Retain & Develop
Kick-Ass Designers
Part 1: Ownership & Autonomy
This is the first article in a 10-part series for design managers and directors called How to Retain and Develop Kick-ass Designers. You can find the overview of all 10 parts here in the Introduction.
“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”
- Daniel H. Pink
Engendering your designers with a sense of ownership and autonomy boils down to giving them the ability and authority to make decisions.
The Problem with “The Owner”
It’s easy to imagine your design director being the owner of the design. She can handle just about anything. She sets the vision. She manages and guides the other designers.
While this is great in lots of ways — clarity of decision making, vision setting, and so on—there’s a downside: if we limit ownership to one person, then everyone else on the project will be less engaged and less satisfied.
(Note: this is true for all disciplines, but for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on design.)
Ownership isn’t all-or-nothing. Instead of thinking of one person owning a project, think of everyone owning all sorts of decisions, tasks, and challenges at every level all the time. Your designers are presented with ownership opportunities every day. It’s up to you to let them know they have decision-making authority.
Of course, not all designers are the same and not all challenges are the same; you’ll have to align the two.
Goldilocks’ Bed
In the story The Three Bears, the bear family was out for the night. Goldilocks broke in and was trying out different beds. The first one was too hard. The second one was too soft. Then, she found the one that was just right.
It’s like that with ownership and autonomy. You want to provide the right amount. If you don’t give enough ownership or autonomy, your designers will feel like they’re just order takers. They won’t feel as invested. They won’t feel as creative. The bed you’re making for them is too soft.
On the flip side, it’s not as simple as turning to any designer saying, “Here, you have all the authority and ownership of the project. You get to run it however you want and all the decisions are yours.” If that designer is brand new, or the project is complex, or the relationships are extra political, or any number of other challenges, then you could be setting her up for failure. That bed’s gonna be too hard.
So, how do we find the right bed; how do we give designers the right decisions, tasks, and challenges?
Task, I’d like to introduce Ability. Ability, I’d like you to meet Task.
Across your designers, you’ve got a bunch of different skills and abilities. And there are just as many different types of challenges, tasks, and responsibilities. Your job is to play matchmaker. What kinds of projects has he done before? In which situations did he shine? Which ones didn’t work well? What can he be coached on?
This is closely related to the fourth article in this Series, Part Four: Variety and Fit of the Work. The difference is that autonomy and ownership is focused on the ability to handle the task at hand, while variety and fit is about the designers’ preferences and desires for a certain type of project.
What Can Be Owned? … Just About Everything
At a higher, more senior level, there are decisions to be made like Who’s going to work on this project? Which features are we going to include in the next release? Which design direction are we moving forward with? Is the market getting tired of this interaction style? Designers who can handle these decisions are undoubtedly the same ones that can run a presentation, advocate for a design, and manage stakeholder expectations.
But don’t stop there. Every part of the design process presents opportunities for decisions to be made. There are many other steps in the process of getting a design together that your less senior designers can handle. What kind of transition should we use here? How could I simplify this one step even more? What’s a good user-research strategy to assess this interaction? Should we break up this process for the end-user or keep it as one process? How does the color palette work if we extend it like this?
A designer without autonomy will constantly turn to those “in charge” to figure out what to do. The designer with autonomy, on the other hand, will feel empowered to explore, try new things, and will likely come up with better and more creative solutions; because he feels invested.
Scaffolding and Coaching
It’s counterintuitive, but providing autonomy sometimes requires you to be more involved, just in a different way. When you’ve got multiple designers and unlimited challenges big and small, you’ll always have situations pop up where a designer needs support.
Play the long game; you’re teaching them to fish instead of giving them a fish. Instead of stepping in and making decisions for the designer, help the designer through the decision-making process. You’re providing support today to scaffold them for tomorrow. Consider your coaching efforts to be investments in your designers’ abilities.
We had a smart, eager designer who was learning fast. She wanted to help in any way she could to make the project go smoothly with our client. She was interested not only in doing design, but also wanted to help with project organization and communicating what’s happening on the project. As an agency, the way we communicate with clients and what we include in an update is important enough that we need to pay attention to it just like we pay attention to our design solutions.
We coached her. At first, she observed how the project updates were written. She asked questions and the process was explained. The same thing happened the following week. The week after that, she wrote the first draft and she was coached on how it was revised. This went on for a couple more weeks until her drafts were barely changed. She liked the feeling of ownership of not only doing the design, but also communicating the updates with the client.
