Overcoming low self esteem and growing as a leader
Honest Habits episode 1 with Stephanie Leue
I aim to give pragmatic advice on the Confident Product Leader, which you can put into practice. I thought about how to go further and help you make positive changes and grow. I learn from real-world stories and experiences, mainly by reading biographies, listening to interviews and talking to people. They inspire me, and I hope learning about other leaders' stories will inspire you to act. Once a month, the Confident Product Leader interviews a product or technology leader, asking them to be vulnerable in sharing their stories and learnings.
I am grateful to Stephanie Leue, a serial product leader and current Chief Product Officer at Doodle, for being our first guest on our Honest Habits series. Our interview documented below defines leadership, shares battle stories with self-esteem and honest advice to help you on your leadership journey in product or technology. I have included highlights of the interview for you to watch. They are sprinkled throughout the article.
Meet Stephanie Leue
Stephanie has worked in the product management function for over fifteen years and joined Doodle nearly two years ago. She confesses that “Product is my passion. I love building products, and I can’t imagine doing anything else. I have built products for Paypal and Contentful and founded and sold my startup”.
Given Stephanie’s fantastic journey, I was keen to learn how it all started. Like many others, Stephanie credited Marty Cagan for introducing her to product management, but instead of the often-cited Inspired book, she participated in one of Marty’s workshops. It was delivered at the German startup she worked for then. In that workshop, she learned that the thing she was doing with a lot of passion had a global title: product management. This opened the door to finding community, support and learning. Her career in product suddenly opened up.
Are we ever really finished as a leader?
In this interview, Stephanie explored what being a successful product leader means. She started with a powerful takeaway for all leaders, “Are we ever really finished as a leader? It’s a journey, right?”.
Stephanie reminds us that leaders can only succeed if their teams are successful. She says, “I feel like I’m a successful leader, but that is because I have an amazing team, and we have built a really good relationship”. This outlook aligns with servant leadership and the beliefs I hold and share on the Confident Product Leader
Great leaders recognise and respect the people they lead and concentrate efforts to foster trust. Trust can be described as excellent relationships. Trust is not just about the leader trusting an individual, which is the confusion I see when coaching product leaders. It is two-way. Teams need to trust the leaders. The highest-performing teams have this two-way trust. It is a crucial ingredient to repeatable and sustainable success. Unfortunately, too many people in leadership positions ignore this, which results in hierarchy-driven power and missed opportunities.
Self-awareness creates a leader
However, Stephanie did not always have the servant leadership mindset. She recalled university teaching the difference between management and leadership, but it was hard for her to understand why it mattered at the time. At some stage in her career, she later recognised that she was responsible for helping people be successful and the importance and impact of leadership.
Chatting together, we reflected that for many people at work, their role models are managers. Only some people are lucky enough to have regular interaction with inspirational leadership. This makes it challenging to learn leadership through osmosis. In her experience, line managers may not have always been inspiring and did not honestly care for her concerns or aspirations. A pivotal breakthrough moment for Stephanie was learning how to coach. This training unlocked listening skills and the power of questions to support individuals and teams.
I changed my career from product leadership to executive coaching. I may be biased, but I understand and agree with Stephanie’s recognition of the importance of coaching. As a leader, coaching is not a silver bullet; it should not be deployed for every situation, but when used well, it will empower people, support their growth and increase their performance. I believe all leaders should develop their coaching skills.
As we discussed Stephanie’s leadership journey, she shared she recently took EQ training (Emotional Intelligence), which helped her be more self-aware. She recognised that when stressed or swamped, she quickly stopped listening, and her leadership signature shifted 180 degrees from servant to telling. As a product leader coach, I can confirm this is not unusual, and Stephanie has shared a valuable trigger point for us all to identify and use to improve our reactions.
It is natural when the pressure is on to want to drive action quickly. Stephanie shared how it feels easy to jump to what we emotionally believe will get the results quicker. It is easy to think the quick win is telling people precisely what to do. Even though she has the experience to know it is counterintuitive, it is a hard habit to break. This typical behaviour is often driven by wanting to support and help a team out of challenging situations, but it is far better to guide the team to find their way forward. The team will develop resilience that drives performance, but they will likely find better solutions to achieve progress than you or I might suggest as leaders.
