The best leaders "PM" their organizations the same way product managers "PM" their products

A leader should "PM" her organization the same way that a product manager "PMs" her product. How do PMs PM their products? At a high-level, PMs:

1. They conduct continuous in-depth research of the desires, goals and key challenges of their customers

2. They undergo a rigorous and highly-collaborative iterative design process which may involve pivoting (ideally rapidly) before arriving at an optimal solution that meets the customer's needs. 

3. They execute, launch and bring their solution to market and empower their customers with the new solution. 

The best leaders do not treat their reports merely as assets in order to achieve their own executive desired outcomes, but they treat their reports as their customers. They apply discovery tactics (asking questions, observing, validating hypotheses) to get tuned in with the world of their reports.  This discovery work is time-consuming, but once the leader truly understands the desires, goals and key challenges of her reports, then she has the ability to align the organization (the manager's product) in a way that has the largest impact. This doesn't mean that the manager doesn't prioritize executive or corporate needs. It means that the manager finds alignment between the business needs and the employee's needs in a way that maximizes the good for both parties. Afterall, that is the spirit of the free-market economy. Businesses discover consumer needs and provide products and services that solve customer problems. Then, exchanges happen between the consumer and the business that leave both parties better off than they were before. 

Product managers should know very well that this is done best when you gain a deep understanding of your customer's world through regular contact and carefully asking questions. This requires time, and empathy but the results are real. Likewise, leaders will maximize the net-good of their organizations if they get tuned in with the world of their employees through regular contact and genuine employee empathy. If this is done well, then employees will be empowered and successful business performance will naturally follow. 

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, is an exceptional leader and a great example of what it means to PM your organization.  Since Microsoft is a behemoth organization with 160K employees, Satya Nadella has one of the greatest challenges of all staying tuned in with the world of employees with that magnitude. It would be easy for Satya to spend all his days in seemingly important back-to-back strategy discussions with his top leaders that are closest to him (this still must happen). However, Satya doesn't allow these strategy discussions to overtake critical "discovery time." Since the Adobe-Microsoft strategic partnership was announced, I have been following Satya on linkedIn. It is clear from his posts that he regularly spends significant amounts of time down in the trenches among engineers, customers support, research, sales etc., down at the very individual-contributor level of his behemoth organization, getting tuned in with his employees. 

Why does Satya spend so much time mingling with his employees at the individual contributor level to get tuned in? Why doesn't he just rely on the executive summaries that flow up through the ranks of management? it's the same reason that PMs don't build their products based purely based off of the industry summaries that Forrester and Gartner publish. The devil is in always in the details and information is always lost as it is passed up an organization. Since this is unavoidable, leaders need to take proactive steps to break out of the executive strategizing routine and dedicate time to interviewing and understanding the employee's world at every level of the organization that is below them. This is product management, and this is also true leadership. 

When I was working at Nav.com, Levi King, the CEO demonstrated this principle very well. Levi didn't let the fact that he was always on the road pitching the business and raising our next round of funding stop him from meeting 1:1 with every employee every so often. During my 1:1 with Levi he would ask questions like:

What are your goals? Do you feel like you're growing?  Why? Why not? How is your relationship with your manager? What can I do to help you grow and succeed more?

Remember this leaders - You will maximize the output of your company if you get tuned in your employees the same way a PM gets tuned in with his customers.  Stay tuned in. Don't get disattached. PM your organizations.