Applying the Multipliers Approach to Design Leadership

“A leader is someone who helps others lead” -Ela Bhatt

I recently attended an excellent training program at Salesforce around the concept of Multipliers, or leaders who access and revitalize the intelligence of the people around them. It’s incredibly common for leaders to fall in the habit of accidentally diminishing the abilities of their team. These leaders need to step away from being the “idea guy/gal” who has all of the answers or the “rescuer” who interferes to move things along more quickly, and instead move toward specific behaviors and actions that challenge and enable their team to grow and contribute at their highest level. In other words, become a Multiplier that is able to leverage the most of your team.

While the concept of being a Multiplier is not unique to the design world, after having gone through this program I began to think about how design leaders can leverage this concept to manage their design teams more effectively. Below are my top five learnings and how you can apply them as design leaders.

1. Shift from providing answers to asking questions

An effective design leader doesn’t just give their team the answers and expect them to execute against a given direction. Doing so can have negative effects, as described in Multipliers:

If a leader holds the assumption that it is a leader’s role to provide the answers and if the employees resign themselves to this mode of business, a downward Know-It-All spiral naturally follows. First, the leader provides all the answers. Second, subordinates wait for the directives they’ve come to expect. Third, the subordinates act on the leader’s answers. Finally, the leader concludes they would never have figured this out without me. -Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown in Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

Instead, provide just enough information and insight to help begin a process of discovery. Give your team a starting point that generates more questions than answers. This will encourage your team to fully evaluate a problem and explore solutions while instilling confidence that they’re doing so on a solid foundation. As soon as your team starts to come up with potential approaches or solutions, ask them hard questions that challenge them to think about their approach from other perspectives and to ensure they are considering all the factors that go into finding an effective solution.

Leading your team through questioning has many benefits:

• It unearths and challenges assumptions in old patterns and thinking, leading to increased creativity
• It forces your team to thoroughly examine facts and confront reality, instead of dismissing those facts or dealing with them later
• It ensures your team is considering multiple perspectives, and not just their own way of thinking
• It surfaces the tradeoffs that need to be considered that your team may not have been aware of or may not have considered thoroughly

Moving away from being the one who comes up with the answers and instead to one that trusts your team to come up with those answers can be difficult. It’s important to remember that your people are smart and will figure things out, otherwise you wouldn’t have hired them. By challenging their ideas and assumptions, and ensuring all angles have been considered, they’ll likely come up with even better ideas and solutions as a result.

2. Create a design environment that is both comfortable and intense

In order for designers to come up with great ideas and solutions, they need space to think and to work. Ensure that you’re giving your team the time needed to synthesize information in order to use it most effectively. In addition to creating space, encourage free thinking and contributions that help foster creativity. Allow your team to share everything they know and how they are thinking about a problem, and listen carefully in order to provide any necessary guidance (again, primarily by asking questions, not giving answers). This instills in your team that you trust them and will support them, and will not micromanage their ability to work through a problem. It will allow them to use their intelligence and their own abilities to truly own their work.

At the same time, having an overly relaxed environment can lead to lazy solutions, procrastination, and work that no one is really proud of. While it’s important to trust your team to own their own process and solutions, you must also create an intensity within your working environment that challenges your team to do their best thinking and produce their best work. This doesn’t mean you need to insist on a specific desired outcome, as that may be out of your team’s control which only causes unnecessary stress. Instead, requiring your team to produce their best work given their circumstances generates positive pressure to do solve problems in the best possible way. Design critique sessions are a great way to reinforce this need by encouraging the entire team to hold each other accountable for high quality work instead of it only coming from the design leadership.

3. Find each designer’s native genius

Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown discuss in Multipliers the concept of a “native genius” as something that people do, not only exceptionally well, but completely naturally without a lot of extra effort. Getting the most out of your designers requires that you deeply understand not just their skills, but which skills you can use to their fullest. This not only benefits the designer, but the entire team.

You can find someone’s native genius by carefully watching them in action, and seeing when they are genuinely excited and energized about their work and do it with minimal effort.

So what are some examples of native genius you can look for among designers?

• Deep and active listening skills
• Creative thinking and the ability to quickly explore many options
• Technical capability and awareness of new technologies
• Storytelling and clear presentation skills
• Ability to break down a complex vague problem into clear pieces
• Empathy, both for your users and for your team members
• Genuine curiosity and a passion for learning

These are skills that may not be readily apparent unless you’re really paying attention and looking for them, since from the designer’s point of view their native genius abilities just come naturally. You can find someone’s native genius by carefully watching them in action, and seeing when they are genuinely excited and energized about their work and do it with minimal effort. Once you have found their native genius, it’s important to make the designer aware of their ability, which helps raise their confidence and encourages them to use it as well as share it with others. Then you should look for opportunities that demand and would benefit from the capability. Match designers with these opportunities to leverage their intelligence as much as possible.