Being a leader is not about knowing everything or having the best ideas. It is about setting everyone else up to achieve their best. This powerful outcome leadership style creates companies that create products with valuable differentiation.
In this video, Stephanie shares her stand-out moment in becoming a leader.
Inspirational battle with self-esteem
Talking with Stephanie about self-esteem was inspiring. She was honest and vulnerable about her leadership mistakes, hoping everyone could learn from them as she has. A significant challenge for her has been self-esteem. This is not uncommon, although talking about it is unusual, I applaud her for bringing this to light. While participating in coaching training, her key takeaway was, “You must love yourself to be a good leader.”
She explained, “I was questioning myself way too often, and I was way, way too critical of myself.” Lacking self-esteem or confidence impacts how you operate as a leader. Someone who is very critical and uncertain may appear to be a weak leader. Stephanie explained how it became a negative spiral. As her team picked up on her uncertainties, they asked more questions and challenged her, which fueled more self-criticism. Further self-criticism made her more uncertain, which encouraged more questions and challenges from her team. You can see how this gets out of control quickly.
Stephanie worked on accepting, trusting, and loving herself to foster confidence and self-esteem. She feels this was unavoidable in her journey to become the leader people deserve. Overcoming the challenge of low self-esteem made her a stronger, more effective leader.
Stephanie shares a mantra: “If you treat yourself like a best friend, you will flourish and increase your self-esteem.”
Social media, both Instagram and LinkedIn, were unhelpful for Stephanie before she gained self-confidence. It is easy to look at all these posts and feel inadequate or small. It is easy to speak to yourself with such an opposing voice. She feels changing this perspective and mindset helped her unblock many things.
It was terrific Stephanie was so open about a topic many find difficult to share. I hope as you read this, you enjoy the authenticity and use it to improve your self-awareness. When I coach product leaders, self-confidence is a common challenge people discover they must work on. If this is an area of improvement, you are not alone!
Empowered with self-awareness and strengthened self-esteem, Stephanie was ready to enjoy feedback from her teams, peers and bosses. She explains how avoiding feedback will stifle growth, and it is powerful to welcome feedback. However, this does not mean all feedback is correct. She permits herself to reject feedback. It is her right to decide what to do with the feedback. She now uses feedback to drive a positive upward spiral, fueling her never-ending journey to a better place.
Feedback helps us understand the impact of our actions. It gives us pointers to initiate learning. Well-constructed feedback, which is difficult to obtain, will provide you with immediate learnings to decide what action you want to take.
If you are open to feedback, giving better feedback becomes easier, which will help you grow as a leader.
In this video, we discuss the leadership mistakes for you to learn from.
Who inspires you?
Finally, to end our Honest Habits interview, I invited Stephanie to share who inspires her. The first response was brilliant, showing a real learning mindset, “A bunch of people, there is not one person that inspired me”.
She is inspired by how people handle challenges, build networks, and take on board criticism. She admires people for things they do and tries to learn from them to improve herself. An example Stephanie offered is a product professional from Switzerland called Tanya Lau. Tanya is excellent at networking, greets everyone personally, and everyone is excited when she enters the room. This is inspirational.
Watch the video to hear more about Stephanie’s inspirational figures.
Top tips from the field
Here are Stephanie’s tips and advice for product leaders.
You are never really finished growing as a leader.
Learn about coaching skills to help your leadership.
Become a better listener.
Recognise stress and don’t let it force you into a manager instead of a leader.
Love yourself and work on self-esteem.
Talk to yourself as positively as you talk to your best friend.
Embrace feedback, but remember you have a right to reject it.
If you are interested in being a guest on Honest Habits or know someone I should interview, please contact me.
Further learning
Stephanie mentioned listening, I covered active listening in detail last week.
We talked about the value of coaching. I have read dozens of books on coaching and have studied the topic in detail. Perhaps the most accessible and pragmatic book on coaching I can recommend is by Sir John Whitmore. It was first published in 1992, yet shares principles with agile methodology. My other book recommendation is The Trillion Dollar Coach, co-authored by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who shares insights from the coach Bill Campbell, who supported leaders at Google, Apple, and many others.
If you want more help, you can find out about product leader coaching with me at my website www.righttoleft.co.uk.