 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to join this webinar. My name is Ronke Madjakadumi. I'm a Senior Product Manager at PayPal, and today I get to talk to you guys about serving leadership. So, as I said, I'm a senior PM at PayPal. As most of you know, PayPal is an American company that provides online payment system around the world where it's enabled, where you can transfer money electronically. This is in lieu of checks and money order. At PayPal, I help large enterprise merchants manage and grow their business. So, for most of my career, I've worked in the fintech. I've helped to build B2B and B2C platforms. And like I said, I'm happy to join you all today. Thank you for taking the time. I always like to start the presentation by telling you all about my PM superpower. Well, everyone, I thrive in finding opportunities beyond the side of others. What do I mean by that? It means that when I get a no and it looks like I can't launch my product or I can't build it, I take a step back and I try to figure out how else I can get my product to market. I highly recommend that if you don't have your PM superpower, please make sure you have one because this is because on those days when you were down on those days when it looks like you just cannot achieve your goal, your PM superpower would get you through it. So, this is mine. I usually not, I normally share my favorite books with this webinar. This time around, I wanted to share my favorite podcast as a product manager. And I've been doing this for several years. I have to tell you, you never stop learning. I never stop learning and I love to listen to other people's podcasts. So, these are my favorite right now. Some of them are product podcasts and some of them like the one with Josie, it's about taking some time to do some affirmations, especially with the pandemic. I really needed that one. So, these are my favorite podcasts. If you get a chance to listen to them, I highly recommend it. So, today we're talking about servant leadership, but I wanted to start with this. Great product leaders build people and products. What do I mean by that? I mean they build people because if you build people, then guess what? You're going to have, if you care about the people that you work with, your cross-functional teams, your scrum teams, your partners, they're going to help you build the best in class products because you genuinely care about them. So, leadership really matters, but you must build people and products. The other thing I wanted to share with you all is, I see leadership as an endeavor and service. I see that the way I see leadership, I see it as my team doesn't work for me, I work for them. So, to me, successful leaders, they work for their cross-functional teams, they empower them, they build them, they build them up. They care about their dreams, not only professionally but personally, and they help them to flourish and accomplish those dreams. And that to me is what, and that to me matters a lot because it leads to an everlasting footprint. And that by the way, everybody is really what makes me happy at the end of the day to see my team flourish and that they're doing well, not only professionally or personally. So, what is serving leadership? Let's talk about that. So, first, I think we should actually talk about what traditional leadership is. So, traditional leadership is the type of leadership where teams do their projects and we give them assistance and oversight, right? We give them the intention, the sense of purpose, right? But in traditional leadership, product leaders basically are demonstrating the organization's role in the marketplace, right? Whereas in serving leadership, you're working for your team. So, you are basically leading your team with empathy, gratitude and motivation and vulnerability, right? Because you really, you just work for them, you care about them, it's about them, it's about helping them accomplish their dreams professionally and I can say it personally. So, I love serving leadership, serving leadership. There's a bunch of leadership that I personally practice, there's participative leadership, transmission leadership, but I always start, I lead with serving leadership. So, today, I'll take a ways. We're going to talk about being empathetic, being attentive listener, being present and in the moment, motivating and of course, building up our communities and the importance of gratitude. So, let's start with being empathetic. So, I see it as creating a culture of care. So, what do I mean by that? I know, in my own spring team, my own partners, I know everybody's name. I take time to understand what drives them. What do they do for fun, for instance, right? Especially with the pandemic. Like, do they like to go to concerts, right? Do they like to go for walks? I care about the milestones in their lives. I know the names of their family members and children. My team knows I care about them. And studies have shown that if your team knows you care about them and their organization cares about them, they're going to turn around and care about you and what the goals and mission that you're trying to accomplish. The other thing is, because now I've proven my team knows I care about them, it also frees up innovation. You freeze them up to look for innovative ways to build products. So, I'm not just building for today, we're also building for the future. Because they're motivated, that also leads to increased employee engagement. They want to be there. They want to be a work. They want to help bring the product vision to fruition. This is why empathetic leadership really matters. Being able to put, I'm able to put myself in my partner's shoes and my scrumptious shoes and feel what they're feeling so that I can help them any way that I can. And because I care about them, they're innovated and therefore they want to be a work in increased employee engagement. Very important empathetic leadership. The other thing is being an attentive listener. Whenever my team comes to me, I let them express their viewpoints. I let them vent whenever they need to. I don't see it as my role to step in and try to solve the problem for them. I just let them vent. And then what I do after they vent or tell me what the problem is, I then say, okay, how do we solve this? How do we work together to fix this? And then we share ideas. But I listen first. And when I say listen, I'm present. I'm writing notes. I'm putting together a list of things that they've told me so that we can kind of work through it together. What this does is it develops a long-term connection because then my team knows, okay, when I go talk to Ronke, she's going to listen to me. She's going to help me come up with ideas to solve this problem. And they trust me, right? So it develops a long-term connection because they realize I'm going to be there listening. And what that does is it also instigates participation in teamwork. So because I listen to their point of view, because I listen to their concerns, not only have I developed a trusting relationship with them, but also it instigates participation in teamwork. As in, they want to be there. They want to do workshops. They want to be on the team. They're engaged. And because they know I'm going to help them solve whatever problems they're facing, I'm going to remove obstacles from their path. Very important to be an attentive listener. And the other reason why I practice this a lot is because with the impact of the pandemic, we have so many distractions and it's easy to just get lost in those distractions. So I take the time to just be there and just listen, which then brings me to being present. So