Design Leadership: On Being Robust and Resilient
Design leaders can use these qualities to create an emotional armour to lean on in tough situations
This is the second in a series of articles on the subject of design leadership (here’s the first installment). In this article I’m going to attempt to tackle the topic of robustness and resilience and why, as leaders in any field, our psychological and emotional fortitude is something we need to recognise, acknowledge, and develop.
Our emotional armour
Let’s face it, leadership can be a tough gig. There is an expectation that folks can, and in many cases should, be able to deal with the pressures and expectations that often come with a leadership role.
But, in order to thrive in leadership, we first have to protect ourselves from these inevitable and unavoidable pressures and learn to recognise the changing state of our emotional integrity.
To this end, I like to think of the qualities of robustness and resilience as my emotional armour. Worn well, it shields me from a number of situations that might otherwise impact and tarnish my confidence and self-esteem.
As a concept, Imposter syndrome never goes away. After every knock, every stalled project, every missed deadline, every mishandled conversation, that sense of imposter will start to slowly creep back in.
Rewinding for a second, let’s look at the definitions of robustness and resilience.
Robustness is described as “The ability to withstand or overcome adverse conditions.” Resilience is described as “The capability to recover quickly from difficulties.”
To continue with the armour metaphor, you might think of these two things as the toughness or durability or your armour, along with your ability to re-forge or reassemble over time, having shed pieces of it along thew way, in various acts of battle.
The types of resilience
In many cases, people will refer to the concept of resilience — or someone who on the face of it demonstrates this quality- as simply being “thick-skinned”. You either are or you aren’t as a binary state. But, it’s far more nuanced than that, and I’d argue that there are actually different facets of resilience, some of which we’ll likely develop and more than others, based on our individual circumstances and challenges:
Political resilience
Political resilience is very relevant for anyone in a leadership position. While you were once shielded from the meta of organisational politics, you’re now likely in the centre of these conversations and, in some cases, a primary contributor. You’ll spend a lot of your time trying to persuade and influence others; perhaps advocating for the value of Design, campaigning for resources, or negotiating with your Product and Engineering counterparts.
Playing the political game can be taxing. It’s often a product of social capital and reliant on your ability to clearly articulate a desired outcome, and establish a sense of common value between those you seek to influence. However, there are likely to be many a negotiation situation in which you’ll need to be willing to concede or compromise. This can be tough, as every compromise — no matter how small — can feel like a small defeat that serves to test your resilience as a leader.
You’ll start to bring into question your soft skills; your communication style, your intuition and ability to read a situation, and how you relate to and empathise with others. Am I being too bullish? Am I being a pushover? Am I blinkered to others’ perspectives or bigger organisational challenges? Political resilience is something most of us haven’t had to deal with before, but it is very real and apparent challenge for any design leader.
People resilience
Interpersonal resilience speaks to our daily interactions with those we report to, those who report to us, and other peers or stakeholders for whom we’re required to develop and maintain professional relationships. People are complex and sometimes unpredictable. This can make it difficult for any leader, because, of course, much of what we do in our roles and our success as leaders is based on the relationships we forge.
But again, every difficult conversation can take its toll. We work hard to build trust and develop these relationships, particularly with those in our immediate teams. So what happens when that is compromised? The wrong choice of words, personal circumstances, looming deadlines, and poor communication habits can start to erode the relationships we’ve built.
Again, we start to question what more we could have done in these types of situations. Is that conversation one I should have avoided, avoided for now, or one I should have leaned into? Could I have employed more diplomacy and tact? Am I just a bad people person? These moments of doubt affect us deeply, and shape our own internal perceptions of us, as people leaders.
Productivity resilience
As leaders, we have to become comfortable with putting down some of the tools of our craft. Our efforts likely focus more on things like strategic initiatives, change management, and cross-functional ways of working. The shape of our work, day-to-day, fundamentally changes, and with that so does the speed at which we, as leaders, see the results.
Where you once might have been directly involved in shipping lines of code, a UI change, or some copy revisions, now it might be a week or even months before you see the impact of any larger, transformational efforts. If left unchecked, the sense of inertia and lack of more immediate gratification can be painful, disheartening, and, at worst, demotivating.
As a result, we can start to question our value and worth. Am I adding value? Could I be spending my time more wisely? Can I confidently look myself in the mirror and say, “I did a good job today”? There is inevitably a long tail of fulfillment with much of the work we do as leaders, and we have to be comfortable with operating on a different cadence; one where there is often a longer lead time between effort and reward.
Personal resilience
The saying “We are often our own worst critics” feels very relevant for leaders, particularly for those in the field of design, who often feel they have more to prove than their product or engineering peers. Whilst self-reflection is super important, it’s easy to be overly critical and to beat ourselves up when we fail to meet our own high standards.
Our feelings and emotions can and do get the better of us, whether that’s an overwhelming sense of pressure, loneliness, exclusion, frustration, or some other emotional response to a situation. Sometimes these responses are well-founded and logical, but at other times our emotions are clouded, illogical, and occasionally irrational.
Learning to cope with any emotional response is hard, whether it’s rooted in logic or brought about by your own personal situation and circumstances. But a feeling is a feeling at the end of the day. They’re involuntary and we can’t control them, but we can learn to recognise them and slowly start to compartmentalise the rational from the irrational.
Let you own inner voice be your friend, not your enemy. Learn from your mistakes, but please don’t let them consume you.
Recognize your tolerance
While resilience isn’t something that can be taught, we can learn to recognise the triggers and situations in which resilience can help us cope and bounce back from difficult situations. But resilience has a breaking point. Apply enough tension and it will snap, your armour will fail, and you’ll expose yourself to the emotional impact.
But the more we expose ourselves to these situations, the more we learn to cope with, reframe, and look beyond what are often momentary bumps in our journeys to becoming better leaders. We learn from these experiences and they help to shape and colour future experiences, but our ability to manage our feelings and bounce back from what we perceive as a failure is a long, hard lesson.
We slowly become more battle-hardened and able to weather the types of knocks that would once have completely derailed our confidence and self-esteem. But this takes time, and in any new situation of adversity these moments of doubt will inevitably resurface. What’s different is that learn how to fall better, roll with the punches and recover with belief.
As John Maeda once said on the subject of failure, “Failure is easy, recovery is hard.”
So, we need to also learn to recognise our personal limits, when to seek support, and when to pull the cord and ask for help. While everyone is different in this respect, some have a higher tolerance than others — a different tensile strength if you will — everyone has a breaking point. Identify yours and seek support when you need it. Don’t go it alone; there’s always someone willing to listen and support.
