Framing Decisions Like Executives
Understanding how Executives make decisions is key to understanding how to standout as a high potential leader.
Coaching corner updates
I’m hosting an intimate event on April 3rd about how to find your grounding, destress, and navigate times of uncertainty and change (as a result of layoffs, new leadership, etc). Register here: https://lu.ma/ground
I recently had an opportunity to sit down with @ Vidya Dinamani and @ Heather Samarin on the Product Rebels podcast. I share my journey in product leadership and my thoughts on essential skillsets for product leaders as well as advice for breaking through barriers in the corporate world. Please give it a listen here and you can find all my talks and podcasts here.
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Focusing on your executive superpower can help you accelerate your career and increase your value for the company. Take a fun quiz to learn your superpower: https://www.yuezhao.coach/superpower-quiz.
Phew that was a lot. Let’s get down to this week’s (corgi) content. =)
(Teddy the Corgi; Brick sidewalk in Barcelona, Spain)
When we begin a process of transition or transformation, one of the first steps is to evolve how we think about problems and prioritize our actions. This is mindset.
One of the first things you notice when you speak with an executive vs a line manager about a problem is how they approach the problem. You might notice that their answers feel “bigger”, or to some people more “fuzzy”. You might notice they start talking about people and resources sooner – who do we need, who has the right talent, while a line manager stays more focused on what the right answer might be. This is a difference in mindset.
This isn’t by chance. An executive needs to operate differently to be successful in her role. She has more demands on her time, more ambiguous problems without clear solutions, and more people to lead. As an aspiring executive, it’s important to move in that direction in terms of your thinking. While you still need to be involved in the day-to-day, you need to develop and practice the loops in your head an executive would run through, which often leads to a different approach or solutions to problems.
When you adopt this mindset and think like an executive, even at non-executive levels, you’ll come up with different potential solutions and begin to make decisions or take actions that are more in line with how an executive would approach a problem. This helps you build trust and credibility faster with your leaders and get ahead in the competition for executive roles.
Put the Company First
An executive evaluates decisions in terms of impact on the overall company rather than impact on the team or product area. They do what is best for the company, not what is best for the team or themselves. This is counterintuitive for many who rose through the ranks by fighting for resources and making sure their team outperformed others. In middle management, the job more typically revolves around ensuring your team is moving ahead and doing well, with less consideration for other areas. However, at the executive level, it is critical to the success of the business to put the company first.
This affects how you prioritize projects, the breadth of work you consider, and the frequency with which you plan with other functions and teams. As a product director, I focused on working with my teams to make progress against a focused area and metric (e.g., increase new users to the website by 10 percent). As a product executive, I develop holistic strategies for launching new product lines: modeling with finance the impact on the P&L, with marketing on distribution and messaging, and with people ops on types of skill sets we need to hire for. As a director, I may prioritize projects that improve the sales of my product line but may hurt another team’s product revenue. As an executive, I prioritize projects that improve the company’s revenue overall.
When I first became a C-suite executive, the CEO would give me consistent feedback that I needed to build better relationships with the other executives and think about the company first. I was very busy trying to ramp up product development speed, get to know the team members, and ensure we were delivering impactful projects on time. So, I was not directly responding to his guidance. At one point, during a one-on-one, he emphasized the need again, and I asked, “But why? I don’t need them to build my team or launch the product. If I spend the time with them, my team will be worse off.”
But he said: “Yue, you’re an executive now. A manager is concerned with the success of their function or product. An executive is concerned with the success of the company. As an executive, you need to think about the company and not just about the product organization.”
This company-first mentality will make or break an executive team. It is detrimental to the business if an executive consistently puts their function first or is not proactively gathering feedback from others on how their teams work with each other. The decisions that an executive makes need to move the business forward together and ensure that every function is brought along for the journey. This is why, in some cases, a leader who has been successful by gathering the most resources for their area will fail to move into or succeed in executive leadership. An executive who “wins” by backstabbing, playing one side against another, or hoarding resources may make progress in their area in the short term but hurt the team and company in the long run.
