Kate Leto
Improving the EQ of Your Product Org
In this episode of Brave UX, Kate Leto calls on us to improve the EQ of our product orgs, so that we can improve their performance, our team's happiness, and our own self-awareness.
Highlights include:
- Why do we focus overly on technical product management skills?
- How do you make the business case for investing in Product EQ?
- What mistakes do we often make when interviewing product people?
- How can people come to terms with imposter syndrome?
- How can product leaders avoid their own EQ blindspots?
Who is Kate Leto?
Kate is the Principal and Founder of Kate Leto Consulting, the vehicle through which she shares her 25 years of expertise in product management, organisational design, culture transformation and personal development with the world.
Before founding her consulting practice, Kate was the Head of Product at Moo.com in London, where she built and led the product management and UX teams responsible for the business’ e-Commerce platform, and premium physical product range.
A regular speaker, blogger, and the author of a book worth its weight in gold, “Hiring for Product EQ: Using Product EQ to go beyond culture and skills”, Kate has a huge heart (and mind) for increasing the effectiveness of product organisations.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluator UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals.
- My guest today is Kate Leto. Kate is the Principal and Founder of Kate Leto Consulting the vehicle through which she shares her 25 years of expertise in product management, organizational design, culture transformation, and personal development with the world. Her clients have included JP Morgan, the Financial Times, Comic Relief and Yves Saint Laurent, among many more. Before founding her consulting practice, Kate was the Head of Product at Moo.com in London, where she built and led the product management and UX teams responsible for the businesses' e-commerce platform and premium physical product range.
- Kate also invested several years at Yahoo in Silicon Valley where she was first a Marketing Manager and then the Product Lead of Social Search for the UK and the EU markets. A regular speaker, blogger, and author of a book worth its weight in gold, Hiring for Product EQ: Using Product EQ to Go Beyond Culture and Skills. Kate has a huge heart and mind for increasing the effectiveness of product organizations by giving product people the framing and tools they can use to improve the softer aspects of their practice. And now beaming live from France to me, right here in Auckland New Zealand. I have the pleasure of welcoming Kate to this Brave UX conversation. Kate, welcome to the show.
- Kate Leto:
- Thank you so much and thank you for such a lovely introduction. I'm very happy to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, it is wonderful to have you here, Kate. And I have to say, you don't sound very much like a European as far as I can tell. You're an American [laugh], possibly a Californian.
- Kate Leto:
- Actually, no, I'm originally from Iowa, but I went to S Yeah, I know you would've never got that one. I'm sure. I went to university in Northern California and worked there for a while before I moved to London with Yahoo a long, long time ago. And then just recently made a move from the UK to France.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And Kate, I wanted to ask you about that. So, because I understand that you recently were a, you're a freshly minted citizen of the uk and I wondered if you cleared this with the Queen, this move to France?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, well she's been a bit busy lately. [laugh] family drummers, she's been feeling great. So she kinda let, yeah, exactly. A lot's going on. So I don't know if she's noticed yet, but hopefully she's going to let that one go.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So does this mean that you are no longer having to force yourself to drink cups of tea?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah. Oh, that's a very good question because my partner who's Welsh drinks a lot of tea, a lot of Yorkshire tea in the house. And it's something I've always, I've tried to really tried to lie. I just can't get
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Into did they put it on the citizen test? Was it on the test?
- Kate Leto:
- They should have, you know, would've thought, because every one thing I've learned living in the uk, I've lived in the UK for 15, 16 years before moving to France, and everybody has their specific way of drinking their tea, of course. So it would've been quite funny to actually have on the citizenship something very practical. How does your partner take his tea and could you make it for us that way now instead of some of the questions that I have to answer?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it sounds much more fun, much more practical and probably would lead to a better result, right? Yeah, absolutely. Kate, I heard you say in the past when I was listening to something that you'd recorded that you started consulting after Moo mainly as a way to pay the bills, but that it's developed naturally into something of its own volition. Are you happier consulting as a free agent than more happy than when you were employed?
- Kate Leto:
- I mean, personally, it works for me very well. I've been an independent consultant for almost 11 years now, so it's something that I don't think I could ever go back to a full-time employment situation.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That was my next question.
- Kate Leto:
- And yeah, I don't think I could, I tried it once and it just didn't work. So no, I think I, I'm pretty much done for and a consultant for life. But yeah, I started just because I left MO in 20, 20 11 and was going to start my own startup because that's what everybody was doing in London at the time, and I needed something to help me pay the bills while I figured out what it was and how I was going to build it and world domination and all of that. And so yeah, I started doing some consult consulting for some VCs whose organization had kind of portfolio companies that needed to help to understand what is product and how do you build a product and how do you hire for product and how do you even think in the way a product person and bring that into the core D N A and startup from the very beginning. And I just found I really liked it and I liked the diversity and I liked all the different products I was working with and all the different kinds of people and it paid the bills, and so I just kept going from there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And your big focus is currently at least on helping product leaders to develop the EQ of their product organizations. And in my research I discovered that you have discovered, or you're at least suggesting that often we are too focused on our techniques, our tools, our frameworks, and we are not focused enough on our practicing of the human skills, our emotional awareness, our self-control, our empathy and things like that. Yeah. What was it that made you realize that? Where w was it a certain moment? Were you somewhere where there was there a big aha moment? Tell us a bit about that there.
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, it was a bit of a slow burn and then the aha moment kind of happened. So after doing about, gosh, maybe five or six years of consulting, I had gone from startups to working for big organizations that wanted to do digital transformations and product transformations and all of these transformations to actually learn how startups were building products because that was the thing at the time. And I kind of got to a point where I was really tired of talking about our product management traditional techniques and tools like roadmaps. And at the time, MVPs were very big and lean and now OKRs, it's just the same type of questions, the same type of frameworks all the time. And I noticed that a couple minutes into a conversation with a client, well, it might start out with something that's really product focused, one of these great frameworks, A few minutes in it got very personal.
