Creative identity mindset shift#5: Build a path to impact

You can be a designer who understands, shapes, and aligns with the business without losing your creativity.?Embracing business is not loss; it’s amplifying. It’s helping us do more of what we love. Becoming business-minded creatives is critical to our success as a discipline.

There are five actions you can take to make this mindset shift. This is?#5.

Once you’re ready to scale your new business-friendly mindset to your team, it’s important that you also help them build a path to more business impact.

You already have all the tools in place in the form of a career ladder or levels. And regardless of which path individuals choose to follow — craft or management — they are headed toward business leadership. So why not adapt your levels to reinforce the craft-to-business gradient for individual contributors (ICs) and managers?

On the management track, we’ve identified something we call the management gradient:

The thought behind this gradient is that shifting from IC to executive is fundamentally a question of?what?you design. You start on the left designing project work, but as you level up, you shift your area of impact from project to team to product to org.

Along the way, you’ll need to acquire new skills and transform your mindset from solving craft problems to people problems to business problems. Your career ladder or level should measure these shifts in skill acquisition and transformation of mindset. This will give your team members a clear structure to follow and milestones to achieve as they seek to grow their own impact on the business.

This applies to individual contributors (ICs) just as much as those with their hearts set on the management track. ICs who want to level up to senior levels and lead without becoming people managers are making the same shifts along the way from craft > leading through others > impacting product and org. In order to increase their impact, they too must embrace the intersection of business and design.

To fix big problems, we have to answer the big?Whys

Businesses, organizations, and systems are the ultimate design problem. It can be incredibly satisfying to help shape them. As designers, we dream of fixing big problems in critical areas like climate and healthcare. These are deeply complex and often organization-driven changes.

If we, the change makers and creators, hold ourselves back by refusing to engage with even the basics of business, I worry that we limit the scope of the change that we can effect. And we can’t afford that as a society — or as a world.

So I encourage you to embrace the business side. To level up your understanding and your practice and redefine your identity around the?why?that moves others rather than the?how?that moves only us.

Creative identity mindset shift series

• The creative identity crisis
• Action #1:?Speak for yourself
• Action #2:?Stop talking about quality
• Action #3:?Make your team more dangerous
• Action #4: Democratize your ecosystem

Here are three ways Design Dept. can help you grow as a leader:

1. Attend the Designing Businesses workshop?to build your business acumen, or?design a customized learning series?for your team
2. Work one-on-one with leadership coach?to tap into your creativity as a leader and transform the way you work with your team
3. Sign up for our newsletter?to get design leadership wisdom in your inbox each week