you are not sure, and some people think that saying that you’re not sure, you don’t know yet, is a sign of weakness. But I think it’s just being honest, and people appreciate honesty.
Especially if there’s something to go along with it, and here’s what we’re gonna do next, as opposed to just I don’t know, right? It’s like, Well, I don’t know yet, but here’s what we’re gonna do.
Michael
And then here’s what we’re gonna do could be, here’s how we’re gonna decide what we’re gonna do.
Melissa
And here’s what I need from you, or you know, here’s what we’ve been asked for. Let’s work on this together.
Michael
Help make clear what the next step is, even if that’s deciding what the next step is.
This has been a great conversation today, Melissa.
For people who would like to follow up on you on building these cultures, work with you perhaps, and having you help them make their product more the way they want it to be. What’s the best way for people to connect with you?
Melissa
People can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I have a link there to sign up for time on my calendar to talk with me if there’s a problem that you’re looking to solve, and people can find the book ‘Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders’ at alignedthebook.com.
Michael
Where you have a bunch of free stuff for them to download and sample, correct?
Melissa
Yes, there are free downloads. I do recommend that you buy the book. Obviously, I’m the author, I’m gonna recommend that you buy the book.
But there’s supplemental downloads and things like that, so that you can do the exercises that we suggest in the book. there’s templates. We have a stakeholder canvas in the book, which is essentially a way to write down key aspects of the stakeholders that you’re working with to be able to keep track of everybody and think about how you work with them, and that’s available for a free download on the website.
Michael
That’s great. And I’ll have all those links in the show notes, too. What would you like to leave our audience with today?
Melissa
We talked a lot about a lot of things. I think that what I wanna leave the audience with is that when you are working with somebody who is difficult or who confuses you, or whose behavior you don’t understand, the first step should be to be, to get curious, to ask questions, to try to find out as much as you can about their context, their background, their motivations, their incentives, rather than assuming that everybody’s like you and rather than assuming that, their, you know, their behavior is due to some personality flaw versus due to a particular scenario or situation that they’re in.
Michael
I like that a lot. Thank you, Melissa, for joining us today.
Melissa
Thank you for having me.
Michael
Thank you, audience, for joining us today. Melissa and I would love to know, what is your favorite curious, inducing comment or question? What question do you like to use to open a conversation with curiosity? Please let us know. Thanks, and have a great day.