How to Lead Like a Designer

What do you do when someone is burnt out?

Traditional business approaches might present you with a range of templated options. You could offer them more money, hire more staff or even let them go. But in the jump for a quick, clean-cut solution, you’d miss an essential question: Why??

Pausing to consider this question — and the others it drudges up — is the domain of design thinking. This concept, crystallized into five stages by Stanford’s d.school and brought into the business mainstream by the design studio IDEO, offers an escape route from the box that tends to trap business leaders and constrain innovation.

This mindset allows us to think like a designer and get to the root of problems, often revealing an obvious solution that was bypassed by business conventions. Design thinking is a user-centric approach that challenges us to consider the problem we’re solving before we turn to predetermined solutions. In this case, it means addressing the conditions that lead to burnout rather than putting a bandage over their effects. As a CEO who started his career as a designer, this is how I naturally approach problems, and it meshes well with the experimental ethos of Brooks Bell as a consulting firm.

Design thinking comprises five different pillars: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. Put succinctly, these phases mean first understanding the users and context involved, then defining the problem, then creating ideas that you prototype and put in action — and then repeating. This approach can clash with more conventional business decision-making that favors data and precedent over empathy and creativity, but there’s a reason companies like Google and Apple adopted design thinking. It works.

The last two years have thrown new questions and challenges our way. Without a strategy informed by design thinking, we can only respond with the same old answers. I know that as the needs of the world and my team change, I can’t always get it right. I have made mistakes and will continue to do so. But design thinking allows us to absorb these mistakes, learn from them and grow, rather than immediately labeling them as failures.

So beyond the neatly packaged pillars, what does it mean to think and lead like a designer? For starters, it means getting comfortable with the unknown. Every day, my creative roots inform my actions as CEO. These are the design-based principles that inform my decisions.

Understand Your Employees

Design thinking rests on the belief that to solve a problem, you first need to understand the people involved and why there’s a problem at all. In a leadership setting, this translates to empathizing with employees and ensuring your policies address the challenges they actually face. My time as a designer taught me to understand the different perspectives people hold, and to use this knowledge to find the best way to communicate and connect with them.

At Brooks Bell, this foundation of empathy has led us to flexible family hours, unlimited PTO, closing the office for Election Day and more. Our decisions start with understanding employees and their needs rather than plucking out ideas from a basket of pre-approved corporate policies. Leading with empathy also enables you to be more agile, creating programs designed to adjust to employee needs rather than restrict them. The world isn’t permanent — your organization’s policies shouldn’t be either.

Additionally, I don’t believe in policies based on percentages. A lot of CEOs and business leaders prefer making decisions primarily based on numbers, but I disagree. Employees aren’t numbers — they’re people. In my experience, talking to employees can be a lot more revealing than looking at a spreadsheet. Numbers still matter, of course. But when you focus on people first, results follow.

Question Everything

Getting to the root of a problem requires examining accepted practices, holding them up to the light and asking “Why?” Too many organizations develop policies and set them in stone, intending to never reassess them again. To me, this rigidity ignores how the world works. I like to view ideas as set in plaster, because our policies and approach should change when the conditions around them do. With core values and employee needs as a north star, we can reconsider tactics without losing sight of who we are.

This year’s “return to office” conversation has exposed a lot of executives who are unwilling or unable to navigate new territory. Admittedly, throughout much of 2020 I had specific dates in mind for our grand return to in-person work. But as the dates kept shifting, I realized the question wasn’t “When can we return?” but rather, “How do people want to work?” The world changed, and our organization needed to also. Too many leaders are still stuck on the first question, to the detriment of their business and their team.

Fall Fast

The mainstream design thinking model emphasizes the idea of “failing fast,” or embracing mistakes and accepting the process as iterative. But I don’t view this as failing. I prefer thinking of it as “Dr. Strange-ing” a decision. You’re conjuring different scenarios, putting them to the test and identifying what went wrong. When you use those learnings to inform your next move, that “failure” becomes productive. As Thomas Edison wisely said about the process of inventing the lightbulb, ‘I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.’"

Falling fast lowers the stake of every decision, because you’re operating with an understanding that things can evolve. This doesn’t mean rewriting the script, just constantly bringing new ideas to the table, questioning them and evaluating success. Organizations without this mindset become resistant to trying new things, because every policy feels immovable once it’s instituted. As a designer, I made tons of sketches and prototypes that never saw daylight. But each time, I gained a better understanding of what I was going for (and even more so, what I wasn’t.)

Who cares if you change something? As long as you’re not taking away benefits promised to employees, people are very understanding of shifting policies. You’re not moving the flag on your team if it’s tethered to your group and your needs.

Don’t Wait for Precedent

Often leaders will fall into the trap of seeing success elsewhere, and trying to replicate the policy within their organization rather than replicating what made it successful. Having a design background means that I am very comfortable operating without precedent. If a decision is based on a solid understanding of our employees and I feel it makes sense, I’m not concerned with whether it’s been done before.?

Being truly innovative requires a willingness to make the first footprints in new terrain. As long as you’ve put in place the guardrails of knowing why you’re trying something, how you determine success and when to pivot, you don’t need a binder full of instructions and past examples to launch an idea. Relying less on numbers and precedent gives you the freedom to work proactively, constructing new frameworks to achieve your goals.

Similarly, another common leadership mistake is creating policies to avoid people abusing them, rather than for people to actually use them. If a team member uses unlimited PTO to vacation for half the year, it’s a people problem, not a policy problem. I believe your organization should be built around your ideal state. Don’t operate in fear — lead with empathy, trust your employees and give them the space to thrive instead of simply not failing.

Moving Forward with Design Thinking

The world and workplace are rapidly evolving. From employee burnout to remote work, new challenges demand leaders that can step outside of the box, abandon precedent and, as Apple famously coined, “think different.” We face a lot of challenges, but we can’t overcome them if we don’t first examine why we face them and what brought us here.

Whether it’s a sketch, ad copy or a time-off policy, creatives are hardwired to try a lot of things and continually optimize. What traditional business types may view as a correct versus incorrect binary, creatives understand as an ongoing process of arriving at the best idea. None of us have all the answers for creating a vibrant workplace or succeeding in the next era of business. But with design thinking, we can at least start asking the right questions.