What We Can Learn About Emotional Intelligence From Product Managers
Hot take: skip the Instagram therapy content and talk to a good PM instead.
Why is everyone talking about emotional intelligence?
Last year saw a health-and-wellbeing explosion: digital detox retreats to get in touch with nature and ourselves, a spike in meditation app downloads, and gloomy reports on the pandemic-triggered mental health crisis and inadequate mental health services. If the internet is anything to go on, we’re not only allowed to show our feelings in 2021, but encouraged. As we open our collective emotional Pandora’s box, we need the skills to deal with what emerges.
The World Economic Forum has been waving the banner for emotional intelligence at work for a few years already. It urges that emotional intelligence can “make your career” and “save your life”. And these days, many of us aren’t “at work” anymore. The boundaries between work and home have completely collapsed. If not emotional intelligence here and now, then where and when?
WEF’s 2016 report, The Future of Jobs, already identified a shift in the determinators of career success. Their report includes a comparison of the top 10 professional skills of 2020 vs. the in-demand skills of 2015.
In the 2020s, quality control and active listening are replaced by cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence. We’re catching on that emotional intelligence goes beyond active listening.
Ok, so how are Product Managers talking about emotional intelligence?
Smart PMs have already discovered what a difference emotional intelligence makes to the success of their products and teams. Many of the skills needed to be a good Product Manager — communication, empathy — come down to emotional intelligence.
Thanks to practical experience and helped along by vocabulary from the social sciences, strong PMs are able to explain, demonstrate, and champion emotional intelligence. I think there are four key areas where we can learn from Product Managers about emotional intelligence in action.
Relational dynamics and participation
We’re accelerating through a shift to a blended consumption/participation economy. More than ever, an organisation — and to zoom in further, a Product team — is the sum of its parts. Each participant is co-creating the organisation and/or team. At a Product level, interacting with users helps teams decide what to build. Our workplaces are relational spaces.
Digital leaders recognise this dynamic. In his keynote [€] at the Product-Led Festival in March 2021, TrueLayer Senior PM Dan Wong talked about finding a symbiotic company/PM fit. This is much like finding the right product/market fit. For example, he suggested asking yourself a two-part question when considering a prospective role with a new company: “Will this company culture be additive to my growth? Will I be additive to this company culture?”.
These questions highlight how the right company/PM fit is a participatory relationship that creates value.
Equity
Aditi Sharma, VP Digital Product Design at JP Morgan, told a beautiful anecdote during a panel on Diversity in Product at the same Product-Led Festival. She shared an adage from her father, who observed farmers working on a collective in India. He described the principle of the collective: everyone contributed, “each according to [their] needs and capacity”. To Sharma, this is equity as empowerment.
I think we struggle to imagine equity in practice. This example of the farming collective helps us understand; I think an anecdote about a tech team could also help us make sense of equity. The balance of needs and capacity become more familiar when we think about prioritisation on a Product team. What do users and customers need? How do we meet users where they’re at? How can each team member contribute according to their abilities? What can we build with the time and resources we have that will create the greatest value?
Authenticity and humanity
Our capacity is limited and this is what makes us human. Against the backdrop of 2021: Another Year of Self-Care, “bring your whole self to work” sounds less like a call to put work first and more like a millennial battle cry, code for “authenticity or death”. This kind of enforced authenticity can feel paradoxically inauthentic, but it’s still a chance to be transparent about our diverse human experience.
Good PMs think about diverse human experiences. In step with the evolving conversation in the social sciences, leading PMs have expanded their vocabulary around empathy. Writing user stories and developing personas isn’t just about empathy, it’s about compassion.
(Here’s a broad-strokes definition of the science of empathy: empathy is the ability to imagine and experience the emotions someone else feels in a certain situation. Compassion has an added, active response to try and help that situation.)
Tech is still a people business. Our capitalism isn’t yet at the point where machines are responsible for transactions of economy at a large scale. The age of machina economica dawns, but for now, the producer and consumer are usually both human. Making good tech is about compassionately understanding personhood, needs, and experiences.
Self-awareness
We all know the stereotypes about technical, analytic people being emotionally detached, but good PMs prove those stereotypes wrong. There’s growing openness about confronting emotional weaknesses. Personally, I would choose another term because I don’t like equating emotion with weakness. But the concept of self-awareness at work is welcome.
To recognise our biases and false assumptions, to get real about how we’re failing and learning, and to thoughtfully evaluate feedback — these are all practical expressions of self-awareness. They are vital for PMs. Without these skills, we only make work harder for ourselves and others.
tl;dr
We can look to good PMs for real-world examples of participation, equity, authenticity, and self-awareness. Building our skills in these areas help to develop larger skills of emotional intelligence, which might just make our careers and save our lives.
