Framing design leadership — Part 2
Early patterns across different leadership styles
A couple of weeks ago Martina and I quickly framed some key areas of design leader responsibility. You can read a summary of our thinking here.
We discussed these with friends and peers over the past few weeks. At Interaction 18 conference in Lyon. And also in chats around London and online with people hundreds of miles away.
We wanted to highlight some of our early learnings. Let us know what you think of these?
Opacity of vision and strategy
One of the key areas of confusion, disagreement and uncertainty came around our use of the term ‘vision’. This isn’t surprising. It means many different things to different people. People would often mention other aspects they felt were missing. Including the notions of inspiration, proactivity, KPIs, and articulating design’s value to an organisation. All of which seemed like they were missing from the framework. For us, they folded into the ‘vision’ category, but we were uncomfortable with the term. Likewise we were uncomfortable with the ‘strategy’ team. Say it so much in so many different ways, it becomes meaningless.
Capabilities vs. team
Another area of confusion was the differentiation between capabilities and team. We wanted to try to emphasise that the team aspects were more about he individuals, their careers, and the team culture. The ‘capabilities’ related to understanding capabilities within and beyond the team. So, would include external contractors, suppliers, and colleagues across the business. Maybe this was too unclear, despite the sentiment being sound. We just can’t see design and ux capabilities scaling within a dedicated perm design team alone.
Selling vs. people management
One of the patterns we observed was that some people were less interested in the people aspect, and more in the selling of the work. It wasn’t clear if this was because they didn’t have the time, or the inclination to spend with the team. We didn’t probe too much but expect it to be both.
Work quality + doing the work vs. people management
Another pattern which we had anticipated was the emphasis on work quality rather than people. We had expected leaders to have aspects of QA on process, strategy and craft in their roles. And it wasn’t surprising that some leaders wanted to still be hands-on. It was one of our underlying hypotheses that there was a gravitational pull back to ‘delivery work’ if you had a designer background.
Leaders doing too much, and not enough
One common pattern, which was actually one of the motivators of this work was around capacity. We found a lot of design leaders being expected to cover many different areas. Each requiring considerable effort to do well. This was exhausting for many of the people we spoke to, and they didn’t feel like they were able to do things to the best of their abilities. Not only that, but their bosses, colleagues and team members didn’t see all this effort. And were expecting them to do more elsewhere. These mismatches of expectations, visibility of effort, and limited time, have contributing to rising imposter syndrome. Where design leaders are feeling like they need to over-compensate for their ‘inadequacies’ by putting more time in.
Design leadership vs general leadership
Something that has come up repeatedly are questions around what aspects of leadership are particular to design. My heart sinks at this point. I know I could refer back and reference a lot of leadership literature. I know this will take a long time. But I feel it would be an ocean boiling exercise. Instead, i’d prefer to come at this from the point of view of design’s struggle. But maybe i’m wrong. So, what aspects are particular to design? The people we lead? How emotive they are? How emotionally demanding they are as a result? The level of self-doubt that they can have? The level of perfection they strive for? The notion that design is more vocational than other careers? What do you think?
Challenging the tyrannical design leader archetype
As part of our discussions, Martina and I have been most heated when discussing the common pattern of the tyrannical design leader. The ones that shit on you from greatest heights. Tear your work to pieces. Are rude. Build a culture of fear. Make you work the weekends. This is a classic archetype often associated with Creative Directors in advertising. But it’s also common in Industrial Design, and even certain CEOs eg, Steve Jobs. As a result it is one that many try to follow. It feels like the dominant model of leadership in the pursuit of design excellence. I believe it would be stupid to ignore this and just say it’s wrong. We both believe it has its issues and isn’t a good archetype to follow. But… we need more examples. I’d like to explore this some more in a separate post.
