Interview Question -- What is your Leadership Style?

Introduction

There are 3 main parts to my leadership style:

• deliberate relationship building
• setting goals that capture business value
• delegating early to help people grow

Let me give a concrete example of each.

Relationship Building

The first part of my management style is that I intentionally build relationships.

At the end of every year we send out holiday cards to all of our important stakeholders.I send cards on other occasions too.

I print out 150 copies of a team photo at a local Walgreens and then everyone on the team spends an hour signing the back of every picture. In addition, we write a one sentence personalized note to everyone: for example, Angelo the Office Admin got a note saying “Thanks for helping us get the chairs for our offsite in October!” In the grand scheme of things, we consider sending these cards to be a small gesture that deliberately grows relationships.

Goals with Business Value

The next part of my style is that I set goals that describe business value. A great project goal will describe how the project is adopted and usedSee Goal Setting

in a measurable and timebound waySee the Manager Tools MT Goals

.

For example, my team was working on a project to extend an automated load testing tool to support our service. We set a goal of “for Black Friday, zero human time is needed to do the load testing for our service” (rather than setting a goal of “the load testing tool can support our service”). Our goal clearly articulated when and why we were doing the project.

Delegating to Grow

The last part of my management style is that I delegate early to help my directs grow.

I had to present the work of a junior direct report to my org’s leadership team. Rather than presenting myself, I encouraged my direct to present because they wanted to learn more about product management. Unfortunately, I was unable to help them prepare for the presentation because I had a pre-planned vacation. Instead, I suggested that they do a practice run with a friend of the team, a Director help with framing the ideas to resonate with senior leaders. Ultimately, the presentation went well and the org actually adopted some ideas from my direct’s work in setting an OKR the following year.

Coda

My favorite part of this story is something I ended up learning about later. Without prompting or asking me while I was on vacation, my direct took a blank thank-you card off my desk and wrote a hand-written thank-you card to the Director. My direct did this because they knew that on our team we deliberately built relationships.