Hi, my name is Leah Tharin, and this is my Substack: hot takes on product-led growth/sales and organizational scaling.
I advise companies on how to not burn everything down in the process. I run cohorts on PLG every two months; join me!
I wrote an article on the topic of why Alignment is at the heart of every great leader; it was one of my most-read articles to date:
Leadership is about leading people in a given direction, not necessarily managing them. At the heart of it is the art of creating alignment and inspiring people to move.
While I think that every manager is, to some degree, a leader, not every leader has direct reports, and IC Leadership (leading without managing people) has been a huge unlock in my career to understand that you lead more people than you manage.
In this 5 part series, I’ll dive into each one of these critical components:
Growing in front of your employees (This Article)
Experimentation skill to learn, not succeed (coming soon)
Part 4: Grow in front of your employees
In the first three parts, we discussed communication, how to tell a great, truthful story, and how often to repeat it.
This is the more active part of alignment when we talk to a wider group of people, but there is more to leadership than just how to communicate. I’m firmly convinced that we also have to lead by setting an example. If what you communicate does not match up with what you do, it’s all just a flash in the pan that does not really align people long term.
Interestingly, this is closely tied to your ability to grow and how open you do it in front of others.
Let’s map it out:
Personal Growth as a Leader
Personal growth to me is the ability to welcome the thought that you are not perfect and never will be but are not intimidated by this thought; rather, you see it as an opportunity to keep improving yourself constantly.
I struggled with this concept for quite some time in my professional life:
I tied accepting a failure openly to my underperforming, not being worthy as a leader and appearing “weak.”
I thought I would never be able to admit that I was not very solid on a topic the closer it was to my job title. “A PM that doesn’t know how to query data? Not me!”
I thought "to be professional” meant being standoffish and vague toward others, not showing weakness at all costs.
All of this is obviously complete nonsense and keeps you from growing because if you think like that, you’re trying to apply others' expectations to yourself, which might not even exist.
As titles increase, feedback declines and ego grows
I noticed relatively early in my career that people tend to give you less negative feedback for the same performance as you ascend with your job title.
The reason for this might be manyfold, but I think it comes down to higher titles holding power over lower ones. Especially if you are the manager of a person, you hold some kind of influence over them whether you use it or not.
Or… that person got burned in the past for giving someone higher-up feedback, which was ill-received and is now hesitant to disagree.
This leads to an undesirable side effect as a leader: your ego might go out of control as the holder of one of these important titles.
Less feedback might imply that you have everything under control.
Obviously, that’s not true, but it’s convenient to think that. Growing is exhausting. We all would love to just have arrived and rest on our laurels for years to come.
This dynamic creates exactly the dictator leadership that no one can stand. These leaders somehow convinced themselves that they got it all under control.
Not only do you lose the respect of people, but you also become ineffective as a leader because you’re starting to lose data that you received before that.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the data:
The data
I did a survey on how much people are willing to challenge their leaders, and the significant results (Linkedin, Substack) are sobering:
Less than 30% of people say they have an open culture of challenging each other. Ouch.
If you further ask those who are holding back on “why,” they hold back, the picture looks like this:
The main reason is the fear of repercussions, closely followed by the impression that their opinions don’t matter.
If you believe in a top-down company that rules through fear and your personal ideas are always the best, then you can stop reading here and do something more productive with your time.
If you believe, like me, in a mixed bottoms-up approach where people should be more autonomous in choosing what they build and also have buy-in, then we should see that as a serious warning sign.
Growth as a leader and the connection to fear of repercussions
I don’t consider myself to be an authoritarian leader at all, yet I have received feedback multiple times that people are also holding back from challenging my ideas for a variety of reasons out of fear of repercussions.
I’m firmly convinced that we are paying the bills for a leadership culture from those who came before us and underestimating the meaning of a title once we have it.
As long as people don’t really know you well, they will put assumptions in place:
You have a title and hold power over them in some way they don’t have over you.
Previous leaders/managers in your company might be difficult to challenge and seem to lash out; how can they know that you aren’t the same?
When it comes to keeping your job and livelihood and challenging an idea for a company that is not the center of your life, why risk it in the first place?
This leads to the problem that you’re suddenly risking to become an ineffective leader because people are hesitant to give you their honest opinions, which would make your decisions better.
So, this is about building trust.
Growing yourself to grow others
Much like leading people in a direction you think is good for the company, we can also lead them towards an open culture that allows them to challenge each other openly first.
You can do that effectively by growing in front of your colleagues more than anything else:
1. Be specific about admitting mistakes, change of opinions
People can smell fake modesty dressed up as mistakes. “I make mistakes all the time. I work so much!”