- There were things like, why doesn't my team like me? Why doesn't my manager like me? How can I get a promotion? It all turned to a much more kind of personal level and I didn't feel like I was really equipped for a lot of those conversations. So this was back in 2016, so I went and took them a coaching program in London and that kind of opened my eyes to a whole different skillset around coaching, be it personal coaching or career coaching or business coaching, whatever it might be. And I really, really enjoyed it. I remember coming out of the course, I was sitting in the front room of my flat in London at the time and I was looking at lots of blogs and lots of content to see all the stuff that I'd missed over the last couple months when I was taking this coaching course, all the stuff that was out there in the product world.
- And I realized nobody was talking about the human skill side of things. Nobody was talking about EQ and how important that really is to anyone. But in product management, I think there's a special place for it because we do work with so many different types of personalities and we do have such a broad range of responsibilities and accountabilities. Anyway, so I remember sitting on the floor in my front room and started thinking about this idea of product management and emotional intelligence and came up with this term called product EQ and started writing about that and blogging about that and talking about it. And it just kind of went from there. And I have to say at first I was really nervous about it because I wasn't sure how people were going to respond to somebody talking about self-awareness in your product management practice. So I tried to back it up with a lot of statistics and figures as to research shows that people and organizations with higher levels of self-awareness are have higher profits and higher retention rates and all of this great stuff. But now I'd say over the last couple years, it's something that has become more of an accepted topic and really happy for that. But that's where it came from that aha moment sitting in my front room.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I love it. Why is it that you suspect We do focus overly on the technical aspects, the harder aspects, and we tend to be a bit coy or focus less on those softer skills that are so critical for us actually achieving impact and actually getting our job done in a way that we can be proud of?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's a lot of different reasons. I think some of it is the brain, the way the brain functions. It's kind of easier for us to pick up these more technical product management skills. It's something we can learn and it's something we can read about and it's something we can master and it feels good because we've figured it out and we've put it to use. So we keep learning and growing that kind of technical skills muscle. I think it's also just within our product world, these are core things that are part of our vocabulary and product management. We all think everybody's got a roadmap. Everybody's got a horror story about a roadmap. Everybody's got a great story about a red map. Everybody's got stories about MVPs and now design sprints and discovery phases and all these things. It's essential.
- It is really what we do in product management. So I think there's not surprising that we tend to focus a lot on it. And I think also on the other side, on the human skill side, emotional intelligence side, we haven't really always had the vocabulary to talk about that comfortably at work. And it hasn't really always been part of how we're incentivized even we have career ladders and career frameworks and all of that. And I would say the large parts parts of our legacy as product people, those have been made up of at this level you need to be able to master these skills. And the vast majority of those skills are the technical skills. There's not until lately I'd say in a couple of companies that I'm working with are more focused on how do we bring the human skill side into that as well. How do we say it's really important to have self-awareness at any level and here's how we think it applies to the different levels of a product organization. So I think that's just kind of changed with the times in the last two years
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I think it's a really positive change. And just thinking about the different skills that are required at different levels of products, there will be two types of product people listening to this mainly there'll be our product managers and we'll also have some of the product leaders that are tuning in. What EQ skills are most important for product managers to develop. And does the profile of the type of skill or skills that you need change as you take on more responsibility and you become a manager of product managers, a product leader?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, I think that's a a good question. And whether or not the skills change or whether or not, I think sometimes the skills change depending on your team as an individual, the team you're working in and the organization overall. Because one of the examples I often use is conflict resolution or conflict management. Some teams you're going to need that more than others. Some organizations you're going to need that skill more than others. So I think it kind of varies depending on the organization you're working with. But I think it, it's also the emotional intelligence and the human skills are something that you do kind of grow. I'd say those first few years in product management, we are very focused on the technical skills and it's kinda learning your craft, which is cool. But then the thing that really makes the difference as you go up the ladder, I'd say more are these human skills more is, it's more of the emotional intelligence. It's kind of like that great saying, what got you here isn't going to get you there. So what got you to maybe a senior product manager and mastering these technical skills and getting really good at them is probably not the same skillset that's going to get you from a senior manager to a CPO or something like that. So I don't know if they're specific per level, but it's just more of the evolution of them as you continue to mature as a product person and a person, what side of that as well
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Overall? Yeah, I get the sense that it's a highly situational and contextual skill and capability development that has to go on. And you mentioned coaching earlier, and I would love to come to coaching with you. I actually have a couple of interesting side conversations that I've had with previous guests around coaching and its importance in developing those skills that we don't currently have. But I wanted to come back to something you touched on earlier, which was the somewhat fluffy nature of eq, and I'm being intentionally provocative here, the business culture that we work in. I mean, look, I work in UX and design, so if there's anything that's ever been accused of being fluffy, it's been UX and design. So when we bring this lens of EQ to product, I'm assuming that it's not the first time that someone said something like that to you. How do you go about developing the business case? And you mentioned statistics earlier, but how do you actually have that conversation with the organization that, hey, we would really love to bring Kate in, or we'd really like to take and apply some of Kate's teachings into our product practice and that's going to require us to make an investment of time potentially of money too. How do you have that conversation with the more hard-nosed business people amongst us?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, it is a challenge, but I think it, it's something that, it's really kind of one of the main reasons that I wrote the book itself. So I wrote a book, the title is it's hiring product managers using Product EQ to go Beyond Culture and Skills. And one of the main reasons I did that was to really kind of operationalize product EQ or emotional intelligence and product management because I wanted to make a case for where it is applicable and kind of a really important primary thing product people are doing now, which is a lot of hiring. Yes, we do a lot of hiring
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If you can find the people.
