 Hi everyone, my name is Brooke Robson and today I'll be talking about some of the critical soft skills to help you transition from an IC to a manager. A little bit about myself. I have a technical and business background, majored in computer science and started my career in consulting, got my MBA and then have been in product and PM roles ever since then. And I personally went through this transition from being an IC to a manager about a year and a half ago. So while I reflected upon that experience, there have been a lot of learnings that I've gotten skills that either people told me about advice that people gave me that I wish I would have listened to more or had more context on what that meant in practice. And as I reflect upon what that's meant for me and my team, I hope that I can share some of those experiences if it's of relevance or maybe of help to you. Alright, so jumping in, if you're curious about if this presentation is relevant or useful to you. Fundamentally, if you're currently in an IC and looking to transition to a manager or you recently just transitioned to being a manager, what got you here won't get you there. And what I mean by that is what got you to the point of being a kind of rock star ICPM is not what it will take to get you to be that rock star manager. There are different skills that are required and you'll have to think about kind of areas that you need to grow or what that means for you and also the part of the job that you like the most. Like, did you really like the IC work? I found that I transitioned to being a manager. I did a lot less of that and that was also something that I hadn't thought too much about. Like, do you really like how tangible the execution work of being an IC is? So just things to keep in mind. We'll kind of talk through five of the critical soft skills that are even more useful and essential as you're transitioning to a manager. The first, effective delegation. Second, giving feedback. Third, coaching. Fourth, second order thinking. And fifth, influencing up and across. I'll chat through what all those mean if you aren't sure what those are or if they're things that you already are not good at. So, which I'll write in. The first effective delegation. So why is delegation important? Delegation is important for three main reasons. The first, if you don't delegate, it could be a stolen learning opportunity. You've taken away an opportunity from someone on your team to learn or develop a new skill. Second, you trap yourself in the weeds when you don't delegate. You've taken away your ability to spend time on the hard strategic work that makes you successful as a manager. And third, you're holding onto the secrets. You end up not communicating the things you know that will help others be better at their job. It's a common trap when you make this transition is kind of keeping those most important projects to yourself. The thought process is this is important. I'm a great executor that's got me to the role I'm in right now. I can create a better outcome if I do it myself, and therefore I should. Well, that may in the short term workout, but in the long term, if you're not scaling your team, helping them learn and develop. And maybe the short term fastest route, but in the long term, you're not scaling your impact or investing in your team and developing the skills that they need to grow. So how do you set yourself up for success when you delegate? First is recognizing that it's not a one size fit all strategy. When I first became a manager, I think I probably had a similar approach for everyone on my team. And I realized that probably wasn't the best approach to take. I started off with probably being too involved, which meant that I was spending more time working or kind of supervising or thinking about the projects people on my team were working on. And it was kind of duplicative to what they were already doing. So then I took a step back. And when I took a step back, then I lost the context to be able to effectively coach them and help problem solve. So there's a little bit of that sweet sauce of like, how much do you need to know, but how you can take a step back so that you can effectively jump in and coach when you need to. As well as there's different levels of how far you go in delegating and how ready that person is for you to delegate different parts of the task and responsibilities. So regardless of kind of where you're at, it's important to set expectations, clearly define the task, explain your direct reports role, as well as your own role, and discuss deadlines and check in points. And I think a really critical piece of all this is number two, clearly defining the task. And that's where scoping a problem appropriately comes into play, depending on if someone on your team is more junior or more experienced. The big question you need to be asking as a manager in your goals and manager is to give them the appropriate amount of ambiguity. Ambiguity is where we can just get sucked into the weeds and go into these spirals and can be frustrating and confusing. And so as a manager, you need to make sure that you are giving people appropriately sized problems, scopes and questions to work in. And as they get more experienced, they can take on more and more ambiguous problems. But if someone's a new PM, really starting them off with a specific problem so they can focus on developing the skills, rather than trying to think about what they should even do next. So there's five levels of delegation, assess and report, recommend, develop action plan, make the final decision, full delegation. So the first assessment report, this is when you're asking your director report to go and assess a situation. You might give them a feature, a problem, something that you want them to go out and collect some information and report back to you. At this point, they're kind of reporting back, but you are ultimately still making the decisions, coming up with solutions, and they're kind of just kind of building that information for you and you're explaining the decisions to them. This leads into recommend. This is when that team member has now not only done the assess and report work, but is also as part of reporting back to you. Sharing their thoughts on what the best possible solutions might be, and asking them to justify the best one. Here you're starting to help build up that muscle around prioritization. How do you think about different solutions? Do these solutions actually solve this problem that you're looking to solve? When someone is at this recommend stage, an important thing to keep in mind is you are still the one that will be making the decision. But when you make that decision, you need to explain how you decided and your decision-making criteria so that your director report can build