An interview with Tutti Taygerley
Tutti Taygerly is a leadership coach who helps creatives and technologists embrace their unique leadership styles to achieve professional impact. Tutti has 20+ years of experience and has led design teams at startups, design agencies, and large tech companies, most recently at Facebook supporting video products.
We chatted to Tutti ahead of her two Masterclasses at Leading Design Festival this March.
What has 2020 taught you about design leadership?
Tutti: That change is constant. It’s happening all around us. 2020 has been this crazy year of change and it’s tested all of us.
I don’t think any of us really like change, even those of us who have made a career out of embracing it. For most of us, this has probably been one of the hardest years emotionally of our lives with the isolation and the uncertainty. It’s exacerbated our core personality, especially those of us who are data-led; like to figure out all the facts and then pick a course of action. All our usual methods don’t work, because we’re working with information that’s constantly shifting and because we’re in a soup of changing emotions.
It feels like 2020 is a perfect metaphor for the design process and design leadership. It’s like a brand new project. When you start it, here’s what you think is going to happen. But actually, j/k, that’s not the way it’s going to go. There’s another setback. And another one. And from there, you see the shape of the project. I look at a lot of the events this year as being about design constraints. There are design constraints from your organisation about how you show up as a leader and what you can do. There are design constraints around how you inspire your team: how you keep them motivated, feeling safe and feeling human and how you support them as a servant leader.
How can design leaders pave the way for people from all types of backgrounds to realise their leadership potential?
Tutti: You have to first do your own work. To better understand historic systems of injustices and to understand what it means to be in the minority. This is the stuff that I’ve been involved in for decades through all the companies that I’ve worked at. The very first baby step is actually acknowledging that there’s a systemic problem. I would say we are all in some ways, racist. And if that is the underlying knowledge, then it’s like, “Alright. With this, what can I do?” What can we do to educate ourselves? What can we do to elevate the voice of others? What can we do to help design leaders of all backgrounds?
We don’t need to amplify the stories we already know. What we need to do is find the quieter voices, the stories we’ve never heard, the surprising ones, the unique ones, the different ones, and amplify that. We can do that each day with the voices in the room with us, with our purchasing decisions, and with who we read. We can do this in all aspects of our lives.
One of the things I love the most about design leadership is we’re all inherently trained to be curious and ask questions. Having curiosity as the basic premise is how you learn about other people’s backgrounds and heritage that are different than yours.
Being innately curious. Is that what made you want to become a coach in the first place?
Tutti: One of the things that I realised about three jobs ago is that while I loved doing products and digital things. I was getting more and more fascinated with the psychology of people and how things work. I realised that I was spending most of my passion on side projects, such as company culture. Then Facebook really taught me to be a really really good manager. I’d been doing it for 10–12 years before but the training, the support and the philosophy at Facebook really gave me the ability to shine and truly adopt servant leadership. To support the designers on my team as well as engineers, product managers and all the people on the greater teams that I was leading.
One of my side projects was leadership workshops for women in technology. These are women at Facebook, so both technical women as well as women in sales and marketing, and I was doing it all over the world. It was so different when you look at some of the philosophies in North America versus the United Kingdom versus the Middle East, and I just got more and more fascinated with this. I also got my own coach probably about eight or nine years ago and found it transformational.
When I left Facebook, I was pretty burned out. While I was interviewing for other jobs, as part of taking a break, I started attending workshops and classes to better understand the craft of coaching. I’d had decades working on the craft of design but I was coaching more intuitively from being a leader and working with people. Now I was curious about the craft of coaching. And I fell utterly in love with coaching after my first or second workshop.
And that’s when I decided I was going to transition and become a professional coach, which really has been all the things that were bringing the most joy in the last 7 years as a design leader. After doing this for a couple of years I realize that I coach as a designer. I help people find their North Stars. I help push them to bigger North Stars. I help them dream bigger and visualise what that feels like. And then we work on how to get their milestones and experiments in place to move towards that dream. It feels like what I do right now is such a perfect blend of all the things I love.
What are some of the main challenges that people can come to you with?
Tutti: Something that’s been a huge surprise to me is most of my clients are women, people of colour or immigrants. There are conflicting messages around leadership presence, especially for women and people of colour because there is a predominantly white male ‘This is how leadership should be’ subtext. Many people I coach come to me with the question ‘what’s my leadership style?’. This is especially relevant when they may have gotten feedback and criticism in the past that they’re a difficult person whether it’s being too loud, too aggressive, or not loud enough in the right ways.
I want to celebrate and encourage the people I work with to celebrate all their strengths and their quirkiness. On one hand, you may be known as a difficult person, but on the other hand, that means that you’re passionate; you have conviction; you care a lot about your ideas. And part of the work is unpacking all those feelings. What is the hurt that that part of your leadership is causing others? Many times it boils down to communication and relationships. So there’s a huge area of leadership presence, leadership style and leadership voice that I coach people on.
Another common theme is wearing ‘busy-ness’ as a badge of honour. There’s a sense of juggling all-the-things — client work, leadership presentations, creating your next design roadmap, building cross-functional relationships — it can be really overwhelming. I work with people to understand what really matters to them. This involves finding a sense of white space to re-discover the joy of creation, the joy of leadership, the joy of inspiring a team — all the stuff that gets lost under all the weight of busy-ness, to-do lists and milestones.
How has your leadership style evolved as you’ve travelled from design agencies to start-ups to large tech companies?
Tutti: It’s evolved a lot. The bulk of my early leadership was 10 years spent in design agencies, including five years at Method Design. I would say my first, very natural style of leadership was command and control. I was very particular with high expectations. I cared a lot about how things were done. I cared so much about the quality of the deliverable and, as an agency there’s an additional level of perfection that feels like it’s needed. I was working in that organisation at a time where leadership was much more performative. Of course, collaboration and relationship mattered, but it was more about selling the big idea. And I think that led to a command and control style.
This evolved rapidly as I started working at startups, where my style became much more entrepreneurial and iterative. We all have a role, we all can figure it out, we all can do it, and we can do it together. The last major evolution of my design leadership was into a servant leadership model. Facebook, as well as the last start up I worked at before Facebook, taught me about being a servant leader. You hire people that are way smarter and way more talented than yourself. You hire people that don’t think like you because they’ll provide valuable other perspectives. And you serve them fiercely to give them the autonomy to do their job. The most important thing you can do is work yourself out of a job, make it so that you create other leaders around you. Hire, build, grow, and teach a successor to lead yourself out of a job. Which opens up more opportunities for every leader, including yourself.
Finally, what have you read, watched or listened to in 2020, that’s had an impact on you?
Tutti: This year it was The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It’s one of those books I go back to over and over again. One of the reasons that it resonates so much is that I typically work with a tonne of high performers but many of us have an upper limit problem which is completely self-imposed. People may think ‘well, that’s a huge achievement already for a woman, or for someone who maybe is the first member of their family to go to college, or an immigrant, or someone with a working-class background’. The book challenges this fake limiting belief we put on ourselves.
We’re delighted to have Tutti running two Masterclasses at #LDFest in March. How To Work With Difficult People (waiting list only) and How to Work with Difficult People… When You’re the Difficult Person on 23rd March.
