Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash)

**John Mark Nickels** (0:00)
Get clear on your objective function. And one way that I've gotten clear on is like, trying to think about it from future me. Because like, five years from now, I'm not going to give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better. But I'm going to care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters. And like, that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, those will translate into the relationship with her, right? Not to be like morbid, but just again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. We try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it. And the horror of it is that we succeed, right? We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do. To me, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
Today, my guest is JM Nickels. JM has been a product leader at Waymo, DoorDash, and Uber. He was also an engineering manager at Groupon, and before that, an equity trader at Getco. At Uber, he built and launched the very first version of Uber Pool, and then went on to lead the team responsible for the infrastructure and algorithms powering the economic and logistics brain behind Uber's matching and pricing systems. At DoorDash, he was head of product for DoorDash Platform. At Waymo, he led product for the commercialization of Autonomous Ride-Hailing and Last Mile Delivery, and he recently returned to Uber to lead product for the Mobility Team. This conversation is a unique and beautiful mixture of heart skills, soft skills, tactics, and emotions. I won't give away too much about the conversation, but this is a powerful one. Tears are shed, stories are shared, and I am confident you will become a better leader and human having listened to JM's insights and lessons. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you JM Nickels.
JM, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**John Mark Nickels** (2:08)
Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. I really appreciate your dedication to helping product managers improve their craft and up-level. There's not a lot of great researchers out there for that, and coaching and development as I'm sure we'll get into is a passion of mine as well, so we have a lot of shared interests there.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:26)
I really appreciate that. I want to start with a phrase that came up again and again when I asked people what to talk to you about from your colleagues, and this phrase is conscious leadership. What is conscious leadership? What does this phrase mean?

**John Mark Nickels** (2:42)
To me, leadership is broadly defined as having influence in the world. By that definition, to me, everyone is a leader, because we all have influence in some way. It's not about whether you're a manager or not. It's like I have influence on my kids, or my partner, or my community, the world, the way I vote, the way I show up. We all have influence. We're all co-creating influences of each other. That's the leadership piece.
The conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up. To me, it's like learning more about my interior world, what my background is, my biases. We all inherit certain belief systems from our parents or our church or our community. A lot of times, they go unquestioned and then they end up in conflict. It's really just about becoming more aware and then taking responsibility for the influence that I have. Taking responsibility for my influence in the world.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:42)
As you talk about this, something that came up and something that I thought about as I was preparing for this episode is this idea of soft leadership, the power of soft skills and just how important that is in success. Is there something there that comes up when I say that? Just the power of soft skills and the importance of those in being successful?

**John Mark Nickels** (3:59)
Yeah. It was Theodore Roosevelt, speak softly and carry a big stick.
Yeah, I think I've evolved in that department. I think when I was younger in my career, I thought it was really important that we got to show up to the meeting and have the right slides and be the loudest, rightest voice in the room and that's the way to have influence. There's certainly a place for having leadership in a meeting and presenting a point of view and helping guide the narrative. But to me, I would say I've evolved more towards sitting back. It's also as I've become a more senior leader, I'm aware that there are power dynamics there. There's imbalances where junior folks don't feel as comfortable speaking up, or I say something's not a good idea, or I don't want to disagree with JM. So it's like back to being more aware of my influence in the world. I really try to spend more time being mindful of that and say, I want to hear from other people first, I want to create space. I don't need to win the argument in the meeting. There can be a follow-up. It's not like it's my last chance to say something. But that's also more true when you're more senior, because when you're more junior, it's like, well, this is the one presentation I have with Dara for the next six months. I really got to nail it. And so the pressure is a little bit different, yeah.