What is Design Leadership?
I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a Design Leader in the context of today and the state of design in our world, our markets, and our lives. As a result of my ongoing job search, I began looking into how I might become a more effective leader and how one attempts to do that. Where does a designer begin? I had a loose collection of thoughts, but what I uncovered put into perspective what I had inadvertently been leaving out of my professional narrative. Today I want to speak to the design leadership journey I took myself on, what I learned, and humbly ask for opinions, feedback, and personal insights.
Context: My Job Search
Over the last few months I have been on a job search journey that was both unexpected, but at the same time somewhat welcomed. At this point in my design career I had been mulling the idea of making a change that would better align with my personal and professional growth goals. There was some sort of design itch that I had been trying to ignore while focusing on my work and my family and the enjoyment of life itself. Being recently laid off as part of a workforce reduction, my immediate reaction was dismay. I had grown over the years with my fellow designers and I would miss them and the achievements we had accomplished together. I also felt freedom to begin the journey of searching for the right role – even if I did not know yet exactly what that was.
One thing that I was well aware of in the beginning is that the further up one grows in level and experience, the fewer and fewer positions are available. Due, in many cases, to high demand and low supply. This is true for Design and most functional roles in established organizations. Instead senior talent will often forge out on their own, start their own businesses, private practices, or change careers altogether. I have been a designer since I was 8 years old – I’ve been drawing race cars, airplanes, and cityscapes since the 3rd grade and even won awards at an early age. I simply have no interest in letting a context that includes competition for fewer roles force me out of who I inherently am.
However, the feedback I have been receiving during my job search has not been entirely helpful. There are three types of feedback I have received in response to the roles that I nearly landed. First, there has been honest feedback which I am very appreciative of and have taken to heart. Second, there have been cases of absolutely no feedback. Those are especially tough moments, when after multiple rounds of interviews, in person and over video conferences, time spent engaging and establishing a positive report, that a Workday automated script sends me an emotionless email notification that I am no longer a candidate. Then there is the last, most frustrating type of feedback: the blow off. This is the type of feedback that is so obviously created out of a duty to send something rather than provide anything meaningful. The most absurd blow off feedback I received to date was for a role requiring 2 years minimum management experience. The feedback, conveyed through a recruiter, was “We are looking for someone with more management experience.” I won’t recite my experience credentials, but one glance at my resume would indicate I have plenty. I would almost prefer no feedback than receive something as valueless as this.
But it got me thinking…
A Design Problem
What If I take this feedback seriously? What if I treat the non-feedback as some indicator that I didn’t effectively communicate my leadership skills and experience? This was the real impetus for this design leadership journey and the driving question behind treating it as a design problem. At the beginning of any design problem, I began by articulating for myself what I believe to be true today. I had been using four primary categories as a structure for how I speak to questions of design leadership in my job applications, on my resume, and during interviews. They are Empathy, Communication, Vision, and Mentorship. I used these categories more so as a way to organize my thoughts rather than as a meaningful framework to approaching design leadership. (I often would relate specific examples or scenarios that fell into these four areas.) So it is at this point I had a context for what I needed to go out and discover. Was there anything that my four loose buckets couldn’t account for? What would need to change for me to adapt to what I discover?
The next step was to go out and learn. I took a look back at what experiences, conversations and advice I had received from various peers and mentors over the years had formed my basic philosophy in order to understand the trajectory of my thinking. I also spent time reading articles on the topic of design leadership and even examined a few design leadership course syllabi I found published around the web. It wasn’t long before I had collected several dozen traits that describe attributes of Design Leadership. There are a lot of opinions to be gathered, but I was looking to find patterns from sources that I had come to respect including IDEO U, Medium, Fast Company, Abstract and others. I took note of where perspectives reinforced each other and where they diverged.
Then I began the process of sorting through the information collected, looking for major themes. Using a rudimentary card sorting exercise I was able to uncover that the traits can be roughly divided into two categories: those that are intrinsic and those that are instrumental. Intrinsic traits are those that are valuable on their own in the context of Design Leadership, and instrumental traits are those that are valuable in relation to the intrinsic or other traits. For example, being able to provide actionable feedback is instrumentally valuable to an honest and candid leader which are more intrinsically valuable traits on their own.
What I Learned
Eventually I was able to line up a lot of what I had learned with my original four categories, which was reassuring. In addition, I did learn a few things that I had not anticipated. Three things that I had not considered was 1) being able to speak to being a practitioner-leader, 2) how I lead myself in order to lead others, and 3) how I convey my creative philosophy.
First, a lot of what I had read underscored the value of being a design practitioner as well as a design leader. Often this type of role is termed a “contributing manager”. In my time as a designer, I have never worked under a design leader who was not in some way a contributor or executing some aspect of their design practice. Designers are inherently a hands-on group of people, so it stands to reason. Though, I had read a post recently from someone writing about how they didn’t want a design leadership role because they believed that somehow they would have to give up the act of designing in order to do so. What I learned reinforced the ideas of leading though example, setting the bar of work ethic, establishes a gold standard for the team.
Second, something that I had not thought about, but is very important for a design leader, is the idea of "leading self". This is something that I had thought is maybe a bit introspective or not something to consider as a quality to speak at great length to. However, I have now come to understand how important it is to qualify how I have allowed myself to be open-minded, my willingness to fail, my acceptance of feedback, the ongoing enrichment of my viewpoint, etc., all as a part of being a better designer and design leader.
Last, and this was the big “ah-ha” for me, is the importance of Creativity (duh!) as a key attribute of Design Leadership. In that moment I realized that I had not been addressing, through any of my design leadership job searching activities, the critical component of how to lead and manage a creative function. I had been treating creativity as something that potential employers and hiring managers would likely take as granted, simply because I have extensive experience listed on my resume and in my portfolio. What I had been leaving out is how I speak to creativity and my philosophy and actions of being a creative leader. And it is such an immensely important aspect for a hiring audience to hear! Creativity is not only fundamentally important to design leadership, but is also connected to leading of self, leading others and creative collaboration. Inspiring your team, expanding the comfort zone during ideation, and partnering with cross-functionals to embrace forward thinking are just a few of actions a design leader should be speaking to when prompted to “Tell us about what makes you a good creative leader.”
What Does it Mean?
At the end of this thought exercise, I have come to understand a few things that I had been leaving out of my professional narrative as a designer searching for a leadership role. I now know that I have something to improve on in the future, and that’s great. I have also rearranged a bunch of words in Figma as a part of that process, but I don’t think that collection of words alone merits much beyond its usefulness to the exercise. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I am a process nerd and collector of design-related frameworks. I have quite a collection and use them to inspire myself and others to think around big design problems.
I would like to take this thinking forward and build something of value for the design community, but I’m not quite there yet. In my opinion, a good framework needs to check two boxes to have any value: It needs to be interesting and it needs to be useful. Below I have created a very rough draft of where my brain is heading. It definitely needs work. I may even scrap it and start over and continue iterating.
I would really like to hear what the design community thinks – about the exercise and the potential framework. Am I missing anything incredibly obvious or not so obvious? Is my thinking grossly incompatible with your perspective and experiences? Please share! I’m on a journey and I am genuinely hungry to build on this. Thanks for reading. -TR
