The Essentials of Teamwork for Product Leaders
Illustration by artinker.com for Kate Leto
Here’s a situation that may sound familiar:
I’m currently working with a newly formed leadership team that’s experiencing some ups and downs. When I speak with each person individually, they all have their own notions of what’s working and what’s not. And this includes the leader, who has their own ideas of the problems, but hasn’t actually checked in with the team to see if they’re in agreement. This is creating a sense of distrust and dysfunction among a group of people who really want to work together to create something great for their organisation.
In this type of situation, the leader needs to have and display the core emotional intelligence skill of teamwork. Dr. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ and one of the leading experts on the topic, writes:
“Teamwork is the ability to work with others toward a shared goal, participating actively, sharing responsibility and rewards, and contributing to the capability of the team. You empathise and create an atmosphere of respect, helpfulness, and cooperation. You can draw others into active commitment to the team’s effort. Leaders skilled at teamwork build spirit, positive relationships, and a pride of identity on the team. And it’s not just teams. This competency holds the key to collaboration of any kind.”
Why teamwork matters in product management
Product people—and particularly product leaders—rarely work alone. The vast majority of our work is discovered, debated, developed, and delivered by teams. And these are ideally cross-functional teams where members are coming from different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise to create something that create something that meets a customer need or desire.
To do this type of work, it’s crucial for each member of the team to feel safe, valued, and respected. In many ways, it’s up to the team’s leader to create the space and ways of working to make that happen—that’s where the teamwork and collaboration skills of emotional intelligence come into play as key skills for product leaders. Your role is to be a conductor, to turn a collection of solo players into a harmonious orchestra.
As the leader and team build momentum, trust, clarity, and alignment, they feed off of each other, becoming a dynamic system that grows together, succeeds together, and sometimes even fails together. In this way, the effectiveness of the team comes directly from the relationships built between member and leader.
And as I shared at the beginning of this article, when you don’t have teamwork, it leads to distrust and dysfunction, which creates tension on both an individual and team level. This can have a long-term impact on your ability to meet your organisation’s outcomes.
How to put teamwork into action
As a leader, it’s so important to create space and structure to help your team develop their own norms and identity. These can change depending on your team’s stage of development. Here are a few of my suggestions, starting with some foundational behaviours you as leader can display.
Team formation/early stages
Essential Leadership Behaviours
When your team is new or recently formed, the default action is often a team-building activity so that everyone can get to know each other on a more personal level and begin to bond.
Interestingly, according to David Clutterbuck in his book Coaching the Team at Work 2, “there is surprisingly little evidence that people in the team have to like each other, but they do need to respect, trust and be open with each other.” In many ways, we’re alluding to the importance of psychological safety on the team.
How can you as leader begin to set the tone for psychological safety? Clutterbuck points to three things:
Exhibiting vulnerability - Start with saying “I don’t know” to a question and asking for and acting on feedback. While these actions may not seem like heavy lifting for some leaders, when done with authenticity, they bring more humanity to the role of leader and team member. There’s a dynamic reminder that none of us—leader or team member—are perfect and know it all. Ultimately, the team members will become more comfortable in showing vulnerability, too.
Sharing failures and mistakes - Making mistakes is part of learning what works and what doesn’t; it’s an essential part of innovation. As a leader, you have the opportunity to shift thinking about failure and mistakes from a blame game to learning and innovation.
Creating safety in tension - A key outcome of psychological safety within a team is that people feel comfortable brining up ideas without fear of negative retribution. That doesn’t mean that the team is without conflict or disagreement, but that it is comfortable dealing with it when it happens. While the leader may instinctively want to step in to solve conflict, the real leadership challenge is to create a space where team members are responsible for their own actions. Leaders must learn to allow space for positive conflict in the form of healthy debate and allowing members to challenge each other in a respectful way, but they should also be willing to step in the moment the conflict becomes personal.
Teamwork Tactics
As the building blocks of respect, trust, and openness begin to form, there are some basic tactics that the team leader can work through with the team to help create some structure and alignment.
Start with a team charter. This process will help you answer key foundation questions around your team’s purpose, accountabilities, dependencies, strengths and weaknesses, and ways of working. For example, you can answer questions like “Why does this team exist?” “What is the team responsible for?” and “How do we share our work with each other?” “What will we be measured by?” Working on these areas together can help your team begin to come together, clarify what you’re really working towards, and discuss upfront what might hold you back.
When working with new teams, I often create a custom charter that meets the unique needs of the team, but a great place for inspiration is this Team Canvas.
Other leaders find it valuable in the early stages of team development to help team members get to know each other through group exercises that create a safe and collective way of getting to know each other. A few that I’ve used in the past are “User Manual of Me” (check out these examples from Brad Feld, Beck Colley, and Cassie Robinson for inspiration) or creating personal histories, a trust-building exercise from Patrick Lencioni’s Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
There’s no single right answer here—the key is to be intentional about establishing teamwork when you’re first forming a team to lay the foundations for future success.
Ongoing development
Once your team is formed, there are steps you can take to encourage teamwork and continuous team learning. In my book, Hiring Product Managers, I talk about the importance of team retrospectives (also often referred to as “retros”). While we often use retros as part of our product development practice, I also recommend leaders regularly run retros to focus on how your team is doing and uncover potential sources of tension before they get out of control. The retro, much like the team charter, can be a guided activity that creates a safe space for respect, trust, and openness that I talked about earlier.
There are countless formats you can use, but some of the most popular ones include “Stop/Start/Continue,” “Like/Learn/Lack/Longed For,” and the Sailboat Retro. You can encourage your team to share their observations within these frameworks and collectively decide if there are any specific actions to take based on what you’ve discussed.
While the tactics I’ve outlined here can help you create opportunities to develop your own teamwork skills, sometimes it helps to get an external perspective. In my next post, I’ll explore a few of the ways you can work with someone outside your organisation—team coaching, group coaching, and team facilitation—and how they might help you take teamwork to the next level.
I regularly work through teamwork and other aspects of emotional intelligence with my leadership coaching clients. Does this sound like a skill you’d like to improve? Get in touch to learn how we might work together!
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