Better Product Manager Or Leader - 11 ways to grow your influence beyond your intellect

Instead of trying to get people to respect your superior smarts, get them to want to follow your leadership.

Whether you’re a product manager, an engineering lead, a manager, or a senior executive, below is the list of 11 ways to grow your influence beyond your intellect you can do :

1. Develop personal relationships outside tactical work discussions. Go for a walk outside. Get coffee. Drink beers or cold-pressed juices together.
2. Be more approachable, even if you initially think an idea is awful. Every idea is worth 5 minutes. You never know when one will be truly great.
3. Respond with more “Yes, and…” instead of “No, because…”. You’ll get better ideas encouraging others instead of shutting them down.
4. Show more emotion, ditch the poker face, and expose chinks in your armor. People want to work with other people, not emotionless robots.
5. Never let your frustration show in a meeting, and even more importantly in email/slack.
6. Can you make a great argument for the other person’s side? If you can’t, put on your empathy hat. You might convince yourself to compromise.
7. Force hard decisions, but make few decisions unilaterally. Make sure to communicate them tactfully with everyone involved.
8. Make fewer assertions. Ask more pointed — but not aggressive — questions.
9. Make fewer demands. Your ratio of suggestions: informed observations: directives should be 100:10:1.
10. Give credit 10x more than you take it, and take blame 10x more than you give it.
11. Be relentlessly optimistic and perpetually pragmatic. Hope is inspiring, as long as it’s grounded in reality.

Get people to love working with you instead of hating how smart you are. That’s all and now the choice is yours where do you see yourself Leader or Manager ?