I was in a situation where the marketing executive at the company was very experienced and vocal. He advocated for an awareness-building campaign that included TV commercials, national radio programs, paid marketing, and more. The company and product were not at a stage where this would have generated revenue or customer growth, yet this executive pounded the table and eventually got approval. What resulted was not only millions of dollars spent with no significant results but a slowdown in other critical priorities like launching new features and scaling operations. This single decision greatly contributed to the company running out of funding and shutting down.
In contrast, I worked with a chief operating officer at the same company. The company wasn’t profitable and needed to find ways to lower the cost of the service. So, the COO took it upon herself to analyze how the operations were run and found multiple ways to reduce costs: getting rid of a third shift where there were fewer customers, hiring a larger team in other English-speaking countries, and standardizing workflows. She ended up with a reduced budget and a smaller team. However, her decisions were overall better for the company and all the employees. She put the company’s needs first, above her function and team.
There Are No Fixed Constraints
At the executive level, there are no fixed constraints when it comes to finding an optimal solution to a challenge. In middle management, there are generally fixed constraints placed upon you by others: team budget, headcount, and scope of responsibility, for example. As an executive, while there are easier or harder aspects of a business to change, nothing is off-limits. You could change the business model or enter new markets. You could reorganize the teams and work with other executives to do the same. You could drive additional fundraising conversations. You could outsource or in-house certain talent. The changes vary in difficulty to get buy-in and execute well, but all are possibilities. A great executive doesn’t limit her thinking to the current organization or strategy. Instead, when the benefit of making a large strategy or organizational change outweighs the disruption, effort, and risks, she bravely leads the team in that new direction.
Minorities tend to struggle more with actively working outside constraints because the path to becoming a part of the “in-group” often means following the rules. If they stray too far from the “rules” of the in-group, then they risk being an outcast or an outsider. In addition, many cultures outside the United States also emphasize rule-following more than Americans. As an aspiring executive, you may not have as much leeway as an established executive. However, you often have more ability to change the status quo than you think.
To combat thinking too small, start with identifying what constraints you are assuming and list them out. If you find yourself or others saying, “Oh, we don’t do it this way” or “Oh, we’ve never done it that way,” then you’re up against a constraint. Look for constraints related to processes, feature sets, monetization models, and resources. Then, one way to avoid micro-optimizations due to constraints is to start with small changes to the constraints, rather than removing them entirely. Perhaps it’s reallocating the budget or switching people across teams. Alternatively, try using a “no fixed constraints” mentality when initially brainstorming solutions, then explicitly adding back constraints that are difficult to change. This is a more executive-like way of tackling a problem and will often lead you to higher-impact solutions.
I once worked with a growth director who was given a mandate to double the number of customers in the business in the next year. She came to me frustrated, because her best ideas got her to a 50 percent increase in users, not double. I asked her about international expansion to other English-speaking countries, which would more than double their potential addressable market. It was an idea she hadn’t considered because she had taken it as a constraint that they were only operating in the US. By thinking outside the current country, she more than doubled the number of users in seven months, vastly surpassing her original goal. Within the next few years, she built out several successful new markets and eventually became the company’s new VP of international.
In revisiting her assumptions around what she could do to reach her goals and removing the constraints she imposed on herself, she was able to find a way to help the company reach a new growth curve, rather than optimizing for incremental improvements. This is the type of thinking and impact that leads to executive promotions, and I encourage minorities to do this more often than they are comfortable with to counterbalance some of the more inherent tendencies to stay within your lane.
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When you shift how you think about a problem and how you tackle it, you level up in the types of strategies and solutions you come up with, your effectiveness in communicating the proposals, and whether people are willing to give you resources to realize your proposal. This directly impacts the amount of influence you have in an organization, and helps others perceive you as a leader.