Leadership & UX: A Tale of Two Leadership Books
I am constantly driven to try and improve in UX. Whether it be theory or application, design or usability, research or wireframes — there is always room for improvement. For those topics there is an abundance of books, some of which we’ve reviewed in this blog. But, there is one topic that there is little written about: leadership & UX. Like how Meg wrote in her review of Design is a Job, there isn’t much out there in school or when you are first starting a “career” in UX about leadership.
Here is the big problem with that. To really be successful, to be *really* *really* *really* good at UX you need leadership skills. It is like the magic pixie dust that makes little girls and boys fly through the night to the second star on the right. To be really successful requires a little bit of leadership. Leadership is what helps you convince people they should listen to you. Leadership is also what helps you to be able to look at a hard design problem and to not back away quietly hoping that it never saw you in the first place; it is what makes you forge ahead. Leadership is what you use when people have conflicting design solutions to the same problem. Leadership is what you use when a developer argues with you that it isn’t worth it to implement your design solution. It is how you tackle difficult situations. Leadership is the magic that makes some UX people successful and some UX people not be able to convert the user’s needs into working solutions.
If it is so important, why aren’t more people writing about it? Well, probably because it is a soft skill. Soft skills are hard to teach. Everyone knows good and bad leadership when they see it, but few people question what they need to do better to be better leaders. The second reason people don’t write about it is because there just aren’t that many people in leadership positions in UX. To help fill this hole I would like to juxtapose two books on the topic of leadership. The first is User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams by Arnie Lund. The other is The Competent Organization by Lee Thayer.
Reading the first book, User Experience Management, was a bit like drinking too much water when you are dehydrated. I didn’t realize how much I really needed the content that was in there until I was almost drowning in it. Lund provides, on just about every page, very practical advice on how to manage and direct UX people. Want to know how to hire a good UX person? Lund has some decent advice (although, forgive me for putting in this shameless plug to another post I wrote on UX recruitment). Want to know how to handle a matrixed UX organization? Lund has some good advice about an 80–20 system to support the growth of UX within the company while still supporting individual projects. Not sure how to position UX within a company so that your team is successful? Lund has advice on how to use company champions to create buy in at the CEO level. Ever wondered what a performance review looked like for a UX person? Lund has some advice on how to critique UX people (although, I disagree with him on a handful of his advice). Just about anything a manager of UX could want to know, Lund covers.
User Experience Management is very comprehensive, dense, and jam packed with useful methods for tackling the soft problems. All of Lund’s advice is very slanted towards UX. From personality analysis, to team growth, he understands and describes the nuances of a UX team and why those nuances are going to matter. Overall, it was very useful and now that I’m writing this review I realize I should probably give it a second pass.
What Lund doesn’t address is the more theoretical aspects of leadership. The book is so grounded in the practical that it doesn’t take a step back to examine the role of leadership in making a UX person successful.
Therefore, to juxtapose User Experience Management I read the Competent Organization. Lee Thayer, the author of the Competent Organization, is the author of many books on the topic of leadership. However, before I sing the book’s praises I should say that this book has no research, makes exaggerated (sometimes controversial-make-you-throw-the-book-at-the-wall) statements, and hand waved at many practical detail. But, trust me when I say that even with those qualities it gets at the heart of leadership as pixie dust.
Thayer frames his argument by discussing an unachievable goal of a “competent” person through what that person is or is not. For instance, the competent person is constantly in learning mode. The competent person is someone who improvises and approaches every experience as if it is new. The competent person evaluates their purpose for engaging in their work and strives for more. The competent person does not go with the flow.
When applied to UX this makes perfect sense. People who are successful in UX find ways of shaking themselves out of a funk when they find themselves using the same design patterns. The great people in UX inspire those around them and encourage others to collaborate — knowing that they have additional expertise to bring to the table. The great people in UX lead through competence in their knowledge and by having an organization that supports and demands that competence.
While Thayer may have little practical advice to apply to UX, his guidance on leadership is about grounding ourselves in competence. Through excellence and growth in the UX person the user experience also grows and excels. The argument for competence is a compelling one and something what Lund’s book lacks.
Together these two books on leadership attempt to fill some of the holes in a discussion on leadership and user experience. I recommend both (and others), but these two books are so dichotomous yet useful to the topic that they are both worth a read.
Book Club Questions
- What is the most useful quality a leader in UX can have?
- What does leadership mean to you? How is that different to how leadership is viewed by your organization?
- Does your role within an organization or the size of the organization impact leadership in UX?
