466: Use the 4 leadership motions to be more effective – with Janice Fraser

How product managers can navigate leadership challenges

Today we are talking about four leadership motions that enable increased organizational effectiveness and productivity and alleviate organizational friction, waste, and indecision. The motions reflect a need for leadership change as organizations struggle for higher performance while supporting employees.

Sharing the four leadership motions with us is Janice Fraser. Janice built her career in Silicon Valley as a startup founder, product manager, and confidante for entrepreneurs and enterprise executives alike. She currently supports very large organizations including P&G; in becoming more innovative and agile. She also guides several venture-funded startup companies, federal government entities, and non-profit organizations.

She is the coauthor of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:32] Why take on the topic of leadership from a product background?

The product piece has always been with me. In my first job out of college, I was already creating new products. The instinct to make something out of nothing that helps people have a better life or solves their problems was an innate instinct in me. I started working at Netscape right after its IPO. It was the hottest startup in history. That was the time of the advent of a commercial public worldwide web and the first .com boom. Suddenly all these people were now startup founder and were creating something new, not just new products but whole new businesses and business models. There were a lot of really inexperienced, terrible leaders who were doing what I call flaily squanderness—startup founders just trying a bunch of things.

Previously I had been working at some of the best managed, best run companies on the planet. The CEO of Netscape, Jim Barksdale, was influential to my thinking about what it is to be an effective leader during a time of hyper growth. My two journeys fused for me—helping people through new products and helping brand new leaders be effective in the heroic things they’re trying to do. For twenty years I was equally interested in both practices—how can you make great products and how can amateur leaders become effective and competent? Observing leadership and what is repeatable and effective became my hobby. My book, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, is the result of a user-centered design challenge and answers a product-centric question, which is “How can regular people be extraordinary leaders on purpose?”

[6:11] What are the four leadership motions?

We call them motions because they’re simply things you can do to be a leader that are reliable and effective.

* Orient honestly

* Value outcomes

* Leverage the brains

* Make durable decisions

I treat these like a spinner on a board game. If I’m stuck as a leader, I can spin the spinner, and wherever it lands will give me a new direction to start thinking in. These are things great leaders already do. We just wanted to name and describe them so we can do them on purpose whenever we need to.

[7:25] Orient honestly

Ask the questions “Where are we now? What makes this moment complicated? And are we all in the same place?” Before we can set goals and hope to achieve them, we have to know where we are. We have to know what makes this moment complicated before we can begin to untangle it and get everybody into the right place.

[9:03] What’s an example of orienting honestly?

I was facilitating an offsite for a small company, their first in-person event in a few years since COVID. There were some market conditions at the time that were making it hard for them to be profitable. To orient honestly, we did a sailboat retro.