Ask HN: How to speak like a leader, not like an engineer?

You got like one little answer about this but this is like general life hacking, tied to an axiom from salesfolk you might’ve never heard before, “Tellin’ ain’t sellin’.” You never, in other words, start talking to a new client by telling them all about your company and your products and what they do, you start by asking about their day, about their family if you know their family, about their business level problems.

What is at stake is that in every conversation you are like an anthropologist doing ethnographic study. I don’t mean that as normative but descriptive—I don’t mean “this is the attitude I recommend you adopt” but rather “this is how every conversation is right now, today, whether you like it or not.” There is always something like an ‘immediate local culture’ and you are always trying to discover it and speak in that language. In most corporate contexts you would very happily tell people that the company is posting record profits—but you might get a different reaction at a subset of the company that was informed that the company is changing strategic directions and will therefore be laying them off. An employee who just found out that his wife is pregnant might not mention it to a boss who was expecting too, but then she had a miscarriage. Someone from accounting comes in and says that your data does not match the general ledger under WB-code Y104-B and wants to make sure that nobody is stealing money and now you have to figure out what they consider to be a WB-code and what Y104-B is and what they were expecting and why those do not match up perfectly. In each of these three cases you are an observer of a local context who needs to learn what some local culture considers acceptable or unacceptable.

Now there is a sneaky way that salesfolk fit in to most local cultures, and it is to be genuinely curious. I want to know what your problems are, as you describe them, and as you do I will be able to learn a lot more about your language and your priorities and your values. You will be teaching me, indirectly, how to sell you my product: “So you were talking about how you need to be able to periodically monitor each of the Floozels in your company, we have technology which automatically periodically monitors web sites for changes, I wonder if there's a way that we could treat each Floozel as a web site or so, even if we didn‘t solve the monitoring problem immediately we could at least give all your Floozel Monitors at your company a weekly automatically-up-to-date checklist of every Floozel they're supposed to review, just by pretending that each one is a web site that changes every week when we send out the new email batches... but maybe we can make it even more smart than that, I’ll talk to my engineers.” I cannot have that conversation if I come in from the get-go talking about web site monitoring solutions, they will never tell me about their problems with Floozels and they will just say, “uh, we have not updated our web site in two months, I don't think it needs weekly monitoring” and the conversation will be over.

Ask a lot of questions when talking to your superiors, identify what their interests are and what sort of problems or constraints they feel around them. Ask a lot of questions when talking to your subordinates and peers, too. Especially ask questions about your own understanding: “So if I'm hearing you right, you’re saying that the shop floor system is not an information tracker, you already had gone paperless on your shop floors since two years ago?” “Well I mean we would still like it to track the same information because we don’t want to have two separate computer systems but yeah, if that is the only thing that this does then I don’t see the point either.” “OK so what is the point, what do you actually need here?” “I mean sometimes adding a supervisor will slow down the output of my shop floor, and I don’t have a great sense of where things get stuck and where we could add resources to make money. I really need to know what everyone is spending their time on and how fast stuff has come out in the past with different configurations of people.” “Aha, so this is a time tracker?” “Well uh, I guess yeah, it is, but uh, you gotta be careful talking about tracking time in this industry. Guys on the floor will just assume that you mean that you’re not going to pay them when they go to the bathroom.” “Oh so we're talking about tracking the time of the projects, not the time of the people.” “Exactly, exactly.”

Do not rush to speak, either. You can nod and give confirmatory grunts to let someone know you are listening when you are not summarizing your guess about what they just said in a question, but just... lay off a bit. Give them a silence, see if they fill it up with some more words. And when you do speak, remember the advice of Hillel the Elder, not to say anything that you do not want someone else to hear, no matter how much you trust the people you are talking to. Or if you prefer the New Testament, James 3 is a direct lesson for you about speaking like a leader.

Therefore, speaking like a leader means being more focused on principles, goals, mission. Delegate the “how” and focus on the “why”. Paint the broader picture for the team so that they’re motivated to figure out how to accomplish it.

At the highest level, leaders make decisions no one else is able to make. Focus meetings by throwing questions back to the team to make sure they really can’t solve the problem themselves, and then resolve to make decisions on everything else so that they aren’t blocked.

"A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Marketing / sales / bd / etc do not understand most of the variables engineering is working theough. They can be big: impacting price to build/extend and when it starts being a profit center! The tricky bit is those depts also have their own tracked variables that need to be rolled into the decision. Non-engineering variables can also be critical: E.g., going to market before others, hitting some top account or partner, growing revenue by x% compounding now and using that to pay for tech debt, or even learning the workaround isn't worth improving from the customer's/market's perspective.

The humbling thing is no one has all the info, from engineering and product to sales and marketing to the execs. That is where your job comes in. So communicating opportunities at the level of time/cost/growth within engineering's field of view, and making this a non-unilateral discussion. (And if you are good, invisibly sneaking in color around all your other operational glue: who is doing well, what new ideas came in, etc.)