up to developing an action plan. So here, what's important in explaining your decision-making criteria with develop an action plan, they still aren't responsible for making the decision. But by understanding the decision-making criteria, that helps them come up with the roadmap and the action plan of what to do next. Over the priorities, what are those critical open questions that I need to answer first to know if I should even be working on this? Maybe we need to answer this critical key question and we might need to pause the project. First, we had assess and report, then we had recommend, and then the third one, develop action plan. Your director report is doing the assess report recommend you're making the decision, but then they're coming up with the action plan to act upon that decision. So you're still accountable for making the decision, but they're figuring out, okay, now that we've made the decision, what do we do next? Which ultimately leads to this fourth stage, making the decision. So at this point, your team member has mastered all the previous responsibilities and you trust them to make the decision. You're available to coach them, support them, but you expect them to act independently. Here, especially if this is just a new transition that you're making, make sure that you're monitoring progress by asking for regular check-ins, reviewing the status of the project and raising concerns when you send problems. And then ultimately, as people on your team get more experience, they may reach the level of full delegation. And at full delegation, they are fully accountable and responsible for projects. And they're really just at this point reporting back to you with exceptions and unique problems. What's critical here is at this point, this team member hasn't just made one good decision. They need to have a track record of solid decision-making and it's not just a one-off. They've kind of developed a framework where they're consistently making good decisions. You trust their decision-making and they've also kind of developed action plans executed on these things. So, full delegation is definitely where you'd expect a more senior experience PM to be. Some companies have PM roles that are super high levels or very experienced and they're still ICs. It kind of depends the company that you're at and what that structure is. So it also may be that you don't need to become a manager to progress in your career and you might just kind of be operating in the full delegation mode already, which is totally okay as well. It just depends on the company that you're at. Second, giving feedback. Ultimately, good feedback helps produce better decisions and improve performance. So why is feedback important? First, I think people associate feedback with the negative a lot, but feedback should both be the positive and the negative. And you think about feedback as both as positive and negative. It makes sense that feedback engages, motivates, and improves achievement. Second, employees value feedback. And third, feedback improves retention. That third piece, I was a little surprised at when I first heard it, but then as I reflected on it, if you're getting feedback on both what you're doing well, areas to improve, you're getting kind of specific coaching on how to improve. Usually, those are companies that are investing in you, helping you work towards those career goals. If feedback is being delivered in a constructive way, probably also a culture where there's a lot of transparency and trust. So if you built this culture of kind of balanced feedback, feedback that's motivating, that's constructive, that's in line with ultimately helping employees grow. Those are probably companies that people really enjoy working at. At least that's my personal punch. So there are three things that are helpful to make sure that feedback conversations that you have are impactful and resonate and kind of are received the way that you hope. I personally have always kind of dreaded feedback conversations and been intimidated by them. It's something I've definitely tried to be more proactive in terms of preparing for and being intentional about it. And so these are things that have been helpful for myself. The first is feedback should always be given with the intention to help an employee grow. Should never be given with the intention to show someone that they are wrong. Second, you need to be open as the feedback giver. If you come into a conversation uncomfortable or defensive, your employee will match that energy. And then third, invite the employee into the problem-solving process after you deliver the feedback asking what are their thoughts? What ideas do they have? What steps will you take making them a partner in the problem-solving and action plan that comes out of the conversation? So this is a feedback prep give that I've personally used. I think I've definitely been someone that has fallen into the trap of the feedback sandwich in the past. And so I find this a helpful tool to make sure that my feedback is specific, relevant, and actionable. And there's kind of four pieces of this. One, micro-es, two, data point, three, impact statement, and four, Q-step. So first, micro-es. Here, you really just want to get by and reduce the mystery. Also, check in to make sure it's a good time to have this conversation. There's maybe situations where if someone has a hard stop, they don't want to start this conversation and would ask to schedule time later to follow up. An example of this could be, hey, do you have 10 minutes to talk about your last email to Jill? You're getting that micro-es where the person can say, yes, I have 10 minutes. Yes, let's talk about it. Second data point. Here, you really want to focus on the behavior and the data, not the person, not the interpretation, and really avoid blur words. Really being specific in the action or the behavior that you're talking about. So following up on this example about Jill's email, I noticed you replied to her email three days after she sent it. And then three, which I think is one of the most critical pieces, and probably the one that is often not included when people give feedback, is the impact statement. That's why does this matter, who is affected by it? And with this example with Jill in the email, I mentioned it because you can't move forward without your reply, so might delay her team. It's important to contextualize feedback of why this matters, so people understand why it's important for them to change that behavior if it's negative feedback that you're delivering. And then fourth, the queue step, checking in to see if they see it the same and agree on an action plan. So in this example, if I kind of had this micro, yes, I show my data point impact statement, and then I wrap up with what do you