Design Leadership

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When I first began managing a team of designers I worked to quickly gain the trust and respect of the team and from Day 1 and achieved the highest associate commitment scores across more than 20 UX people leaders in the organization. I went on to maintain the highest Associate Commitment score among my peers year after year.

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Here Is How I Did It​​

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Step 1: Understanding what the team expects of you

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Coming into a new leadership role it’s critical to first build trust and foster physiological safety. I leverage early 1:1 meetings to learn about the team on a personal level before ever getting to the work in order to build a healthy rapport. On a more tactical level I make a point to ask each direct repot the following questions to understand what makes them tic.

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1.) How they like to be recognized for a job well done?

For some individuals, public praise is like rocket fuel and you should create regular cadences to celebrate well executed work.

For others, the spotlight can be embarrassing and will stifle future motivation. These individual most often need subtle and private affirmations of their contributions to keep them energized.

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2.) How they like to receive constructive feedback?

For some individuals, immediate and direct feedback is the only way to get critical growth messages across.

Others need to be in the right mindset to effectually absorb constructive feedback. For these individuals it is usually best to schedule specific time that lets them prepare for the conversation.

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3.) What would you like to see from me?

Coming into a leadership role inherently means you are there to fill a gap. Simply asking the team what they hope for the most from a new leader might be your biggest clue as to how to win the team over but also how to focus your energy early to drive the business forward.

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Step 2: Ensuring the team understands expectations

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Landing any job as a UX designer takes a good amount of creativity, intelligence and an ability to navigate ambiguous situations. I don’t know a single person with those characteristics that will thrive under micro-management. For that reason, I avoid trying to articulate every last expectation I have for my team and simply talk about the high level behaviors I look for.

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Behavior 1: Support Your Partners

The role of a UX designer is inherently collaborative. I expect my team to support their Product and Engineering partners in delivering results. This means showing up prepared and ready to contribute to meetings, clearly communicating how and when their work will be delivered in sport of the team, proactively looking for new ways to add value and so much more. At the end of the day, I ask my team to consider themselves responsible for any and all requests from partners that reasonably fall within the responsibility of a UX professional.

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Behavior 2: Support Your Users

I expect my team to push both research and design opportunities in support of the end user. They should do this relentlessly, up unto the point that their efforts conflict with their ability to support their partners. It’s that simple.

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Behavior 3: Support Your Fellow Designers

Often times UXers find themselves in a room as the lone individual advocating for the end user. This can be a daunting and tiresome. For this reason it is critical for a team of UX professionals to support one another. I expect all of my team to act as a support system for one another in various ways including participating in design and research reviews, contributing to design systems, lending a hand facilitating workshops and more.

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Step 3: Creating processes and rituals to maintain alignment

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One of the best things any leader can do to build an engaged team is to create regular cadences for recognition, collaboration and opportunities to for bi-directional feedback. I have had pretty good luck with the following format.

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Re-occurring 1:1 Meetings

These are meetings owned my my team members. It is their time with my undivided attention to use how they with. Sometimes we dig in heavy on career development, sometimes times we pair on design challenges, discuss complex partner relationships, and other times we simply use the time to connect on a personal level. This meeting can be anything. But at the end of the day it exists so that my team always has my attention and support.

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Goal Setting and Review Meetings

This meeting is owned by me. On a regular cadence I connect with my team to ensure we have clear goals for every team member. I prefer to focus on just one personal or developmental goal and a single performance or business goal at a time and prefer to follow the SMART goal format however but each company has their own format which I flex my approach to.

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Read more about SMART goals here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/how-to-write-smart-goals.

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Team Meetings

Typically, I get my team together about once a quarter to focus on all things UX. The agenda is most often driven by topics impacting us the most including how we segment customers and in effect develop clear personas, maintaining our design systems, how we archive and socialize end user research and more. We usually round out the meeting creating a lose agenda for the next meeting followed by some time to simply socialize among peers.

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Regular Retrospectives

These are run by the team, I am not invited by design. It’s their chance to discuss what’s working for them and what is not. Some of the action items they own. Others they delegate to me. In the end, it’s just good hygiene for the team to regularly connect and discuss what they can do to improve their typical work week and more importantly identify the critical items that they need leadership to own for the. Everybody on my team knows that they are 100% empowered to assign action items from a retro to me.

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Consider Reading

Below are a just a few books that I suggest reading on the topic of building trust with a team.