- Kate Leto:
- It used to be very centralized. Yeah, exactly. It used to be very centralized in hr and now it's really, I think decentralized and kind of democratized in a way amongst the teams. So one of the main reasons that I wrote the book was to actually say, here is a way that emotional intelligence can really make a big impact on your organization and can help people realize, grow personally and help the team grow as well. And the organization has a massive impact on the organization too. So it's something that it's not easy for everyone to understand why investing time in coaching or focusing on things like empathy or conflict resolution or self-awareness or even collaboration is an important things for teams. But I think my clients, the people that I work with get it. And so I don't have to do lots of selling anymore, to be honest around why it's important. Not everybody's going to get it, and that's okay. That just means they're not my client. And that's completely cool because they'll get it in a couple years. Something tells me well, they
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Probably have to, it certainly seems like the tide is changing, doesn't it? And just for people that are listening. Yeah. I just wondered if you could recall some of those ROI factors related to new hires and the costs of getting it wrong. And if not, that's no trouble. I've actually got some of those stats here.
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, I remember one specifically is when things don't work out, the cost of turnover is huge. So when somebody leaves a job, you've got cost to, sometimes there's some kind of a severance package involved or gardening leave or something kind of like that to cover. Then there's the cost of hiring somebody new which recruiting or maybe you're working with an executive recruiting firm or something like that. And all the interviewing times, all of this stuff involved. And if I remember correctly, the statistics that statistics that I have in the book is something like it could cost 120 to, what was that, 200% of a person's salary?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hundred percent.
- Kate Leto:
- I might
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have that higher. I mean you're a hundred percent right? Yeah.
- Kate Leto:
- Did I have
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That right? Yeah, yeah. Sorry. This wasn't meant
- Kate Leto:
- To be a chance. Hundred percent [laugh], 200% of a person's salary to cover that turnover cost. Also, one of the things that I found really interesting, a statistic that said the statistic that from a survey after people left a job, only 11% of them said they lefted because they lacked a technical skill. So that leaves 89% of respondents saying the reason they left had something had nothing to do with the technical skill. So my assumption is that it had a lot to do with the human skill. Maybe it was getting feedback from a boss, maybe it was trying to form a relationship with a stakeholder who knows what it was. But there is a big space to explore outside of this technical skill as a reason people are leaving also. And just that it takes a long time, once somebody new does come on board it takes a long time to get people up to speed and to be working at a good level of efficiency in a new job. I think it's about the research I quote, I think is about 13 months. Wow,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's three outta three K them. That's pretty good. Is
- Kate Leto:
- It really?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, during my
- Kate Leto:
- Talks. So I think I still, so I get to see talk about them quite frequently. So it takes a long time. It costs a lot to get new people in the door. It takes them a long time to get up to speed and the reason they're leaving most likely has nothing to do with the technical skills that we focus on so much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it's really, really important to get, those
- Kate Leto:
- Are my top three.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's so important to get this right. Don't worry, I don't have any more quizzes for you in this, excuse me, in interview, I understand you have a bit of a story though as a freshly minted head of product at Moo. How did you go about approaching your first hire?
- Kate Leto:
- My first hire at Moo could, I'm still friends with them on Facebook, so I guess that means we're still friends.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- He
- Kate Leto:
- Was a great guy. How did I approach it? I can't remember to be honest with you. It
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Was That's alright. That's alright. I'll Jo, your decade ago, I'll jog your memory. I believe that you, yeah, spent some time looking at some of the leaders, and I'm using commerce here. I suppose they are still technically the leaders, but big tech companies like Amazon and Google and cobbling together a job, right? A job description of all these things that you could wish someone would have in this role. And you've said in the past and yeah, I'm just going to quote you now. We've created roles that are impossible for people to fill. What we're actually looking for is a unicorn. How has this come to be? Yes. And how does this negatively affect the way in which we approach that hiring conversation?
- Kate Leto:
- And I'm going to quote another stat, which is in the book as well. And that's this other another survey that was done of hiring managers and asking them how important a job description is. And about 80% of them said yes, a job description's really important, but about 50% of them also admitted to cutting and pasting together job descriptions. So I know I wasn't alone in what I did [laugh] that day at Moo and probably many days after that when I was hiring other people. But yeah, and think the reason is we do, we go online, we wanna see what else everybody is saying, number one, because we think it'll save us time and we can get a job, just tick something off our list of things to do and get it out there and then start meeting people and then we'll just take it from there and figure it out.
- So I think that's one of the reasons that we do it. And two, I think we're uncomfortable with, we don't really know what needs to go in the job description. We haven't really taken the time to figure it out. So when we look around at other things and say like, oh yeah, we, that's right, that totally makes sense. And that one over there, that makes sense as well. So I'll just kind of put it together and put it on our letterhead and then we're all good. So I think it does happen a lot. And when I talk about it with other people, everybody, not everyone I talk to, but people get a little blush and I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, I do. We're all guilty of doing this
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Because we have no time. We're trying to save time,
- Kate Leto:
- We we're trying to save time. I think we're, yeah, it's trying to save time and we don't really know what we're hiring for. So we see other things we're like, yeah, I need that and I need that. And it's a grocery list almost. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. I believe you've got something that you've created to help product leaders to actually figure out who they're looking for or what they're looking for. It's called the roll canvas.
- Kate Leto:
- Yes. I created the roll canvas and it's really simple. So instead of sitting down at your laptop and cutting and pasting together a job description, what I've started doing with clients is this canvas where it has four really simple questions. And the first one is, what's the purpose of the role? So that's not just the title. It goes beyond that. What is the actual reason for this role? Roles being and then what are the accountabilities for the role or the outcomes they'll be working towards? And then the human skills, what human skills and what technical skills are essential to actually for this role to achieve the outcomes and may and its purpose. So it's four blocks of space on [laugh], a canvas that you can get from my website and use with your teams. And it's any canvas that we use in our world today. It's a conversation starter.
