What is your philosophy on coaching a high performance team and influencing as you have grown into a leader?

I believe strongly in giving my team autonomy to progress and drive their careers, but at a certain point, we all need mentors to help us think through specific actions that can grow our leadership influence. We all have blind spots.

As I've grown in my career as a people manager and leader, I've developed a PMM Growth Framework to use with my team. I think that building influence can come from many things and it helps to pull apart the threads to understand where your team has it and where there is room to grow.

• In this career reflection, I ask a few questions about my team members' short and long term goals.

• I also have four key skills I have them self-assess against, which are broadly framed as: 1) Research and Audience Insights 2) Product partnership & Business Understanding 3) Positioning & Messaging, and 4) Launches & GTM work.

• Lastly, I include what I call an "Influence Inventory." This is a super lightweight self-check on some of the key indicators of organizational influence. I created an acronym for these elements: VITALS. Each team member self selects "Feeling good," "Feeling neutral," "Feeling less great." This isn't a performance review but more of a tool to talk through how I can help them beef up their broader influence by getting more specific about where it may be lacking.

  • Volume/Output of work

    • Number of campaigns, tests, research projects, etc.

  • Impact

    • Getting meaningful results and returns from the work

  • Team Enablement & Collaboration

    • Doing things that grease the wheels for others

  • Autonomy & Scope

    • How broad the domain authority is and how much you need your manager to step in

  • Leadership & Repping the work

    • Serving as a leader across work streams and teams and/or sharing out learnings, decisions, etc. in a way that positions you as a leader

  • Strategic Influence

    • Decisions made based on insights you've provided

The resulting career discussion helps us really prioritize not only the types of projects to sign team members onto, but also how we position them and give them platforms to drive decisions and share out learnings.