Design Leadership Starter Guide
A lightweight resource for designers who are new or aspiring leaders.
Leadership skills are often overlooked when hiring or promoting designers into leadership roles. We go to college for hard skills, but so often it's the soft skills that make us successful in our careers.
I've written this article to help designers who are new or aspiring leaders, understand what leadership looks like, and what things they can do now to either refine their approach or develop skills to set them up for future leadership roles.
This article has been influenced by my career experiences, and an IxDA NYC panel discussion I moderated in May 2020 with design leaders: Radhika Nayak; SVP of Product at Kinesso, Michele Tepper; Senior Design Manager at Salesforce, and Donna Lichaw; Independent Leadership and Executive Coach. The event recording can be found here.
Start where you are.
Create a healthy culture.
Build relationships.
Focus on communication.
Be selfless.
Start Where You Are.
Leading is such a nuanced and valuable skill, and yet they don't teach you this in design school. Too often designers are promoted into leadership roles because they have outgrown the corporate structure at the individual contributor level. But being a good design practitioner doesn't always equal a good leader.
Leadership is a different skill-set and can lead to a different career path. If you think you'd like to explore the leadership track in your career, a great way to explore the role is to start where you are. There are many things you could do in your current position to start growing these skills and bring more awareness to your leadership goals. Michele Tepper specifically calls out that designers who are looking to make this move can "take a step back and look for ways to grow the team culture."
How to get there
Mentor junior designers. As a leader create opportunities for your team to mentor new designers to the team. As an IC use mentoring relationships to build up skills giving constructive feedback and setting direction without being the one executing.
Volunteer for new opportunities. Gain more visibility within the business by offering your time and skills to areas that interest you.
Speak-up. Ask questions or offer your point of view in meetings. Showing interest in how your work impacts the business or fits with other initiatives will arm you with more information that will allow you to start making more strategic decisions.
Look for ways to grow the team culture. The easiest way to do this is to think about rituals or processes that you enjoyed in other companies and suggest them to your new team. For example, cross-team critiques or team self-initiated design sprints to get them out of the day-to-day and get people working together that normally wouldn't.
Create a Healthy Culture.
Culture is probably the most important aspect that influences people's experience at work. A healthy culture can help employees feel valued, respected, and supported when bringing their ideas forward. All this contributes to better work outputs and more efficient ways of working. Think back to a time when you were unhappy at work, how long did it take you to do simple tasks versus when you were in a healthier work culture — big difference right?
Donna Lichaw says, "culture is reflected by its managers" which explains why "people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers". She also explains that culture is best built (and maintained) in person, which is why even for fully remote teams its important to "get people together for social interaction about once a quarter", Radhika Nayak suggests. For fully remote teams where physical interaction may not be possible, consider 30 mins every week or two just for social time.
On the flip side, some companies don't have a strong culture, which Radhika explains can sometimes create an environment where its easier to define one.
How to get there
If you're in a company that you suspect doesn't have a great culture, focus on what you can affect, not what you can't – start small.
Carve out social time for teams to get to know each other outside the work environment. Organize quarterly in-person socials or regular online social time to build, and maintain team culture.
If in-person socials aren't possible to create rituals to help build culture by bringing people together to discuss both work and non-work related topics.
Build Relationships.
Building strong relationships at work will help you create impact; increase the success of your projects and your team.
At a team level, Michele Tepper talks about how to help the team bond. She suggests that we should look for ways to "share a bit of everyone's personalities to break the ice, and build relationships".
Similarly, Donna suggests deepening the relationships within your team by "deliberately creating psychological safety - let people know they can share with you, model the behavior with them that you would like to see, and ask if there are ways you can help them".
At an organizational level, Donna also advocates for the practice of building alliances to improve the level of impact you and your team can have. She advises that this is a very conscious effort and can be achieved through the following approaches: scheduled 1:1s, create casual loop-ins, maintain a constant flow of information, finding ways for people of all levels to meet, and over-communicate / overshare to create transparency and visibility. However, she caveats the over-communication suggestion by acknowledging that this intention needs to be set from above.
How to get there
Build relationships across the business. Strong relationships with PMs, technology, business stakeholders, and your manager will help you create more opportunities for yourself and your team.
Build close-knit connections with your team. Get to know them on a more personal level.
Build trust by building psychological safety. The most effective way to do this is by modeling this behavior yourself because it starts to breakdown barriers between boss and subordinate relationships.
Breakdown hierarchies. Encourage people of all levels to meet.
Share often. Create mechanisms for you (and your team) to share insights into respective projects easily and often. This casual stream of information will help your team's efforts gain visibility by the organization.
Focus on Communication.
Communication is such a huge part of working with others, especially via various digital channels. Communication habits can vary dramatically by channel, especially in digital work environments. It can be easy to slip into the habits of poor grammar, jargon, and abbreviations.
This can lead to miss-communications and even contribute to alienating people. Michele makes a point about this explicitly and suggests when communicating via written word that we "take the time to be human", and "be aware that the tone of communication is very important".
Similarly, Donna talks about the pitfalls of tools like slack, calling out: death by pings, and games of telephone. She encourages everyone to consider the right communication channel for the task. "If you're starting to write a direct message and it's getting long, consider if it should be a quick call. The same goes for slack threads, if the topic is getting lost, "consider a call".
Radhika had some great tips about choosing the right communication channel when giving feedback. She advises that "giving feedback should always be done face to face". It helps ensure that your message is landing the way you intended.
How to get there
Consider the right communication channel for the job. Giving feedback should always be done face to face, and if things are getting lost in translation via chat tools - suggest a phone call.
Be conscious of tone and language when constructing written communication. Spend the time to use human, conversational language, and avoid overly abbreviated, short-form sentences.
Be Selfless.
Mentoring, creating opportunities, and elevating others is a critical part of leading that doesn't happen often enough.
Mentoring happens in many ways. Too often I see leaders miss the opportunity to grow someone's skills in an area of interest because they are delegating work based on what the team member 'can do' rather than what they 'want to do'. Luckily I've had the benefit of working with leaders who see the potential in someone, sometimes beyond what their job description might say, and then actively put people in positions where they will grow and gain the experiences they are looking for.
A good leader is defined by the success of their team. Shining light on your team's efforts within the company will lead to bigger, and better projects for the whole team. Elevating your team's efforts will also improve their sense of job satisfaction, build respect for you as a leader, and help create healthy team morale.
Radhika has some great feedback for leaders who are mentoring a team member into a leadership role (but this is great all-round advice for facilitating a healthy mentor, mentee relationship). She says "remember that people can lead in different ways. Try asking for outcomes and let them navigate there".
How to get there
Empower your team by providing them with opportunities that are in line with their respective goals.
Find moments to connect people within the company and shine a light on your team.
Avoid dictating solutions and instead set clear goals, intentions, and outcomes and let the team members explore how to get there.
Try bringing these practices to your day-to-day. No matter what level you are or where you sit within the organization, its possible to affect positive change – for yourself, for your team or at an organizational level. Start where you are and focus on affecting the things you can. Do this by focusing on creating a healthy culture, building relationships, focusing on communication and when appropriate, be selfless and shine a light on your team.
A special thank you again to the panelists for their valuable insights.
Donna Lichaw Independent Leadership and Executive Coach – @dlichaw
Michele Tepper Senior Design Manager at Salesforce – @michelet
Radhika Nayak SVP of Product at Kinesso – @radhikanayak