- And once the team starts using this to talk through these questions, you find that would've been a lot of confusion over what really was going into the role unless they sat down and had this exercise and went through the practice itself. So it saves a lot of time and that it saves a lot of confusion down the line. It saves a lot of time to do it this way. And that instead of just cutting and pasting and putting together a job description and putting it out there and then you meet people, you have people coming in for interviews and realize, oh no, that's not what I want at all. So it saves you time and it saves the candidate time as well because the idea is to really think about it before you create a job description, some of these key facts or key spaces to discuss with your team and your stakeholders and your managers and everyone else. And by sitting and using and doing these four questions, it seems to kind of get the communication going and the conversation going.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I've noticed that these frameworks, these canvases tools which we're also familiar with on the technical side of product, you have brought forward into the way in which you're trying to help product leaders shape the EQ on human skills within their practice. And I was curious about this because you seem to be, and you haven't stated this, but it's sort of obvious in your work that you see value in people structuring their thinking and actually getting it down on paper even if it's just to shape or start a conversation, has this way of structuring, thinking of starting conversations through artifacts, has this been something that you have always done or is this something that you have developed in response to the need that you've seen to better develop the EQ side of the product practice?
- Kate Leto:
- I think it's something that, it's a coaching technique actually, to actually get things down on paper and preferably it's pen and paper or pencil and paper. But given the virtual world we live in now, it can also be done virtually. And that's why I have the canvas as it is. But it's just taking a moment to write something down. Your brain works in a different way and thinks in a slightly different way. It's a bit more reflective experience that comes out of that. So that's why I love creating opportunities for people to actually write things down. And I think that the structured nature of it just helps us focus in on often if we think about a role and not using cutting and pacing and all of that and creating it ourselves or creating it with our team, it seems overwhelming. It's one of those things where it's like, God, I don't even know where to start. So with the structure, it's just like, let's just go step by step by step by step and it breaks down something that may seem really overwhelming to some people into four boxes on a page. And that can seem a bit more digestible I think. So that's the other reason for it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it strikes me that just the simple act going through those four boxes and working that out has actually taking quite a lot of risk of wasted time and energy or making the wrong hire for a start out of the process of finding product people. It's almost like you are mapping out the vision of what you want that role to be so that when you are sitting in the interview chair, you have a better understanding of whether or not the person that's opposite you is going to align with the canvas that you've agreed on is what you're after.
- Kate Leto:
- Right, exactly. It's a way to start to, you know, create the conversation with your team and it's much easier then to move on to let's take the bare bones of this and put it into a job description and then move on to actual interviewing and the questions that you're going to ask in interviews and things like that. It's the foundation really of that process and that's why I focused on it so much in my blogs and book and all of that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Stuff. Well it's come to interviewing cuz interviewing is certainly a bit of an art when you're trying to find someone for a job. There's a lot of risk, there's a lot of money at stake, there's a lot of hurt feelings potentially if things don't go well. Yeah, it's generally it's fraught with a few gotchas. You really do also have to create space for a meaningful conversation with people. What are some of the common mistakes that people and products are currently making when they approach that conversation with candidates?
- Kate Leto:
- Well I think one of them is again, that we we're just so focused on the technical side of the job. So we ask a lot about specific skills or specific tools that you use to if be it building out OKRs or creating your MVP or the way your team is working or we definitely tend to focus more on the technical side. I think again, it's because we don't know exactly how to bring the human skill side or the EQ side into the conversation because it, it's easier to say to have some good scenario questions for somebody and just ask them about their last project, what was the project, how did it go, what were the metrics? How did you smash your metrics? And just go and tell a story around that. So I think that's just an easier and safer conversation to have. And I think also though in product we tend to ask those brain teaser questions quite a lot and I have a couple in my book and what has what's going to create more revenue or ad revenue funeral home or a flower shop or there's just all these random questions that we ask.
- And I remember doing this as well quite a bit when I was at Moo and beyond just to try to, I think going into an interview and asking people these questions made me feel really smart and cool and in charge and I kind of see them squirm and try to figure it out and it was like a power trip almost. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm so glad you said that because that's exactly what it is, isn't it? Most often it is a power trip. What are you really having this interview for? Yeah,
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, exactly. And I'd say a lot of times the person asking the question has no idea either. So I don't know, I don't know. Some organizations definitely use them and find it a worthwhile part of their interview, which is great. But I'd say a lot of time we product people are asking them just to feel cool and feel kind of smart and I'm not quite sure it's something that really helps us figure out if that person is somebody who is going to be a great person to join our team.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So what kind of questions
- Kate Leto:
- Those are some of the mistakes,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What kind of questions or interview style does lend itself to understanding the whole person, both their technical skills but also the human skills that we've identified on our role canvas? What technical way can we really understand who they are and whether or not they're going to be a good fit for us?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, I talk a lot about and advocate behavior-based interview questions and they're really simple questions. They're not meant to trick you or throw you off or anything like that, but yet they're found to be highly, highly valid in terms of finding out about people and finding out about how maybe somebody has behaved in the past in a work situation and how that may impact their behavior in the future. I'll unpack all that cuz there's a lot in there. So questions could be really simple for conflict resolution. If you do have a team that has a lot of conflict recently, maybe you want to bring in somebody who has good skills deal dealing with conflict. So you could ask a really simple question, how did you react when somebody disagreed with something that you said? What did you say? How did you respond? Something really simple that what that will tell you is how they did behave in a very common situation.
- I've had five people probably disagree with me today already, so it happens all the time. So it's not like a niche occurrence and it will give you kind of an idea how they've maybe behaved in the past, but also it doesn't determine, we need to remember the response and how somebody might have behaved in the past, even earlier this morning, doesn't mean they're going to behave the exact same way going forward. However it gives that person kind of an that candidate an opportunity to come back and say what this morning when somebody disagreed with me, I called him, I said he was just not a great guy and I don't wanna work with him anymore and I stormed out of the room, but that's not how I wanna handle it going forward. I've learned that I'd rather do it x, y and zenway and have a conversation with them afterwards.
