Leaning back, and in
From June 2022-23, in addition to being a product manager I served as Chief of Staff for the Microsoft Education Product team, and drove business rhythm and reporting for the cross-discipline marketing, sales, and product leadership team. This post is part of a series of reflections on my learning from that experience.
As Chief of staff, you have the broadest visibility into priorities, changes, challenges and opportunities. You see the fires but you don't get to put them out. I took the Chief of Staff role after being a product manager for 9 years, and continued in my PM role while being CoS. As an action-biased product manager, I am driven to create clarity and execute. As I straddled the two roles at once, I developed a new muscle -- one might even say a new gut muscle, because I learned to lean back, and lean in, carefully modulating when I was leaning back, and observing intently when I needed to lean in. Leaning back can sometimes be hard for driven, action-biased, innovative and caring leaders, and yet it is essential. It can be very powerful.
Leaning back is empowering to the team. It upholds the values of fail fast, and growth mindset. When you lean back, you set context, share principles, agree on the definition of success, and then spend most of your time coaching and caring. You hold your tongue, turn on your active listening ears and curious mind. I leaned heavily on my curious nature to help me lean back.
There are times when you need to lean in, and most all of them have to do to with creating topline clarity on why, what, who and perhaps when. With a strong, and competent team, you rarely need to state how. Keeping an eye on the culture, and creating the space for differing perspectives while being clear about who is on point to deliver, you can easily lean back, leaning in only to reiterate or clarify why, what, who, and when.
Back and in, back and in, in the last year my gut intuition on when to do each has become stronger and my action-biased nature has found satisfaction by asking questions, and creating the space for success.