think our process should be moving forward? Really putting the ball in there for it to kind of create that shared action plan together and free buy-in. If that feedback prep grid doesn't resonate with you or it seems too formulaic, if nothing else, I think there are three tips that will hopefully make feedback and the feedback you give more actionable and be received better in the future. First, making it receivable, the micro, yes, focusing on behavior and the data. Second, making it actionable, being specific, not blurry. Don't pad the negative feedback stated clearly, and really make sure you have that impact statement. I cannot emphasize this enough, but that's something that I think has been a tool game changer when I deliver feedback. And then third, make it balanced. And we say make it balanced, it's really kind of creating that culture where it's both positive and negative feedback that you're sharing, but it's also you're giving and receiving, making it clear that if anyone ever has feedback to give you, you're open to feedback, you love feedback, you're welcome to feedback, and that just further creates this culture of trust, vulnerability, empathy, all those good things. Third, coaching. I kind of like this quote as it relates to coaching. The last piece, I don't know if this is really the reason why we should focus on being coaches, but I'll share it anyway. Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if we take a day off. I do not think we should all strive to be good coaches so that we can go on vacation, but I do think that this highlights that as a coach, really what you're trying to teach people is how to think and ask questions. So that was probably the biggest surprise for me. When I initially transitioned to being a manager, I thought coaching was either telling someone what I would do or kind of directing someone into the course that I thought was like the one that was the best. But really, as I've learned more about coaching and tried to improve my coaching abilities myself, ultimately is really all about asking questions. Questions are important because it makes sure that you understand the person on your team what they're saying. It helps them clarify their thinking. If you've ever been in conversation with someone who's really good at asking questions, I often find that at the end of those conversations, I feel like my own thinking is incredibly, is much more crisp and clear. And you're also empowering them to take ownership. So with clarifying questions, I encourage you to ask these regularly. I think there's two helpful tools and then just some general questions as well. The first tool is the concept of a playback. And a playback is if someone kind of summarizes an issue or comes to you with a problem, you repeat it back to them and make sure you clearly understood them. So for example, okay, so you're wondering about X, did I get that right? Sometimes it'll be like, yes, they got that right or you may have this something. So this is a good way to make sure that you understand them and that you're on the same page. A second really helpful concept is the split track. Sometimes when someone comes to you with a problem or an issue, it's actually a bunch of different things. And so being able to separate those and focus on each one individually is really critical. So when you hear a bunch of different things being kind of tangled up in a problem or something like that, you can split track where you're going. It sounds like there are two issues, X and Y. Is that right? Which should we focus on first? This can kind of make this next part of the conversation when you're diving into options and next steps much more specific and you aren't trying to tackle this big messy hairy problem. Examples of other clarifying questions. Can you give me example? Can you walk me through your thinking on this? A helpful acronym for how to like guide and go through one of these conversations is soon. Success, obstacles, options, next steps. This can kind of help map out how your questions might change throughout the conversation and how you guide someone from that kind of problem to ultimately the options and next steps. So success, what would success look like for this issue? What would tell you that you reached this goal? These questions are, you're asking kind of your direct report, your team member. When I'm putting the ball in the court, you're pushing them to think strategically think about these things where before maybe they would come to you and ask you what success looks like. When you're playing this role as a coach, it's helpful to turn it back on them and ask them, what do you think success would look like? Oh, obstacles, what are the obstacles? What's holding you back? Oh, options, the next oh, what are the options? What else? What have you tried? I find that to be a good one to just get a sense of what have we tried so far. And maybe we've tried a lot of things and it may be that there's some pretty clear ideas we haven't tried next that might make sense. Would you like to brainstorm on this idea? Sometimes it would be helpful for you to be part of that brainstorming process but there are other times where you might get the feedback. Actually, I'd like to go and think about that myself and bring some ideas to you in our next conversation. So always offering to be there to support and help. But it may be that actually this is in the context of the conversation in which brainstorming should happen. And then ultimately, and next steps, what are the next steps? Depending on where you've come to in this conversation, sometimes the next steps can still be pretty big problems or steps to solve in and of itself. So even taking the next step further and saying what's the first small step or even a smaller step, trying to break it into small bite-size actions or tasks can make it seem a little bit easier. So ultimately, coaching comes down to questions. I literally have those questions printed out on a sheet of paper. I find it's super helpful for myself. And if there's nothing else that kind of you remember from this, I think ultimately just think open questions. So to the extent to which you can ask open questions, I think you'll be pretty surprised with how the conversation will go. If you're not sure where you're at in terms of asking questions in your next meeting, maybe just keep note of how many questions you ask in the next one. Try to ask another one or you can set a goal from yourself if I want to try to ask one question a minute. But kind of when thinking about what questions to ask, staying away from closed questions instead asking open questions, closed questions start with do, are, have, would. The open questions tend to be the questions about W, what, how, when, who, which, why. So hopefully this will be