Design Leadership mapping
Understanding where you are investing your leadership energy and where your team should
How to do it
- Take one of my design leadership templates or just sketch out your own
- Draw a shape indicating how much time you spend relatively between the different areas of responsibility
- Mark upto three areas where you feel your design function should invest
A bit of background
Earlier this year, I experienced a bit of a knock back on a role that I was really interested in. I wrote a few articles in response to my experience. I also decided I needed to start decoding what design leadership was for different people.
In this article, I described how myself and Martina Hodges-Schell quickly pulled together a simplistic framework that allowed us to engage different types of design leader and explore their diversity.
It was only meant to be a placeholder provocation which we would ultimately evolve, but I kept using it with design leaders when we caught up.
As I was planning one of my shaping workshops for a client and their design team, I realised I might be able to use it with them. I started by interviewing different design leaders across the organisation and getting them to map how they invested their efforts, and where they felt the organisation should invest.
And then I realised that a lot of these areas of responsibility were not just relevant to those with leadership or management titles. Many designers would take on different areas alongside their solution design work.
When I realised this, I integrated it into my workshops, asking them the same questions.
- Where do you spend your time relatively?
- Where do you think your design team should invest?
The purpose of the first question was to get people to self-reflect around how they spend their time and also where they could be expected to if they rose through the ranks. It also helped highlight what others might be doing when they weren’t involved in solution design work.
The purpose of the second question was to make the point that they don’t need to change how they invest their time. Although they could. It was more to do with getting a sense amongst peers and for the leadership around where they felt the team should invest. Seeing the delta between the ‘leaders’ and the ‘design team’ was quite interesting.
The initial categories
Below are the initial categories with a small change to the ‘Vision’ one, and ‘Capabilities’ to help make them clearer. It would have been nicer to have single words but people found the misunderstanding within each to be confusing.
- Vision & strategy
Creating the direction and plan for the design offer, team and its culture in relation to the organisation’s needs - Community
Engaging the external community of designers, peers, and different industry sectors - Advocacy
Promoting (selling) the design offer and the team around the business, to clients or to partners - Wider organisational capabilities
Mapping, tracking, resourcing, developing capabilities and skills across the organisation - Team
Growing, supporting, nurturing managing the design team of individuals - Collaboration
Working with peers, other departments, other disciplines, other styles to get work done - Quality
Encouraging quality of product/service thinking (doing right thing) and design solution delivery details - Practice
Developing a toolkit for the team. Methods, techniques, principles, the environment and processes the team needs to function most effectively and efficiently.
Early learnings
You can read some of our early learnings in this post here, but in short, it’s rare for any one person to cover all categories very well. And that’s ok.
Different approaches with using the framework
Using these categories you can also ask different questions. How good you are at each. What you like doing. Who should own what.
I have also realised that there are similarities between these categories and the role of DesignOps. But maybe that’s something for another post.
Want to find out more, follow the series
If you want to learn more about the Shaping Workshops I run, and what I have learned over the years, follow me, or read some other articles in the Medium Publication.
Keep your eyes peeled for another post tomorrow.