Which ones? Specifically? Can your people recall an instance where you specifically said in an instance “I messed up, I’m sorry, that’s on me”
Don’t expect your people to do that themselves if you haven’t done it first. The same goes for feedback. Allow yourself to be criticized first before you criticize others.
2. Be upfront about areas where you don’t feel competent yourself
You can destroy a lot of capital as a leader if you struggle to admit that you don’t know something. Rather than struggling yourself through it to appear competent, try to find people who are competent in those areas.
I’ve built up a great network of friends and colleagues over time, and I’m involved constantly whenever I struggle with something, and I struggle a lot. By involving, I mean bringing them into the conversation rather than pretending that their knowledge is my knowledge to others.
3. Ask instead of answer.
I tend to jump to answers prematurely, especially in collaborative settings. It helps a ton to insist on answers from your team and their opinions before you reveal your own when you’re challenging ideas.
Not every setting is great for that, though.
Some people will only give you feedback in intimate 1 on 1 settings or their preferred form of communication (written vs. spoken). Be patient in this regard when important decisions are coming and adapt to the preferred method of people around you.
I see the extra effort required to adjust to their way of communication as part of my job, not theirs.
NEVER take credit from your team
You have your title already. The success of your team is your success, and it’s very easy to forget to mention someone’s contribution when they helped you form a decision, even unintentionally.
Some people want to get recognition for their contributions, specifically from you. No matter how much you don’t see yourself that way, your title and position causes that.
Even if you are “just” an operator, you might be to an intern what a CEO is to a director.
If you notice that it happens, acknowledge it, remedy it, and try to do better next time. It’s easy for leaders to forget how impactful this little thing is.
4. Tone
Too aggressive
This one might be specific to me. I learned as an operator to be pushy and demanding towards my leadership when it comes to challenging ideas, and I was rewarded for it by having leaders and managers who welcomed it.
This can easily turn into a negative thing as a leader yourself, though:
When you sound combative and pair it with your influence, it can be devastating. I get emotional about certain topics, and that’s reflected in my communication unintentionally.
While I attribute this to being “passionate” about certain topics, it’s detrimental to a company’s culture, especially as a senior leader.
But it happens occasionally, and when it does, I immediately remedy it by openly apologizing for my tone and returning to the matter at hand (and feeling bad about it for days :D).
Too nice
The other end is being too nice and constantly congratulating and thanking people for everything, even though it wasn’t warranted at all, or not pushing topics back at all.
In this case, you treat your voice like a currency that you print too much of. You’re devaluing your individual words so much that it doesn’t mean anything anymore when you do compliment someone’s work and input.
A compliment that can apply to everyone in every situation is meaningless.
A good example of losing value for doing something too much is someone who constantly apologizes for everything. You don’t take their apology seriously at some point anymore, and it just becomes distracting and meaningless.
A good balance: Being specific
Instead of saying, “Thank you for your contribution,” I try to be specific about it:
“Thank you for (specific input they gave); it changed my opinion (describing the way it had an impact).”
This also proves that you listened actively. Which is a compliment in itself, “your opinion was important enough to me to actively think about and listen to it”
Continuous, uncomfortable feedback
I like to have an uncomfortable stream of feedback wherever I go outside of the official performance review streams (even though they can be great).
This can either be a peer (or your friends) brave enough to tell me what they think immediately when it happens (which is a gift you should hold on to) or simply by occasionally sending anonymous surveys out to people about me specifically.
I don’t ever like opening the results of these surveys, but every time I do, I’m glad I did get a look into the mirror.
Patrick Campbell did an interview a while back with me pushing this to the extreme by hiring a therapist to interview his friends anonymously:
Acknowledge the results; don’t fight them
Surveys are great. But only if you acknowledge the results; I make it a habit to share the results summarized back to those who answered them, even if it’s painful.
Or, in the case of having your personal advisor, I thank them for the criticism without criticizing it too much.
It helps me to understand at that moment that this is a snapshot of the opinion of others and not the place to combat these perceptions by becoming defensive about them and bitch to others. That way, you make sure that this was the last time you ever got feedback from these people.
Make it easy to criticize you.
That’s what growth is in the end, to accept our short comings and do something about them.
Summary
You are not as perfect as you think, and that’s perfect. How else should people around us emphasize and identify with our points otherwise?
Don’t ask others to grow when you can’t demonstrate to them that you’re willing to grow yourself.
People will treat you differently because of the title you have, and not always in a good way.
Good feedback is uncomfortable; foster it actively instead of being defensive.
What’s next?
That’s it for the fourth part of this 5 part series on this Leadership guide; stay subscribed if you want to be notified about the next one in the series.
In our next article, we talk about the art of experimentation to learn and not succeed.
In this 5 part series, I’ll dive into each one of these critical components:
Growing in front of your employees (This Article)
Experimentation skill to learn, not succeed (coming soon)