While leveraging your team’s native genius is important in order to get the most out of your team, it’s also important to identify gaps in their skillset that don’t come as naturally, in order to ensure constant growth. Encourage your team to learn from each other.

4. Encourage debates to help make difficult decisions or solve complex problems

Making decisions, especially when trying to solve complex problems where multiple potential directions could be valid, can be very difficult. Design leaders can fall into a trap of relying on the more senior members of their team, or another small inner circle of sorts, to make decisions. The problem with this is that some of the best insights may come from unexpected sources, and only through proper debate can those insights be teased out and used to influence the decision. If only a few people are allowed to contribute to important decision making, your team will be left not understanding the decision or how it was made. This causes a lack of trust in the solution being the right one, and often leads to a lack of desire to execute against the final decision.

Design leaders can help facilitate debates by:

• Framing the problem or the questions that need to be answered in new ways. Get to the core of a design or strategic problem instead of getting distracted by what might be a symptom of a bigger issue.
• Getting the right people involved. Often, this doesn’t just include the Design team. You will likely need to get inputs from the full cross-functional team including Product, Marketing, Engineering, Sales, etc. Knowledge about the problem may come from unexpected sources.
• Level-setting with the group regarding what they’re trying to solve. Make sure that it you don’t just state what needs to be addressed, but also why it’s important, and ensure it’s clear how you’re going to ultimately make the decision. Have all the information that is necessary to inform the conversation available.
• Facilitating informed decision making. Encourage everyone to share their perspective. Challenge the team to make data-based decisions, reduce subjectivity, refer back to the user and business problems you’re trying to solve, and to dig as deep into the issue as possible before making a decision. Continue to ask “why” until the team can defend their position thoroughly.
• Sharing your view last. If you share your views early on in the conversation, they can unintentionally over-influence the resulting decisions. By waiting to share your viewpoint, you can also be more informed as to whether the decision needs to be made by consensus or whether you need to step in to make the final call.

By challenging your team to come to conclusions by questioning what they know and thinking about problems in new ways, your team will become smarter over time and will be more confident in their ability to proceed based on the decisions that were made.

5. Delegate and instill accountability throughout the entire design lifecycle

One difference between a Multiplier leader and someone who diminishes the abilities of their team is in who takes ownership over your team’s activities and performance. It’s important to ensure that your designers take full ownership over their work and decisions, no matter whether those decisions ultimately turn out to be good or bad. Not only does this encourage your team to be self sufficient, but it also helps them take initiative, anticipate challenges, respond more effectively to what’s happening, and learn from their choices.

What does holding your team accountable look like in practice?

• Tell your team that they hold ownership over their work: Let your team know what is within their purview, and what they are expected to do and produce. Explicitly state that they are the ones who own their work, not the design leadership. Consider ways in which designers can own large pieces of an effort instead of limiting them to only a small piece in order to challenge them to apply their skills even further:

When people are given ownership for only a piece of something larger, they tend to optimize that portion, limiting their thinking to this immediate domain. When people are given ownership for the whole, they stretch their thinking and challenge themselves to go beyond their scope. -Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown in Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

• Set expectations for high engagement and quality work at all stages of the design process: From the moment a project begins through the late stages of implementation, ensure that your team understands what is expected of them at all times and what it means to be successful. This includes everything from exploring many ideas before arriving on a solution, producing high quality design assets, and delivering work on time and within scope. By setting high expectations, your team will start to hold themselves and each other to higher standards, and will continue to push each other to be better and better designers.
• Let your team make their own decisions: Micromanagement of projects results in your team becoming overly dependent on the leader to make decisions instead of gaining confidence in their own abilities. There is rarely only one way to solve a design problem. Allow your team to make their own calls on how to proceed. Provide guidance by questioning your team’s rationale, and encouraging the use of research and data to back up assumptions, but do not override your team’s decisions unless absolutely necessary.
• Provide help, but let your team maintain ownership: If your team is struggling, you can and should intervene to provide assistance. Teach, coach, share your ideas as a starting point. Then provide backup by giving them access to any resources needed to move forward so that they can act independently.
• Let the consequences happen, even if they’re negative: Sometimes design efforts don’t pan out as planned. Failure is a natural part of the learning process and is necessary in order to find areas of improvement. Let your team knows that they have permission to make mistakes, but that they’re also obliged to learn from them. Accountability should be maintained in both good and negative circumstances.
• Have your team dictate what they will do based on the results: Accountability doesn’t end at the conclusion of a particular effort. Allow your team to define their own next steps that will maintain what worked well and change what didn’t work well. Facilitate this type of “post mortem” to ensure all angles have been considered, but let your team make their own recommendations.

Being a Multiplier requires an investment. It’s not typically the natural way of leading, and requires a deep self-awareness of your actions. I still struggle with consistently applying many of these methods, and acknowledge that it’s easy to fall into old habits. But by making small changes in your approach, you can start to see changes in your team and ultimately, revitalize and bring out the most in them.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Mulipliers approach to leadership, I highly recommend taking a look at the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.