Product management within an organisation can be a challenging role. Whether it’s developing and launching a product or integrating a third-party product into your company’s processes, it requires a dynamic approach.
Acting as a product leader, similarly, requires flexibility. It combines skills from standard leadership with many aspects of the product management role, and success involves knowledge, excellent leadership skills, and the ability to adapt your style to the problems you’re facing.
Numerous leadership styles can help in a product leadership role. Below, we’ll look at how each translates to the role of product leadership and the innate skills they bring to the process.
Product Leadership Styles
The styles discussed here are “traditional” leadership styles that have been adapted to the role of product leader. As anyone who’s performed this role will know, it involves motivating and organising stakeholders and team members to successfully execute a product launch or integration. To achieve this, it is often necessary to switch between leadership styles to achieve the specific, short-term goal in front of you.
1. Coaching Leadership
Coaching leaders, unsurprisingly, pass on knowledge to those around them.
Their goal is to help people achieve goals through learning, which they can then apply to the problem. It takes a long time to properly coach someone, as it’s a process of constant development.
What’s more, you might find there are only so many people you can coach at once.
But can this be applied to a product leadership role? Yes, provided you’re careful about your approach. Coaching is useful for passing on your product knowledge to both team members and stakeholders – this information could make a big difference when it comes to an important decision.
However, effective leaders will understand that coaching must take a back seat in the face of more immediate issues. It should be seen as a long-term, supplementary goal to the product launch, as delivering for stakeholders is always going to be more important than ensuring people have learned something.
Coaching Leadership
2. Commanding Leadership
Also known as authoritative leadership, this style has the potential to be seen as negative. After all, few self-aware people would want to be seen as authoritative by those they lead. But when it comes to fast-paced environments, such as in the final days before a product launch, a commanding leadership style can be incredibly useful.
We can define commanding leadership as simply ensuring team members do what they’re told. You can be perfectly polite in the way you approach your requests, but this style comes down to one thing: as a leader, you command people to do what you think is best.
It’s useful in a pinch because it can help to deal with imminent crises. However, for it to be successful, you need to ensure you’re making the right call otherwise it can massively damage motivation. Keep this style in your back pocket for emergencies and only employ it when you’re confident it’s needed and that the decisions you’re making are correct.
3. Visionary Leadership
Having a vision is arguably a cornerstone of being a good leader. You need it to see how things will play out and to deliver the results expected of you. In a way, leadership is essentially getting people to work towards your vision.
It comes in pretty handy in product leader scenarios, especially in the early days of a project. This is when you likely have (or are developing) a product vision, and inspiring others to share in this vision can help lift it off the ground.
Being a visionary leader will help motivate team members to identify and address potential issues in the initial vision.
Visionary Leadership
However, after the earliest stages of the project, visionary leadership becomes less useful. It requires those you lead to have the time, knowledge, and experience to figure out and work towards your goal. Once things are in motion, it can be difficult to expect people to have all three, so you should drop being a visionary in favour of a more applicable style. That said, as long as you can nail it in the earlier stages, you’ll get off to a very good start.
4. Inclusive Leadership
Inclusive leadership is another fairly self-explanatory style. It centres on involving others in the decision-making process to share responsibility. Inclusive leadership is ideal for product development because it makes use of your team’s knowledge for idea generation and problem solving.
For example, you’d employ inclusive leadership when generating a product roadmap or strategy document. During these stages, bringing in ideas from team members and stakeholders can lead to high levels of innovation and help to inspire motivation in the product’s vision.
Of course, you must be careful with how you go about being inclusive. If you involve too many people or the wrong people, decisions can be wrong or take too long to be made. You also risk compromising on strong ideas in favour of weaker ones. To overcome this, ensure you remain in overall control and think carefully about who you bring in.
5. Affiliative Leadership
Affiliative leadership shares several similarities with inclusive leadership. It’s about bringing people together to create a harmonious work environment, which could mean including them in decision-making. Generally, it focuses on bringing people together and creating a person-centred working process.
It certainly has its place in product leadership. As with visionary leadership, it works best when employed early in the project lifecycle, especially if you’ve brought together a new team. Ensuring they can work well together and listen to each other’s ideas will be essential for faster and more efficient collaboration in the later project stages.
Affiliative Leadership
However, it can be easy to fall into the trap of being too person-focused. There’s nothing wrong with caring for people, but this should only ever be done to help them deliver successful outcomes for the overall project. Similarly, you should never avoid difficult conversations or having to be authoritative at the expense of keeping team members happy. As any effective leader will know, sometimes it’s necessary to manage the people in front of you.
6. Pacesetting Leadership
Finally, we have pacesetting leadership, which involves leading by example. Unsurprisingly, this means motivating people to do as you do, rather than as you say. It conflicts with commanding leadership because it’s essentially the opposite side of the same coin.
It plays an important role in product leadership, particularly in setting the standards for future work. You can use pacesetting to show how a job is done or how to rectify mistakes you’ve noticed in previous work. Provided you’re thoughtful and ethical about how you demonstrate processes, it’s an ideal style for setting the tone for your project.
On the other hand, it can be fairly exhausting. Pacesetting means you need to set and maintain any high standards you expect, and it can take a lot to keep these up. Equally, it can affect team morale if people are concerned they can’t keep up to your standards. If this goes on for too long, you might notice more mistakes that you end up being blamed for.
Read More: Unlock Team Success with DISC Personality Profiling
How to Use Leadership Styles for Product Leadership
So, how do we convert this theory into practice when it comes to product leadership?
Effective workplace leadership requires adapting your approach to different situations and team needs. Consider the following tips before adapting the styles to suit the needs of your project:
Know Your Preferred Style
First, understand what would be your default style – we all have one. While reading through the list, you should have seen one that jumped out at you more than others. If not, do the following:
- Pay attention to your behaviour. Do you ask rather than tell? Do you spend a lot of time facilitating relationships? Do you find yourself showing people how to do things?
- List key traits of the styles mentioned above and look for them in your leadership behaviour.
- Reflect on this during your downtime and you should identify your main style.
Leadership Styles for Product Leadership
Learn to Adapt
No one product leadership style suits every scenario. It should be fairly clear, but they each favour different stages of a project due to their innate behaviours and the way they cause you to interact with people.
Make sure you’re able to switch between product leadership styles as needed. This might take some practice, especially if you’re more experienced in your default style. However, it’ll be important to show adaptability if you want to be a truly effective product leader.
Attend a Leadership Development Programme
Consider joining a leadership development programme, ideally, one that adapts its learning materials to product leadership. If this isn’t possible, find one that covers the leadership styles above and then adapt them to suit your product leader role.
Final Thoughts
Leadership styles can help make you a far more effective product leader. By adapting your style to suit the project’s needs, you’ll hopefully see higher levels of motivation among team members and greater overall success on the project. Importantly, be aware of those you’re leading and make sure the style you’re using works with what they expect from you.