- So behavior-based interview questions basically give the candidate an opportunity to tell the story and they give the interviewer the opportunity to find out, to probe and nudge and really make something as intangible, as conflict resolution tangible by finding out do they engage with that conversation or with conflict or not. If so, how do they engage and would they behave the same way they did the last time that conflict was something that they had to deal with. So it's a different kinda question to give an interviewee, the respondent a chance to share an experience and also say, but I wouldn't do it that way now I would like to do it this way. And to explain the behavior they'd like to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have. What level of fidelity are you aiming to achieve with that question? How do you know whether or not what you've receiving is a good answer? And I don't mean a good as in ticks the box as in what's in the role canvas, but yeah, how do you know when you've actually gotten under the skin and understood that person's behavior?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, I think it's something, it's quite similar to when you're doing a customer interview and you kind of probe and nudge until you get to a point where either I'm not going to get any further with this question, I'm not going to find out any more about it. Or okay, I've gotten to my insight, I've gotten to the response that I need to know which way to go next. So I think it's quite similar skillset in that you're going to follow up and you're going to continue to ask probing questions or why or for more detail. But it is really to keep going until you can make that thing that does seem untangible, how do I make conflict resolution tangible? But you can just by kind of it and the onus really is on the person asking the question to continue to go through the narrative, find the patterns until you're at the point where you're like, yes, let's continue. Or no, this question isn't going to work with this person and maybe we're going to have to find something else. Or maybe this isn't the right person for this role.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So there's quite a lot actually going on there for the person interviewing. We often think about interviews as the, the hot seat as the interviewee, but it's almost like the hot seat in this style of interviewing is shared equally between the two. And I'm sure that most of us listening I haven't myself been in an interview situation where the person doing the interviewing was grilling, was basically grilling me a sausage on a barbecue, but badly they really were having that power trip. What level of EQ or style of EQ does the interviewer need to bring to that conversation to create a space where the interviewee feels safe enough to talk about some things that may not always be a hundred percent flattering?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, that's a great question. I think the interviewer, the onus is a lot on that interviewer to, as we say in coaching, to hold the space to create a safe space for a conversation that goes beyond what are the metrics that you hit last quarter. So a lot of it is active listening, which of course you've gotta, it's your body language and virtually even this is hugely important. It's eye contact, right? It's acknowledgement, it's not interrupting, it's having kind of gentle nudges through the conversation but not stopping the story before the person's gotten to where they need to or completed it. It's a lot of empathy. And by that I don't mean exactly putting yourself in the interviewee's shoes because I don't know if that's really possible for one person to actually put themselves in another person's shoes. But it's that try to form an understanding of where they're coming from and the situation that they were in or the situation they're they're discussion discussing or describing.
- I think interviewers need a lot of humility and I don't think we bring that to our interviews a lot because I think we again are trying to come across as I'm the law offering you a job and you know, have to impress me. And lately that's probably changed a bit of course, but I think it is kind of a presence, you know, need to have a warm and welcoming and aware and checked in presence to kind of create an environment where somebody, especially somebody virtually you've never met face-to-face that you may be offering a job to and working together very closely
- Brendan Jarvis:
- With. And you spoke about the shift to remote recently. I mean we don't really need to labor the point regarding covid. We have all seen the horrendous impact that has had on many, many people around the world and it's also really changed the way in which us very privileged people in technology work. You mentioned the eye contact that you would otherwise have in a physical setting. It's not really possible in the same way remotely. Can you get an accurate sense you can in person of the candidate when you are interviewing them remotely? Well
- Kate Leto:
- I think you can get a pretty good good kind of likeliness of that. I think you can kind of get there. I think we're at a place where it's something that we have to accept that we may not meet somebody. And the number of hires, I mean the number of clients that I have that I've never met, just kind of shocking. But there is a way to bridge this gap even virtually. And I think we can still give that impression body language wise, even though we're not in the same room. One of my biggest bug bears is clients who would just sit there on their computer the whole time, even though we're having a conversation virtually. And it's just like, do they not know that I can see that they're not paying attention.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's rude. So are still, that's not fun,
- Kate Leto:
- It's really rude. But you remember it when we used to sit in conference rooms and there used to be those people that would sit there and do that [laugh] like, I know you're here, I know you're speaking, but I got a lot to do and I'm very important so I'm just going to get my work done. So I think there are still things we can do to try to make our presence known. And I think even virtually, it's extremely possible to get to know somebody in a very different way. Look at this conversation, you're seeing the inside of my house.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes,
- Kate Leto:
- Right. That's something that you probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. So it's a different perspective, but I still think it's a telling perspective and definitely body language virtually is still, it's still in play I'd say.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking about those people who sit in conference rooms and work while everyone else is trying to have a conversation, self-awareness is something that you have written a lot about and as a key attribute, I suppose to successful people in general, but definitely product leaders or managers who have to interact with others on a daily basis. And one of your articles I was reading, I learned that there was some research from the hey group, I'm just referring to my notes here. They conducted some worldwide research with 17,000 people and found that this is quite funny, 95% of people think that they are self-aware, but the actual percentage is far, far lower. What is that? Yeah, r what's that rough actual percentage of people who are self-aware?
- Kate Leto:
- I can't remember the number, but if you go on in that article, I think there's, from that same survey from the hey group again, there was also, they broke it down by gender into men and women, right? Yes. And yeah, a lot of guys thought they were self-aware compared to women who responded to that question and the vast majority of men had it wrong.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I've got those stats here.