the science of human relationship dictates, right, that we all want to be seen. We all want to be heard and we all want to be validated, right? So how do we do that? Well, by being present, I need to be present for my team. I need to have empathy. I need to be an attentive listener. When they're talking to me, I need to be focused on what they are discussing with me, not checking my phone, not muting them and then asking them the same thing over and over again that they should repeat themselves. And then that also means that when we have discussions and meetings, I'm fully present. I'm engaged. I'm writing notes as to what we just discussed and how we can resolve any concerns that came up in the meeting. What this also does is because I'm present, it's first inventive thinking, right? They are thinking about how can we be innovative? How can we, you know, again, because I'm present, right? We're sharing ideas. It's personal innovation and ingenuity as well. Very important. So being empathetic, attentive listener and being present all are tied together. And to me, this is all part of that servant leadership of being present and being of service to my team. Then the other thing I wanted to talk about is motivation. I like to motivate my team. Again, with the impact of a pandemic, it's very easy to lose your motivation because we're spending so much time looking at unzoned calls. We're burnt out. So now I'm trying to look for ways to motivate my team. And the ways that I've been able to do that, again, part of that servant leadership is autonomy. I give them a lot of autonomy. What I mean by that is whenever we have a customer problem to solve, I don't hold them back from doing amazing research. I'm going to go figure out how are you going to solve the problem not just for today or for tomorrow? And I let them go and dream big on how to solve that problem and bring it back and share with the rest of the team. So that autonomy is always there. That sense of purpose is also something that I use to motivate my team. Why are we building this? Why does this matter? I always bring the customer problems into the room with them. I bring them into the room with the customer sometimes. I still do days in our lives. I do them virtually where we meet with customers so that they can kind of understand the customer problems and how we can help solve it. But that sense of purpose, I remind them of the core value of our organizations and how everything we're doing ties to that core value of our organization so that they can have. So once again, they have that autonomy, that freedom to go dream big and do research. How are we going to solve problems? And of course, that sense of purpose. And then lastly, as a product manager, one of the things I always say is this, I have to overcommunicate and it's important. Again, because of the impact of the pandemic, we're all distracted. So therefore, I must overcommunicate our mission and vision. I must overcommunicate our core values. It's important that I help tell the story over and over again, not just to my scrum team, but my cross-functional partners so that they understand why we're building this. I always say product managers are like evangelists. You have to preach over and over and over again. What is your story? What are you trying to do? What is, what problems does it solve? And tie that customer value and that business value back to the core value of the organization. The other thing I'd like to mention, the other takeaway is building up our communities. Mentorship. Part of serving leadership, of course, being of service to everybody, and I think as I mentioned to you guys, I see leadership as an endeavor in service. So for mentorship, for instance, I volunteer for programs where a young, aspiring product managers are looking for mentors. I volunteer for those so that I can help shift the next generation of product leaders. So I recommend that, again, being of service, not outside my organization. I volunteer opportunities. If there are programs that are helping marginalized communities to get into product management, I volunteer for those as well. There's an inclusive program at the University of Washington. I volunteer for those. Again, outside my organization, but giving back because other people helped me. You're not for me to be where I am today. There are people, there were product leaders in my life who paved the way for me. The other one is community ethos. So the community ethos, what I mean by that is, I have a relationship with people in our community and we adopt some elementary schools. So during the holidays, for instance, we'll take all the kids' names, bring it back to our organizations and all the kids will have different things that they want for Christmas and people in my organization will take different names from the Christmas tree and we'll go behind them twice and we'll deliver them to the kids around the holidays. So we adopt schools. I cannot tell you how important these programs are because we're helping to shape this kid's lives and this is super important. Again, this is part of that certain leadership. And then I want to end with gratitude. I cannot explain how important this is in certain leadership. So for me, gratitude means I'm going to send a thank you note to team members for going above and beyond. It means in that thank you note, I'm going to hand write it and I'm going to tell them how much I appreciate their help. Before COVID, I used to do this. In the middle of the pandemic, I don't see everybody. So what I do is I'm sending an email in lieu of a handwritten note. I still celebrate the big and small milestones. Before COVID, I would bring donuts in and cupcakes. Now I can't do that, but I acknowledge those big and small milestones whether through Slack, with GIFs, or whether through email. And then rewards and recognition. I always recognize and I send notes to the managers of my colleagues and I talk about what they did and how it ties to the vision and vision of our organization and the values that they embody and how they've gone the extra mile to help bring our product vision to life. So rewards and recognition is super important. And then of course, my customers. I'm customer obsessed. I have my, for me, it's a customer first approach in everything. So therefore, when our customers, when we do a day in the life, virtually, well, when I just meet them to kind of talk to them, to look at our wireframes or whatever or even to pilot a program with us, I always thank my customers by sending them thank you notes so that they know that I value their time and I value them. So, server leadership is one of my favorite leadership styles as I mentioned. Not only do I practice server leadership, transformational leadership, participative leadership. So our takeaway from today from server leadership is in order to practice it, you must be empathetic. You need to be an attentive listener to your team. You need to be present and you must be able to motivate your team and most importantly, extend that server leadership outside your organization and build up your communities and of course, extend gratitude. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for watching this webinar and I just want to leave you guys with one final note. Please have your PM superpower. If you don't have one, create one because you need it because that's how we're going to build products not just for today or for the future. PM superpower is what helps us to do that. And lastly, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for taking the time to attend this webinar. Thank you product school and thank you so much. This is how you can reach me.