A few months later, a different designer wanted to do the same thing. He was working on a small project, running most of the design decisions with support from our design director. The project was straight forward and he wanted to write the weekly update. This time around, the first designer was the one who showed him how.
The first designer still received coaching. In this case, she was coached on how to coach the second designer. In education circles, this is referred to as the Train-the-Trainer approach, which we’ll save for a future article.
This example is purposefully a non-design example, to spell out the concepts. For design, coaching can come in many forms. A designer might show their designs to the design director and say What do you think of this design? There are a few things the design director could coach the designer on, depending on the situation.
- “Let me coach you. Assume I haven’t thought about this design challenge and/or I’ve been distracted by others. I need context. Try again and this time remind me what you’re working on and where it was the last time we looked at it.”
- “How do you think we should we evaluate the design? What are we trying to solve here? What guiding design principles did we come up with for this project?”
- “Tell me about how you came up with the design. Walk me through your thinking. What do you think are the strengths of this direction? What are the weaknesses?”
Of course, not every decision needs this analysis, but when in doubt, there are usually things you can do to help your designers be more autonomous the next time.
For autonomy and ownership, your designers need to experience the act of making decisions. The need practice. And they need your help knowing how to practice smartly and correctly.
One of my martial arts instructors used to ask class, “Practice makes what?” The newbie, uninitiated would shout out “Perfect!” Common answer, but unfortunately it’s not true. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes habits. If your designer is practicing mindlessly, or without proper guidance, he’ll practice bad habits. It’s gotta be deliberate, guided practice. They’ll need your support and coaching on how to make decisions.
The Hardest Part: Letting Mistakes Happen
You can’t give autonomy without letting go of control. You can’t let go of control without allowing mistakes to happen. And that’s hard to do!
(Note: In the next article — on Mastery—we’ll say more about having a culture of embracing mistakes and managing them well.)
When you give autonomy and it doesn’t work out well — when mistakes are made — it’s an opportunity to assess the decisions you made about giving autonomy. Did the designer have the abilities you thought? Was the challenge more difficult than anticipated? Which specific details could you focus on next time to ascertain the difficulty level? Did the designer have access to systems, standards, and tools to operate autonomously?
Open up the question to those involved. “Let’s look at what happened here. What went well? What didn’t go well? What should we continue to do next time? What can we improve?”
Sometimes the answer boils down to one hard truth: as the manager, you put them into a situation they simply weren’t ready for. That’s OK, but make sure to take responsibility. When you get it wrong, own it, and treat it like any other learning experience: you debrief, understand what happened, and decide how to make a better decision the next time.
We had two designers working on a great project for one of our favorite clients. One designer, Mia, was more experienced than Dave (names changed to protect the innocent). They were both jamming on multiple design directions. We were over-delivering: beautiful and ground-breaking approaches and more directions than we set out to create. We’d also worked with this client before and had a great relationship.
Our design director had just started maternity leave and I was filling in. Mia, the more experienced designer, had presented work in the first client review meeting. Dave was working on directions that would be ready for the second review.
As we approached the second review, we were so excited about the designs that we didn’t prep enough. We didn’t discuss the flow of the meeting ahead of time. I didn’t take the time to assess if Dave was ready to present (especially important considering there were some high-ranking client stakeholders in this meeting).
The meeting itself was okay. It wasn’t amazing; it wasn’t at the presentation standards that we have — and Dave could feel it. Fortunately, they loved the designs, the meeting was fine, and the project was a great success.
When we debriefed internally, we identified that we should’ve prepped better, rehearsed, etc. I also needed to take responsibility for putting Dave in that position; it was a bad call on my part.
To help Dave develop his abilities to present, we decided to find ways to practice at the right level. Plan for rehearsal time. Start with meetings that are less critical. Have Dave present just a portion of a meeting.
Autonomy doesn’t mean Dave gets thrown to the wolves. Autonomy needs be thoughtfully decided all the time. And, your designers need to know that decisions like who’s going to present are decisions that they don’t have to make alone.
The Best Part
Giving autonomy and ownership to your team is not only great for their individual satisfaction, it’s terrific for you and your group as a whole. You’ll have more time for what you need to focus on: mentoring, innovation, recruiting, process improvements, trend watching, and all the other things that need your attention to make your team great.
Next up, we’ll cover growth and development in Part Two: Mastery.