- Kate Leto:
- More men were,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you want me to share that with you? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So yeah,
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, share that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- William. So overall it's 10 to 15% of people, not 95% who are actually self-aware. And you're a hundred percent that hey group survey found that 19% of female executives were self-aware compared to [laugh]. And this is shocking 4% of men. So what is it about men if you're willing to go there, that makes us so pitifully lacking. And
- Kate Leto:
- I don't know if I'm going to, I don't know if I'm going to go there, but I do think it's interesting, the comparison that I see in my magic bind is that when we go back to thinking about interviewing and applying for jobs, there's also a lot of research that shows that men apply for a job, a job, even if the job description, they don't really match the job description, even if maybe they take a couple of the boxes on the must haves, but that's, that's about it. Whereas women will hold off from applying to a job unless they feel like they really hit the vast majority of the things on that job description. So I think it's that women might, we hold back a little bit and I'm not going to say unless I really think whereas guys might be willing to just kind of bla a bit. I dunno, I'm not a guy so it's hard for me to say and I know a lot of good guys who are very self-aware, but not everyone
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh], it would've been not everyone. And this is really important when it comes to the performance of organizations as well. I was always also reading in one of the references in your article that the Korn Ferry Institute created a study called A Better Return on Self-Awareness. And they looked at 486 publicly traded companies over a 30 month period and they attributed higher levels of self-awareness to higher rates of return. And poor performing companies had employees that were 79% more likely to have overall self overall lack of self awareness compared to the higher performers. So this is actually one of those key human skills that can greatly have an impact on just how well your company does, isn't it?
- Kate Leto:
- And there's also research on an individual basis that shows that people with higher levels of EQ tend to make more money than people with lower levels of EQ in a similar role.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can almost hear people interest pick up just on that note.
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, exactly. And the data point was pretty specific. It said on average around $29,000 a year and that was a few years ago. So I can imagine it's grown. Yeah, and it is interesting cuz I put a lot of those hard facts into my earlier articles because I was trying to convince people that, look, it's not just fluff, there's something really there. I still hold true on that. I still put all of those data points in my talks because it's something for those people that are a bit more challenged on just accepting this makes sense, we need to focus on this kind of thing in our workplace. It starts to kind of break things down and kind of open them up to exploring it a bit more because the numbers are pretty convincing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You also have used story as a way of trying to compel people to pay attention to these issues. Particular in particular. You had an article that, and this was one that I'll link to in the show notes, it's called What the Heck Is and Why Should You Care? And there was a quote in there, which I'll read now, and it was the biggest opportunity for improvement in business at home and in life is awareness. And the person who said that was Ellen, the former c e o of Ford Motor Company. And he is, I suppose largely attributed with the turnaround of Ford Motor Co from 17 billion US losses to 20 billion US dollar profits. It's also the only motor company that didn't take a federal bailout during the 2008 global financial crisis. What was it that he attributed most of the success of that turnaround effort to,
- Kate Leto:
- He attributed it to self-awareness really. And it was something, it was a skill that he talked about that he found hugely important. Years earlier in his career he worked at Boeing and because of the incident with somebody who reported to him, he kind of realized that he was missing a lot of this thing called self-awareness. And since then had really become kind of student of it and tried to bring it into the executive offices and the organizations that he'd been working in. And so when he got to Ford and he actually, and he took that really tough job he said the moment that he knew things were going to turn around is when members of his executive team in a meeting really started being honest about what was happening. And he said it took a long time for people to have the awareness be able to do that, but once they did, that was their moment. So it was, he's big advocate of self-awareness as a leading skill for any business person.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And particularly when it comes to executives, they're often used to people telling them what those people think they want to hear. And it's such a great creator of blind spots. And when you're in a crisis situation, the last thing that you want is for people to be feeding you information about what is actually going on that is not reflective of reality. So it's so critical to foster that, that culture of self-awareness and safety that people are able to share that with you. Now I'm asking for a friend here, but if you're not particularly self-aware, right? How can you become more,
- Kate Leto:
- Oh well baby steps. It's all about baby steps. So I think a great way to start to build self-awareness is through self-reflection. And there's so many different things that you can do around that and doing some journaling every day and what do you wanna work on during the day? How did it go? What went well, what didn't go well? Basic things like that. In the book I even give examples of how you can do self-reflections around hiring after you interview someone, do a self-reflection. Not only did they answer the questions well, but what was it about the person that you think would be a good person to bring into your team? And that can also help you start to bring hopefully some at some point, break down some of those biases that we have that can often come into hiring processes and interviewing as well.
- So I think is a good baby step. It's not even a baby step, but a good step is really just taking some time to do some self-reflection and you can find different ways of doing that throughout your day. One of the things I used to do, I remember when I worked at Moo and I was trying to figure out why things would bug me so much is would every product person has post-its of every color about and when I would get really frustrated or something and I wasn't quite sure why I was frustrated or I just think it was a certain person or something like that, not really have the self-awareness to really figure out what was going on. I would take my post-it and I'd take a pen and I'd write down a word, whatever word came to mind. Often it was c t O, so I'd write that down and put it on my desk
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And
- Kate Leto:
- It became my, and sometimes I'd put a date or a time on it or something like that and that became my automatic first step at journaling. And so instead of it just sitting in here and just brewing, I'd be like, somebody's getting another post-it today. And they would just go on my desk and then whenever I was ready, whenever I had the time, I could pick that up and take it with me, take it home. Maybe on the commute I'd do a little journaling or little writing about what was really going on. But it just was that first, it was that first reaction, knee jerk reaction instead of getting mad, instead of getting really frustrated and keeping it in my head it was pen and paper, write it, write something down, even just a word and then go on with my day. So little things
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Like that. It's emphatic practice, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I was curious about this cuz obviously if you write about this and you coach, and this is a big part of your professional focus, you have your own practices here, what has surprised you about yourself since you actively started trying to improve your self-awareness? Have you discovered any blind spots that you were previously unaware of? What have you learned?
