Retain & Develop
Kick-Ass Designers
Part 2: Mastery
This is the second 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.
Ever since I was a child I have had this urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.
- Bruce Lee
Everyone wants to get better at what they do.
Much has been written about the importance of excelling at what you do. Daniel Pink identifies mastery as one of the pillars of motivation in the workplace. Prior to that, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — in his seminal work Flow; The Psychology of Optimal Experience — highlights how people are the happiest and most satisfied when they’re engaged in what they’re really good at.
Fortunately, your designers don’t have to wait until they’re masters before they feel the positive effects of mastery. The pursuit of mastery — the journey — is full of rich, rewarding moments to sustain motivation and satisfaction on the job.
Classes, Workshops, Conferences
Your designers can develop mastery from formal education — organized learning taught by an instructor or facilitator. Identify learning goals with your designers that they can work towards with the help of coursework and provide budget for it every year. Make it a regular thing.
That said, it’s important to keep formalized educational opportunities in perspective. As a former educator, I’m a huge fan of continued education and lifelong learning, but there are barriers to formalized learning: cost, time away from the office, and the fact that many classes aren’t directly connected to the daily work that designers are engaged in.
Consider formalized coursework to be a valuable option for fostering mastery within your team. But it’s just one.
There are opportunities to help your team learn and grow every day. The key is to deliberately look for learning moments and create a culture that allows them to surface daily.
Teaching Them To Fish
The adage “It’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them a fish” is easier to say than to carry out. Why? Because teaching takes time. Just like we discussed in Part One: Ownership & Autonomy, you’re playing the long game. Don’t think of it as lost time; think of it as an investment. Take the time to make reflection and growth part of the every day conversation.
“This workshop went really well. Let’s talk about why. What was different about this workshop compared to the last one?”
One Percent
Mastery doesn’t happen all at once. Your designers don’t wake up one day and suddenly they’re experts. Small moments of growth happen all the time, every day. Everyone is constantly getting a little better at something—one percent at a time. Don’t let those moments slip by without celebrating them.
I’d like to thank Jay Goldman and his co-authors for describing the 1% focus in their book, The Decoded Company. It’s an excellent read for anyone interested in being deliberate about knowing their own employees better.
Think about your previous week at work. Did you learn anything? Is there something that you got 1% better at? It doesn’t have to be something particularly profound—although it could be. Here are examples that we’ve had over the past year.
- My 1% this week was getting better at working with really large files in Illustrator. When the file was bogging down, Mark suggested I copy a design element (i.e. a top navigation menu), drop it into a new document, work on it there, and then paste it back into the master file.
- We came up with a new way to integrate browse and search [in this design] using the tiles approach.
- Hilary helped me realize that we have to stop thinking about the homepage as something that explains what the product does. Instead, the entire site experience is the product; the user starts to engage right on the homepage.
- I learned a cool new transition that we used on the Cruiseable app design.
- My 1% was a continuation of last week’s: I learned how helpful this new ToDo system is. Specifically, to have all my todos in one place and only one place.
- After a couple note-taking strategy sessions, I improved my turnaround time with information-dense notes dramatically. I did less work, absorbed more info, and supported the team with concise, quick notes.
Celebrate Mistakes
Mistakes are a critical and necessary part of growth and mastery, so embrace the process with your designers. When your designer makes a mistake, help him or her learn from it, feel OK about it, and move forward. Just like the design process is iterative, so is the process of mastery. There’s no shame in improving a design, just like there’s no shame in making mistakes.
“Don’t let this get you down. It’s part of the process. For the immediate next steps, let’s figure out what the project needs right now. Then, we can talk about what we’ll do differently next time. Remember, this is how we get better at what we do.”
This doesn’t mean that we should set out to make as many mistakes as possible, but hopefully the mistakes we make are new mistakes. So, when debriefing and learning from mistakes, ask your team if there are things that can be done differently next time, systematically and programmatically, that will minimize the mistake from happening again.
Deliberate Culture of Growth and Mastery
A good sign that you’ve got a culture of growth and the pursuit of mastery is when everyone on the team talks regularly about what they’re learning. When everyone asks questions all the time. When they ask themselves and each other what worked well and what they can do differently next time. When it’s an integral part of their 1:1s. When it’s part of your All Hands meetings.
It’s a beautiful thing. A team that’s trying to learn and grow together — developing mastery — is a motivated team.
Culture. It’s huge. It’s the foundation for everything. Let’s get right into it in Part Three: Environment & Culture.