a helpful kind of tool if you find yourself in a situation where instead of being prescriptive or giving the answer, you really want to help coach someone to the answer and walk through their thinking with them. For second order thinking, it's going to really be a way to supercharge your thinking. I'm not sure what second order thinking is. It's essentially thinking past that next obvious consequence. So in this visualization here, we see the first order consequences which are if A happens, B happens, which usually people can think of B pretty easily. And then second order order are like that B and C, the kind of butterfly effect. People almost think of it like that. And often when we solve one problem, we're unintentionally creating another one. The reason that this is really useful as a manager is when you think of being a coach or delegating, you want to make sure that you're able to help do that second order thinking for someone on your team or for the strategic strategy that, or the strategic planning that you're putting together. Because if you're not thinking that way, it can just create some either down the road frustrating situations, or it also can just at times feel a little bit embarrassing. For example, there is a situation where some of my team had launched something and after the fact, someone came to us and asked how we thought about something. And I felt like I kind of let them down and I hadn't done my job to really help think of that second and third order effect. So this can make sure that you're not only setting your team up for success, but you're creating situations where people aren't going to feel that thrashing of after something happens, there's an unintended consequence. I like this quote from Ray Dalio, failing to consider the second and third order consequences is the cause of a lot of painfully bad decisions. Never see them the first available option, no matter how good it seems before you've asked questions and explored. So if you're wondering how to improve your second order thinking, ultimately comes down to asking questions. You're coaching, you can almost think of coaching yourself. Always asking, then what? I think that can be helpful to create templates where if you like draw those squares from the previous illustration where it's like the ABC, you're really trying to map out that butterfly effect. Or if you think of like a Venn diagram of circles with all the different layers in the ecosystem, asking yourself how important parts of the product, business or competitive landscape are likely to respond. So maybe you just have a piece of paper where you map out your team, other teams, customers, competitors, regulators, and you just force yourself to write those potential implications or consequences down. And then over time just referring back to it to see how good you were and calibrate your thinking. Often some of these answers won't have an impact, but it's still really important to consider them. And then fit influencing up and across. One of the biggest transitions from going from an ICD to a manager is that instead of solving with the resources you have, you're now solving by allocating resources and influencing others. So why is this important? As a manager, you need to influence across different functions. And influencing isn't just telling someone information or telling someone to do something. It's being convincing enough that you drive them to do something that they're excited about it. And as a manager, you're not just judged by the success of the things you directly work on. You're judged by the success of an area of responsibility or a pretty large scope. And so you as a single individual are not going to be able to work across all of that. You need to be able to influence both your team and other teams that all touch this either product or metric or surface that you're responsible for. I find that influence is one of those topics that you read a lot about it. It's kind of the most abstract and hand-leady. I don't claim to have necessarily any specific magic solution how to work on increasing your influence. It's something I'm doing personally as well. But I do think there's kind of three small steps that you can take that I found are useful. First, building trust. Second, answering why. And third, involving people early. So one, building trust. Listen and ask questions. You have to give trust before you can earn trust. Be dependable. If you say you're going to do something, follow through on it, meet your timelines or be very clear when you're not going to be able to hit those. But being able to have influence and build those relationships trust is such a critical component. Second, answer why. I think this is where you can demonstrate that empathy for those other teams build upon that listening that you've done when you've built trust. But if you are going to another team to try to get by in for a project that you're working on, you want to come prepared to that meeting already with the story, the pitch of why this matters to them and why you should care. Don't start with why it matters to you, why it's important for the reasons you think are important. Really put yourself in their shoes and tell them why they should care and really have the goal of getting them so excited that they want to get started immediately and they almost view this as their project versus your project because you just brought them this thing that is super important and you've done all the legwork for them. And then third, involving people and involving them early. As you are working on areas of larger and larger scope, there isn't just a single decision maker anymore. Real buy-in involves co-creation, involves listening, involves exposing your ideas to criticism, which can be really hard, acknowledging that criticism, iterating. But involving people early in that process and there may be different ways to do that depending on how large your organization is or the processes that you have. Sometimes that might be sharing a doc. I sometimes put together spreadsheets where I ask people to add ideas or questions to be easier to track it all. But just making sure you're involving people, I think the worst feeling is when you get further along in a project and someone feels like they were left out or weren't involved. It may have been that if they'd been involved early on, they didn't necessarily have any feedback and nothing would have changed. But the fact that they weren't looped in is really kind of breaks down that trust. So hopefully this was helpful today. If you have any follow-up questions, feedback, if you're going through this transition yourself and want to chat more or if you're considering it, feel free to reach out and look forward to hearing from some of you and thank you for your time today. Bye.