- Kate Leto:
- I've learned so much and I'm still learning every day. This journey is like will never end. It's kind of like a feature. What is done, never really done, the product's never done. So what have I learned about self-awareness or what have I learned about myself as I've been going through this
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yourself? Yeah
- Kate Leto:
- [laugh], trying to think what's safe to say on a podcast
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]
- Kate Leto:
- Learned, learned. I do get frustrated or I did, I'm still working on it. Get frustrated quite easily. And so doing things that would break that train of thought were helpful. Imposter syndrome hugely. I do a lot of writing and talking about that as well and figuring out what are the limiting beliefs I have in my mind that are holding me back from maybe doing really good or helping move myself ahead. I've learned to, this might sound kinda weird, but get more in touch with getting more in touch with my body and into my body makes a big difference. So there's a big part of coaching called body work and then sometimes it's just movement. It's getting people up out of our chairs and moving or shaking off something that's bothering us and that small things that can help me figure out where I am and bring back a balanced level of self-awareness.
- It's also made me realize how important health is and if something's not going well for me in my mind, something most likely won't go well for me in my body as a result of that being it something simple as shoulders are really tight or my neck is all messed up to bigger health situations. So in my mind, self-awareness is kind of like, it's the meta skill and if we can start to learn that and create it in our life and whatever it is, if it's just a post-it note or if it's learning some body techniques to get up outta your chair and shake off whatever just happened, then I think it's definitely a worthwhile investment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get the sense that from what you've described to some of those techniques, whether it's writing the post-it note or being more conscious of your body, whether that's through movement or, I think one technique that I've used in the past through a coach that I had was just to pay attention to where my body was touching other surfaces. Ground me back in into the moment cuz we spent a lot of our time up here in our head and not a lot of our time down in our body. I get the sense that the physicality, whether it's, like I said, writing or whether it's paying attention to your body is quite important in fostering self-awareness in the moment.
- Kate Leto:
- Well for me it definitely is. I did an executive coaching intensive program recently through Berkeley in California and one of the tutors, well they were all very, very big on body work and how that can help you get out of your mind and become more present at work in a conversation, in an interview, whatever it might be. And just some basic techniques like getting up or shaking a leg or shaking an arm or if you want to, you know, can try Tai Chi or Chi Kong or I have this great book that I got out of that program that's called Physical Intelligence and it's sitting on my desk. So that's something I'm reading and learning more about. But these small things can have a huge impact on breaking the train of thought, negative thoughts often to bring us back to a better place.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well Kate, seeing as you were brave then and shared some of your journey with self-awareness, I thought it would only be fair if I shared with you some of mine. Cool. And one of my biggest failings as a leader has been to apply my personal standards of performance to other people and then share my unfiltered frustration with them about the outcomes when those standards, some of which were impossible to meet, were not achieved. And when I was reflecting on this, it strikes me as well, a, it's a huge blind spot in terms of self-awareness of my understanding of the situation of other people, of processing my own emotions, but also it resulted in a huge lack of empathy. How can product leaders or people that are in the privileged position of taking care of other people in a team avoid setting up impossible situations I have done in the past with their direct reports.
- Kate Leto:
- I think it's really hard and it's something I don't think you can do on your own, and this is where coaching or if it's a peer coach, if it's a friend and you guys are coaching each other, that's great. Doesn't have to be somebody that you paid money to, but just that you have someone to who could be that sounding board who could pick up on these things and can give you that feedback or can help you discover it for yourself as well. I think it's something that's hard to pick up on your own. I think it's really challenging, even journaling and doing all these great self-reflection exercises without getting that feedback from your team members, even if they're seeing it and giving you the feedback would be really helpful. But otherwise, I think that's where it, it's great to get somebody else's perspective and opinion and somebody who, for as a coach, it's kind of being your mirror and playing back to you what they're seeing and what your actions are and what your behaviors are. So yeah, I think it's a challenge to pick that one up on your own though.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I've also, I've got one other tip maybe to share with people listening if they suspect that they might be lacking in self-awareness. You can also look at the retention of your team and if you are noticing that people aren't staying very long to work with you, you might have something that working with a coach would help you to make a little bit better for the people around you.
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah absolutely. I mean that's something that you're going to pick up on and see your lack of self-awareness and other emotional intelligence skills and retention levels. And as a leader, a lot of times product people don't have direct reports. So we're using influence hugely and that's a big skill and that's a hard skill to really master and to understand. But our career work in a lot of ways relies on it. So if we don't have that ability to bring those challenging stakeholders on board with us or colleagues or whoever it is, then that's another sign. Perhaps that skill could use some help. So there's just so many different directions to dive into
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Yeah, you really do have to be paying attention to pick these things up. I just wanna come back to briefly, I'm just being mindful of time also. So I'll bring this down to a close shortly about, I wanna bring back to us back to coaching. I had a great conversation earlier in the year with someone who has written a blurb for your book and I believe Marty Kagan and Marty was telling me about his early career at HP and the importance that was baked into the way that HP did business of coaching. He had a coach when he was an engineer, and then when he started to get interested in product, he still had that coach that was coaching him on engineering. And then he also was able to find someone who would coach him on product management. And he attributes that to one of the keys to success of those stellar companies, but also to his own personal success. Why do we refuse in most companies outside of a privileged few to invest in coaching and its close cousin mentoring of talent? Why do we refuse to do this?
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, it's a really good question and I think a lot of companies are getting better at it because more and more I'm getting more and more requests and outreach for coaching from organizations. I think the reason some organizations don't look at it as something that's a must have is the same reason individuals don't in some cases because they don't want to be feel like, I think traditionally coaching is seen, it's something for people that aren't doing a good job. And I think the mentality in that has changed dramatically over the last few years from something that is kind of, I'm not doing great at my job, therefore I need a coach to, instead, we kind of spun it on its head and now it's like, if I wanna be a super performer, how lucky could I be to get a coach to help me? So it's now a positive versus a negative, but not everybody's there yet.
