Design is hard. Design leadership is harder.

Design is hard. Design leadership is harder. And they’re both getting harder.

Design is hard

It was 1996. I was training as an Industrial Designer. Tackling an assignment for a new PDA. After eight hours and my sixteenth model, I thought I was getting there. I was realising that design was more than ideas. More than just words and pictures. It took a lot of effort. As long as I wanted to do something original or good that is. And I was only concerned about the physical form its ergonomics at that stage. Design was hard. But it was managable as long as I put in the effort.

Shoot forwards twenty one years, and I find myself doing more hands-on design work again. Conceiving ideas and presenting them. Often less physical. A lot more complex. Without the confidence that they are right. That others will value them. I know how to produce something appealing. To produce something original. To produce something good. I also know how to persuade. To wrap a logical argument around irrational (and rational) hypotheses. But after over twenty years of doing this that doesn’t mean to say my ideas will always land. Because… humans.

They are different. Hard to understand. Not always honest. They don’t always have the time you need of them to break through these challenges. Design is hard. It’s getting harder.

Design leadership is harder

Over the past week I spent two days at the second Leading Design conference. And one day at UX Live running a workshop around reflecting on who you are as a designer. With friends from around the world — London to the Bay area and across Europe. With many peers. Some younger than me. Some more experienced than me. People at the start of their leadeship journey — whether they wanted it or not. The first day was emotional for me.

Hearing confident, famous, and successful leaders struggle. Struggle with some of the same things I struggled with as a leader. It was honest. It was heartfelt. And it was important for all attendees to hear these personal accounts and reflections. To lower the barriers of arrogance. Of masked confidence. To connect to people on the human level. Design leadership is hard.

About four years ago I left one of my favourite jobs. Great people. A family I had helped to create. A successful business. I had a great new opportunity to take my career in a different direction. But, I also needed to get out.

In my talk at 2016’s Leading Design conference, I ad-libbed. I knew it wasn’t being recorded so I reflected on one of my biggest mistakes. Not checking personal references on people I was hiring when I was building my A Team.

Formal references, in UK at least, are next to useless. You are lucky if you get anything more than a start and end date for an employee. But informal references from people in your network are gold. It just feels a bit awkward asking at times. And sometimes I would let it slip.

The mistake I made was failing to do this twice at the same time for two different hires. Unfortunately, the judgment I could make from interviews, cv and folio reviews wasn’t enough. These processes wouldn’t have told me about the challenges in their personal lives. The challenges of being disliked by most of their peers despite being a good designer.

In that job that I loved. In that team I had created. I was responsible for hiring two people that would end up being toxic to me and the team. I had to manage them. Hear their sides. Then hear the concerns from my clients, my other team members, my boss, and my peers. I sought help from HR. They were supportive. But they favoured a l0ng-winded process geared towards legal protection. It did little to help me deal with some horrible dilemmas.

That someone who I saw as a friend was trying to pull together a constructive dismissal case against me.

That our client for our biggest project loved what one of them was doing. But the (very) large and talented team was getting more and more frustrated at having to deal with him. Degrading their confidence in me.

I didn’t get to resolve my mistakes. There’s nothing more frustrating to a designer than not getting to an effective solution. I can’t go back in time. I can’t go and change my team’s perception of me.

Luckily I had an exit. But my team had to survive without their leader. I was someone that many people had joined for. I was part of the reason why many stayed. In some ways, I had failed. Creating a team that was reliant on one individual for its stability and its direction was another failing of my leadership. I hated leaving my team. But I needed to escape. And I needed to prove a few things to myself and take my career in a different direction.

I hope the examples above don’t resonate with you. But I’m sure if you have managed or led design teams you might relate to some of the following:

• Building a team with little time and support, in a competitive market
• Getting rid of someone who isn’t performing, whom you personally like
• Resolving conflict between two team members
• Supporting a team on a project with an unrealistic plan that you designed
• Counselling one of your team as they tell you they are getting a divorce
• Trying to find an opportunity for a part time role for one of your best hires as she returns from maternity leave
• Selling a huge new project that you don’t have the resources for
• Confronting someone who you know has a drug problem, because you have seen it first hand
• Reassuring people that the acquisition was positive, when you yourself were escaping

Design leadership is hard.

I have been lucky to have support from some great managers in my career.

‘Shit is fertilising!’

‘Shit was fertilising’ was the phrase that Marcus Mustafa used to use with me whenever things were getting tough. He was right. Simplistic yes, but it helped me recognise the challenges I faced as fuel for the future.

But, your managers are not always there. And the more senior you get, the less likely they will understand the difficulty of designers.

They are passionate. They are emotional. They can have skewed views of their own talents. Over confident or lacking any confidence at all. They are different shapes of skills and experiences. Their ideals don’t match many others’ in business. Their brain wiring has them more susceptible to depression and hedonism.

For the same reason that design is hard. Design leadership is harder.

Because you have to manage those that design. That deal with these difficulties. You have to lead with this team of volatile visionaries. They can surprise you with their brilliance. Or disappoint you with their lack of professionalism. You have to say with confidence to others that they will help solve the challenges a business face.

You have to be a motivating force to your team. When you are over-tired, over-stretched and facing your own depressive tendencies. When you are masking your inner turmoil.

Who motivates the motivator?

They’re both getting harder

When design disciplines were distinct, there were decades of craftmanship, and industry behind them. I can’t think of any design discipline that doesn’t have to consider way more complexity now. If you are an Industrial Designer, you have to appreciate more about what UX means in this new world. If you are a graphic designer, you have to understand digital.

All the change is exciting. But it’s unstable.

People in UX, Digital or the newer Service Design fields are struggling. For clarity. Agreement. As tools get more simple, the challenges get more complex. More people to interact with. Less clarity on what might work. Less chance that your efforts will go anywhere for any lasting amount of time. More and more people are flooding into design through the open doors of UX and Service Design.

The greatest reason for success of these new fields of design, in my view, is the greatest reason they are at risk. Open doors. More accessible tools. Documented dogma. Defined diamonds. Reductionist views on what design is and should be.

With all the many backgrounds, paths and mindsets. With mixed understanding of what good or original design feels like. With so much hype and furore. With so much demand. So little supply of the right level. The shapes of these designers is getting ever more complex. And so building and maintaining a team is harder. Selling and convincing others of what that team can do in a certain amount of time is even harder.

Design is getting harder for all the team. Design leadership is getting even harder.

To paraphrasse Simon Doggett, in his talk Fail, Scale or Bail, we need to support each other. Our relationships will last longer than the project, or the product. Longer than our current jobs.

Design leadership is getting harder, but the field is getting larger. We need to lower our barriers and keep connected. To support each other. To coach each other. Debate the nuance. And not feel alone.