474: Emotionally fit leadership for product managers – with Dr. Emily Anhalt

How to become an emotionally fit product leader

We are talking about mental health for product managers and leaders—specifically product managers moving into leadership roles and those who are already in leadership roles. We’ll call this emotionally fit leadership.

Dr. Emily Anhalt is a psychologist, emotional fitness consultant, and the co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa, your gym for mental health. For the past fourteen years, Dr. Anhalt has been working clinically with executives, founders, and tech employees and has conducted extensive research with prominent psychologists and entrepreneurs about how leaders can improve their emotional fitness. She has collaborated with some of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world, including Google, Asana, Github, Unilever, and Bloomberg.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:55] What is emotional fitness?

Emotional fitness is an ongoing, proactive approach to working on your mental health. It’s the equivalent of going to the gym instead of waiting until something is wrong and then going to a doctor. With physical fitness, we know you should eat healthy, sleep enough, and exercise, but we don’t have a lot of clarity around what exactly you should do to build a proactive mental health practice.

I did a research study in which I interviewed 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs and asked them, “How would you know if you were sitting across the table from an emotionally healthy leader? What does that look like? What does that feel like? What do they do? What do they not do?”

Out of this research came the seven traits of emotional fitness. If you practice them in an ongoing way, you will build stronger emotional fitness.

[4:03] Why is self-awareness important and what should we know about it?

Self-awareness is important because it’s hard to change something if you don’t know it exists. To improve ourselves, we first have to see what we’re good at and what needs improvement. This looks like having a sense of your emotions, strengths, struggles, biases, and triggers. The more you know about them, the more agency you have to make change.

Leaders set the ethos for their entire team, often their entire company. The more aware they are of themselves, the better it is for everyone. Leaders need to do this work to be aware of what they need to work on and aware of what they’re good at. Then it’s less likely that the leader’s struggles will leak out to the team.

[5:47] Why did you do this research study?

I did the interviews about nine years ago, before mental health had quite as much spotlight on it since COVID. It was clear to me that there is a huge population of people who are not struggling with some extreme diagnosable psychological disorder, but who still have a lot of things in their life they wish they could change. A lot of those people don’t think they deserve to go to therapy because they don’t think they’re broken enough. The idea that something has to be wrong with you to prioritize your mental health is a big problem.

I wanted to create some language that would normalize the idea that everyone should be thinking about their mental health. COVID legitimized the idea that none of us is going to see every tough thing coming. No matter how healthy we might be, we’re all going to be in a position at some point where we need to draw on our emotional resources to get through a tough time. The more work you can do proactively, the better a position you’ll be in when life throws you a curveball.

[7:54] What are some examples of self-awareness?

One piece of self-awareness might be saying, “I really like being an individual contributor. I don’t necessarily want to take on the task of telling other people how to do their work.” A lot of people feel the only way they can keep growing in their career is to switch over to a management role, and that’s not always true. Know how you do your best work and what you actually want to be doing.

If you do want to move into a management role, you could say, “I want to do this, but it’s newer to me, so I need to invest in understanding what it means to do this work and get better at it.” There’s no shame in that. I wish more people felt okay asking their company to fund management courses or get them a coach or therapist so they can see their blind spots.

We only see the world through the lens of our own experience, and that lens is clouded by the way we thing things work, which is not always the way other people think they work. The more investment you can make in knowing yourself, the better you will do your job and the better everyone will feel working with you.

[9:46] What are some tools we can use to increase self-awareness?

There are three things: therapy or coaching, introspection, and asking for feedback.

Therapy or coaching lets another person help you understand who you are in relation to other people. You don’t have to wait until things are really wrong to benefit from therapy. It often works best when you start from a baseline rather than in crisis mode.

Introspection means creating regular practices of turning inward and asking yourself tough questions. Great tools are journaling and meditation.

Ask for feedback regularly and often. How you respond when you get feedback teaches people how much they can continue giving you feedback.

There is an exercise I call an emotional push-up. Every week, pick someone in your life whose feedback you value: a report, colleague, sibling, spouse, friend, boss. etc. Send them a text message that says something like, “Hey there, I’m working on my emotional fitness and today’s task is to ask for feedback from someone whose perspective I value. So I would love for you to tell me one thing I’m doing well as a colleague, friend, boss, etc., and one thing I could do 10% better.”

Send a text like this out to a different person every week, and you will be really surprised what comes back to you. People will often be pretty honest about what you might think about improving. You might be surprised by what you’re already doing well. Self-awareness is just as much about knowing your strengths so you can lean toward them as it is about knowing your struggles.

[14:52] How can we give feedback to others?

If you are a leader, you should be giving feedback regularly. Your positive feedback should be as detailed as your constructive feedback. That helps people feel good about also taking tougher feedback.

[16:18] How should we respond to constructive feedback?

Don’t feel like you have to respond right away. We tend to get defensive, but just sit and let the person completely share things, even if you don’t agree with it. Take some time to think about it. Say, “I want to mull over this before I respond. Can we meet again in an hour or next week?”

[17:45] Tell us about empathy.

Empathy is being able to understand other people’s emotions. People don’t realize that empathy has a feelings component. If you intellectually understand what someone is feeling, but you are not feeling it at all, that is not empathy. That’s sympathy. Empathy means allowing yourself to feel what someone else is feeling so you can understand it. A lot of us are resistant to this because we don’t want to feel what someone else is feeling, or we believe if we really feel it, then we become responsible for that feeling.

Empathy and boundaries are not mutually exclusive. They are deeply reliant on each other. To deeply empathize, you have to have strong boundaries.

Empathy is complicated because it’s tough to empathize with a feeling you’re not comfortable feeling. That’s why self-awareness comes first. You need to understand your emotions and get comfortable with them before you can meet other people in theirs.

[19:43] What is an example of boundaries that could enable us to be more empathetic?

All kinds of boundaries are built into my work as a therapist because my job is empathizing. A therapy hour starts and ends on time. It’s in the same place every time. I don’t have patients who are also friends or involved in any other part of my life. By holding those boundaries tight, I can go deep with someone within that space and time.

Let’s say you’re a product manager leading someone who is going through a tough time at home and you can tell it’s affecting their work. Empathy means letting yourself feel for a second what it’s like going through a tough thing at home and also trying to show up for work. If you feel that, you’ll be able to show up for them in a different way.

However, some people think once they are in that space that their co-worker’s problem is now their problem. They feel they have to help them figure out their problem, accommodate them completely, and not give them any consequences. That’s not good boundaries. Good boundaries is listening and referring them to resources but still holding them to the standards that are required for the job. All of those things can happen at the same time. If you trust that, you’re going to be a more empathetic leader when those tough things happen.

[22:48] What is a tool that can help us empathize?

I recommend an emotional fitness survey. Anytime someone new starts to work at Coa, we send them a list of questions about what they need in order to do their best work. Do you like to be praised in public or in private? What time of day do you do your best thinking? How do you like to be supported during a tough time? How would I know if you were stressed or overwhelmed? How do you like to have your birthday celebrated?

Everyone at the company gets everyone’s answers. You don’t know when you’re going to need this information. For example, someone on our team lost someone in her family. Her emotional fitness survey said, “When I’m going through a tough time, I like to be given a little bit of space, and then check on me.” So we left her alone for a little bit and then we reached out to her. That would have been a hard thing for her to tell us in that moment. Because she told us in advance, we were able to empathize with what she was going through and what she needed from us.

Action Guide: Put the information Emily shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links:

• Learn more about Coa, your gym for mental health
• Connect with Emily on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, and other social media @dremilyanhalt

Innovation Quote

“We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.” – Anais Nin

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.