- Not everybody sees it that way. So I think that's one reason. Also, it's hard to actually come up with an ROI for coaching. While we could try to draw these ties to people aren't leaving, you've got better attendance rates, be it virtually or not, stress levels are down, team happiness is up, all of these things. It's hard to say that's you to tie that specifically to coaching. And some organizations are still working that way. If there's no direct o roi, roi, they're going to have a hard time getting budget for it. So I think all these things are changing, but not everybody sees it as a must have quite yet.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Unfortunately, not many accountants and finance people are visionary. They know the cost of a lot of things, but often find it difficult to see the value and the intangible and often are motivated by short term incentives. Totally.
- Kate Leto:
- Well, I think another thing that's really hard about coaching is even within product, we have so many different kinds of coaches. You could have design sprint coaches or okay, our coaches or discover sprint coaches, or you could have product coaches that are more on the technical side and then you have me and maybe a subset that are more interested in leadership coaching or focusing on those kind of skills that are more human skill side. So I think also there's just such a wide variety of how it's just vague. What is a coach and how can a coach help you I think is something we're all kind of working through. And what's the difference between coach and mentor? That's another big thing as well. A lot of people that I, I've had initial conversations with about coaching do think of as a coach, as a mentor in my mind, a mentor, somebody who's going to give you that advice that you might be looking for based on their personal experience.
- Whereas a coach is somebody who's going to more help you figure it out for yourself by playing back or helping you see the patterns in your behavior and things like that. And a lot of coaches we kind of crossover, you know, might even stick in some advisor in there as well. But I think product people, were trying to figure out what is a coach, what is the coach? And then what do I really need from a coach before you start a coaching relationship? I think that's hugely important and I think a lot of organizations don't quite have that figured out either. So there's still going to be a lot of evolution I think, as to how can coaching help product people and help product organizations and help them see that it's just kind of a no-brainer.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I really like what you suggested there about if you are thinking about a coach getting clear on what it is or the reason why or why you want that coach and I get the sense that that would be remarkably helpful in having a conversation with whoever you need to unlock some budget to make that happen if you are really clear on what the outcomes that you're seeking are. Kate, just in closing, you touched on imposter syndrome and struggling with that and becoming self-aware of that just a little earlier, and that is something that I wanted to ask you about, that sort of nagging self-doubt that pretty much all humans have and there will be a few caveats there. Now I understand you went to a Catholic grade school.
- Kate Leto:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Who was Sister Esther and what was her impact on your life?
- Kate Leto:
- Sister Esther was, I think she was a seventh and eighth grade teacher at my Catholic school in Iowa. And she was lovely in many, many ways, but she became my kind of devil on my shoulder. The person with that would kind of speak to me and say, I can't do something. She became a symbol of that. I'm sure she didn't intend to, but for some reason that's how she got built into the story in my brain is, no, you can't do something. Maybe it's not right or you're not smart enough or whatever it might be. You don't have enough money, you don't have the right background, you don't have the right education. So Sister Esther became that to me and when I did a coaching program in London a few years, years back, they had us, we were talking about limiting beliefs in relation to imposter syndrome and they had me, had us all draw out who was our character that kind of symbolized all this and some people made it up entirely and it was a monster, like the monster under the bed. But for me it was Sister Esther. So if you look on a blog, on my blog on my website and the article about one of the articles about self-awareness or I'm sorry, imposter syndrome you'll see my very bad drawing of Sister Esther and all the things that I associate with her
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And Kate, I suspect that many of us have our own version of Sister Esther. For the people that are listening today that have that devil on their shoulder lurking somewhere in the back of their brain that comes out and does a disservice to them when it really is a critical moment or an opportunity for them to develop themselves. What's your message for them?
- Kate Leto:
- Oh, you know what it is, it's such a human condition. Having that limiting belief and having imposter syndrome. I think in the article I quote a stat that says 80% of us say we have imposter syndrome, and then my next question is like, yeah, but what about that other 20%? Are they really
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Being honest? They have a discreet lack of self-awareness.
- Kate Leto:
- Yeah, exactly. Like what's really going on there? So I think it's just something it, it's something that everybody I know has, it is a human condition and it doesn't have to hold us back. So I think that is part of the skill that we can build up through self-awareness and understanding what these limiting beliefs are and how maybe it's stopping me from having a job that I really like or how maybe it's stopping me from going to the next level of my career or deciding that the career isn't right for me at all and I should join the great resignation. These are all limiting beliefs that we have in our head. So it's a great opportunity to take a step back and study them, understand them, find your own Sister Esther, and learn to make peace with them one by one by one. I certainly wouldn't be here as a consultant 10, 11 years on if I hadn't been able to do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So great place, great message to finish this episode on Kate. Thank you. I've really enjoyed today's conversation you've given me and I'm sure all the people that are listening to today's episode plenty to think about. So thank you for so generously sharing your stories and your expertise with us today.
- Kate Leto:
- My pleasure. Thank you very much, Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome. And Kate, if people want to follow you, your writings, get a copy of your book, just generally connect, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Kate Leto:
- My website is KateLeto.com and it has all of that information. My Twitter is @KLeto, just the letter K, Leto. The book is on Amazon all over the world. So please go check that out and if you enjoy it, which I hope you do, please write a nice review.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm sure they will. Thanks Kate, and to everyone that's tuned in, you're most welcome. It's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered, including where you can find Kate and her wonderful book and her on Twitter and all the other great things that we've spoken about today, will be in the show notes on YouTube and also on the podcasting platforms. If you have enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX design and product management, don't forget to leave the podcast a review, subscribe, and also pass the podcast along to someone else in your product, UX or design community that you feel would get value from these conversations. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn under Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile on the show notes on YouTube, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.