Interview with Kate Tarling
In the run up to Clearleft’s Leading Design conference in London this October, the team caught up with Kate Tarling to discuss her background, experience and thoughts on the subject of Design Leadership.
How did you make the jump into leadership?
I had been in a new design role for a few weeks in a rapidly growing company when someone asked me whether I had met all of my team yet. After some investigative work, I found I had 30 direct reports across the UK, USA, India and Australia with near autonomy over the product area as well as managing profit and loss. So really, I landed in a leadership role, rather than consciously jumping.
Tell us about your typical day. Is it all meetings?
My days are really varied. I’m context switching a lot, which is super interesting but also melts your brain. This morning I hosted a weekly meeting for service designers where we caught up on each of our projects and discussed new people joining the team. Then I met with a team who are aiming to align various technical architecture and business process maps with a list of end to end services, as end users would know them. They’re realising that seeing things in this way implies changes to how parts of an organisation is structured and we talked about how to start those conversations. I then did some recruitment of designer type activities, shaped and scoped some new strategic design work, had a lot of phone calls to catch up with people and sketched a diagram outlining a model for information seeking for another team.
What was the last thing you “designed”?
I think it was what our team of service designers is going to focus on next
–and who we need. So, designing the design team and designing the work
that the team does. I’ve also been thinking through ways to better manage and direct hundreds of projects in order to make the overall service perform better. I wrote about this recently: https://hodigital.blog.gov.uk/2017/08/04/what-we-mean-by-service-outcomes-and-measurement/
What makes a great design leader?
I doubt there’s just one kind of great, but some of the things I’ve found good in others or things I try to do are:
Have opinions. Conviction. Stand for something. It’s then easier for others who share the same beliefs to identify themselves and join forces.
Bring it all together. Provide a bigger sense of direction, in a way
that helps people work together better, rather than adding yet more
silos (e.g. a design team silo).
Be on point to support, encourage, remove barriers and deal with
distractions or find people who can. So that people get on with what
they do well.
Have ambition. Not personal, but rather set the ambition for the work to
be done. We may as well aim for working in as big and great a way as
we possibly can, and go all out to really do the right things in the
right way.
What do most new leaders get wrong?
Thinking you have to have all the answers or know how to handle all the
situations, and that you’re a bit rubbish if you don’t.
How would you describe your own leadership style?
My role is to try to really bring things together, to align everyone, in every
other discipline (not just design) around a common perspective of what we’re here for. Which is to make whole services better, more effective, more
efficient. I really have conviction in what we’re trying to do and how we’re
trying to do it. I think that comes across whether I’m conscious of it or not. I’m also super open to seeing what works and what doesn’t work, giving people space and autonomy, and learning whether I, or we, are right or wrong — so leading, but without any particular ego.
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced managing people?
These days I’m lucky to only ‘manage’ people who are really at the top of their game and don’t need any managing at all. Just help in direction, shaping or scoping things from time to time, how to navigate tricky situations or operate in a large organisation. I find it much harder to manage people who aren’t so interested in performing well, who therefore might be in the wrong role or in the wrong situation. That requires some brave, honest conversation and decision-making.
Are design tasks a good or bad idea?
I assume we’re talking interview design tasks here. I used to avoid them
because I didn’t want people to be put off in case they didn’t perform well
under pressure. We do tend to use them in government interviews, but only
as a way to facilitate a discussion or to understand more about how people
talk about work. Like an interview question with a pen and paper. We don’t
ask people to spend time preparing.
What are your views on distributed teams?
It’s hard. So much of what we do relies on being together, working together,
working through nuance and complexity to get to something simpler. When
things are more clearly defined, you can work separately much more easily.
When things are nebulous, you’re all from different disciplines with different
understanding of the world and it requires quite some wrangling, it’s much
better to be together physically.
What one piece of advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t wait for permission or for others to offer it to you. Just take the lead and start making happen what you think should be happening. You know enough, you are enough.
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Join Kate, the Clearleft team and a host of other fantastic speakers at Leading Design, 25–27 October 2017 — book your tickets at https://2017.leadingdesignconf.com/tickets
