Getting the Best Out of Your Design Team
With every quickly expanding startup, the value of design and its creators becomes more evident. Oftentimes this calls for a design team, whether it concerns an in-house design team or a smaller design agency. In a human-resource landscape where excellent designers are scarce, it’s important to build and maintain a design team in which every team member is challenged to create their best work day in day out.
If you’re given the responsibility or better yet the honor to lead a design team it’s important to understand what drives designers/creatives. You can have worlds best designer on your payroll but if you’re not letting him/her realise his/her potential, they will most likely not create world’s best designs.
Background
When Vince Schwidder and I first founded Yummygum back in 2009 it existed of just us; two designers knowing eachothers professional talents and flaws and that was it. A few years in a design student reached out to us, asking if he could do some freelance work for us. The freelance work led to him doing his graduate internship at Yummygum and before we knew we had hired our first employee. Fast forward to today and we’re a team of eight. During our growth we’ve always tried to get the most out of the team.
I believe one of the most important keys to getting the most out of a design team is finding the balance between letting people work on something they excel in while leaving the door open for him/her to explore and develop new skills.
In order to understand who’d excels best in one spectrum, besides the obvious point of observation of someone’s work, is to understand what kind of person he/she is. Although typecasting personalities should never be the foundation for valuing people it *can* most definitely help understanding why someone might struggle with one type of task and get the most amazing results for another type of task. Subsequently that means you’ll be able to anticipate on it.
Creatives and realists
If we were to abstract our teams characteristics as designers to the very essence I think anyone’s designer character can be mostly described either as creative or realist. Needless to say; the one doesn’t exclude the other and sometimes a person is a bit of both. By trying to find out which category someone has the most overlap with, you will be able to understand why a team member goes about a task in a certain way.
Creatives
Those who can be categorized as creative are generely focussed on the aesthetic and emotional outcome of a product (design). They roughly have the following characteristics in common (it’s okay, I’m a creative myself, so I’m allowed to say it 😛):
- they can easily translate brand values into emotional design
- they can be less organised (both in thinking and in working method)
- they find it relatively harder to distinguish between major and minor issues
- they think in non-linear thoughts
- they (feel the urge to) think outside the box and beyond obvious solutions
- they brainstorm solutions quickly because of a high associative mind
Realist
Those who can be characterized as realist are focussed more on the use and usability of a product (design). A few characteristics we found realists to have in common:
- they enjoy working on problems as they would when solving a puzzle
- they can relatively easily distinguish between major and minor issues
- they can think about function without being biased by possible aesthetics
- they struggle when there are no clear boundaries or outlines
- they don’t believe in form over function, and rather as a complimentary aspect
Whether you start gathering a team or keep expanding your current team it’s doesn’t hurt to keep the following in mind:
- try to keep a good balance between creatives and realists within a team
- accommodate the need for creatives to grow as realists and vice versa.
Balance
When you lead a design team you can consider letting say person A, who is a creative, take care of a task that doesn’t involve a lot of information architecture or something else that is not very visual focused. On the contrary it would make sense to put person B, who is a realist, in charge of a task that focusses on mere information architecture without being lured into styling decisions.
Accommodating need for growth
Even though you might be inclined to automatically assign certain tasks to a creative because great results are almost guaranteed, growth is vital to any well functioning team. That means it’s up to you as a manager to challenge creatives to think like realists at times. Just like how great goalkeepers accelerate in defending the goal line while knowing how to dribble due to practice.
Personality — extraversion vs. introversion
Another personality aspect that is super important to take into account when managing a design team (or probably any team for that matter, I would say) is the trait of extraversion/introversion. Some team members will be extravert while other tend to be more introvert.
Regardless of where someone would be on the ‘Ambivert Personality Continuum Scale’ you can keep it mind as a team leader.
For instance, it’s important to make room for introverts to work solely and autonomously on tasks without getting interrupted, as introverts often get their energy from being/working in solitude. When taking into account the more cliché understanding of what extraversion and introversion entails; create room for introverts to vent and give their opinion without being overruled by extraverts as taking the liberty to speak out about something doesn’t neccesarily mean it’s more valid. Try to find a balance and facilitate where needed.
Autonomy & communication
Another thing we learned to take into consideration is understanding someone’s autonomy. Some people are very comfortable with a larger task with a due date in the far future to subsequently splitting it up into clear sub tasks. Other people however thrive when a task is already split up into smaller subtasks. Especially when a new team member is just starting out it can be useful to not assume he or she is confortable working autonomously. Regardless of the level of autonomy, communication is key. We ask each team member to pro-activily update the rest of the team on what they’re working on. Both for the sake of receiving feedback as well as to keep in professional touch with the rest of the team.
Tailoring on strenghts
The only right thing, and perhaps even most obvious thing to add is that every person is different. Even though each of your team members’ personality will probably overlap some of the above mentioned traits, he/she of course also has other characteristics that makes him/her unique.
Team member A might be extremely talented at noticing and applying consistency and structure throughout designs. It would be a waste if you wouldn’t use this strength to the team’s advantage, for example by letting that team member be in control of the design guidelines.
Never stop learning
Besides thinking about everyone’s role within a team there are so much more things to consider when leading a design team. Not should you encourage your team to never stop learning, you’re never done learning yourself too. That’s because everyone is different and your chances are your team will change over time, due to expansion for instance. Perhaps that is what makes it so much fun; trying and get the best out of every individual.
