What's up with design leadership?

So a quick one, too long for a normal post, too short for an in depth article. Such is the UX of LinkedIn.

Anyway, normally I talk exclusively about the UX industry, admittedly often preaching to the choir to let them know they’re not alone. Today I’m going to go a little off topic, I want to talk about Design Leadership in general, UX Leadership specifically and an area where the demise of good practice is down to that leadership.

We’ve all encountered leadership models where design answers into a line of management that doesn’t understand what we do or how we work. That’s not always a bad thing, it all depends on the management trusting the design to deliver and empowers them to do their job. If they provide them with the business restrictions and needs to meet, the tools and resources to do their job, then gets out the way to let them deliver, it’s all good. It’s when they want to control something they don’t understand, take shortcuts that make no sense, and then get angry that it doesn’t work, that’s when it becomes a problem.

It's like taking a taxi in London, telling the driver that you want to go to the Tower of London, then telling them which directions to take, what speed to be going, what roads to avoid and then getting upset when they end up in Paris, surrounded by angry French people and blaming the taxi driver. Nothing new there, we’ve all had to metaphorically explain to the gendarmes, while both speaking different languages, why we ended up where we ended up wrapped around the Eiffel Tower, while the passenger makes themselves scarce.

Meh, we deal with it, we always have, always will. That’s out of our control.

I’m talking about things, that as paid design leaders, we really are in control of and don't take ownership of.

Failure to lead

There is an emerging trend, I’m hearing more and more from frustrated juniors and mid-weights about, and that is that some design leaders, particularly UX design leaders, who do understand what we do, how we do it and why, are forgetting that the designers they lead are also human with human needs.

I’m talking about the design managers that know but don't care that employee satisfaction is essential to delivering success, the UX/CX leads that pass the pressure from above down to their teams, the Creative Directors that are more interested in professional development through networking and gathering titles. rather than getting recognition from producing good results and leading by example.

I get it. Well some of it. Design is hard, design leadership even more so, dealing with company politics, egotists, uniformed senior management, arbitrary targets, stroppy stakeholders, POs with a Figma license that think that turns them into Picasso. All that and you still want to be as hands-on as possible while empowering a design team. That pressure can break the best of us at the best of times and we’re not exactly in the best of times, are we? The entire industry is chaotic at the moment, the focus is on keeping the paymaster happy, rather than users, just so we can keep a job if we’re lucky enough to have one or find one when we don’t.?

See, I do get it, except, well not really. I know the problem I just can't see why you'd choose that solution.

The urge to avoid stress, to avoid unnecessary and unhelpful interactions, is exactly why we do what we do for end users. Trying to avoid it for ourselves, to protect ourselves is very, very, human but is it actually delivering any value or just making things worse?

You can’t protect your team from all the company politics but as a leader you should at least try to mitigate it, keep the noise to a minimum, and certainly don't add any more pressure to them when they’re already struggling to deliver. Ask yourself are you treating your team members as resources or as colleagues? What are you doing to empathise with them, understand their own personal and personal situations. Are you the kind of leader you’d want to have or are you copying the kind of leader you would avoid at all costs, given the choice?

On a professional level, if you want the best from your team, then as I said above, trust your team to deliver and empower them to do so. They need training but you’ve no budget? Find time to mentor them or put them in projects where they can learn. Do they need to have better stakeholder skills? Show them, teach them. Then all you need to do is tell them the business restrictions and needs to be meet, give them the tools and resources to do their job, then get out the way and let them deliver.

On a personal level, which is where so many leaders fail, find out your team members’ needs. Do they need to work remotely because of family issues? If the work gets done, let them! Are they struggling to cope mentally? Step in and support them, psychology is the foundation of what we do, you wouldn’t let your end users suffer why would you let your colleagues suffer? Are they struggling to deliver? Don’t just tell them to deliver, ask if there is something you can do to help them.

Being a researcher, an analyst, a designer (of any aspect), is what your people do, it isn’t who they are. We spend a huge amount of time explaining to our employers, that treating users as humans, not just potential sources of income, is how you’re supposed to people, So why wouldn’t you do the same thing for the people you lead?

For all the acronyms that seek to pigeonhole us, what it comes down to is meeting human needs. When it comes to leadership, put the human into the way you work, not just into the work you produce.

There is so much in the industry that we can't control, too much we can't even influence in fact, but there are things as leaders we can control, and our own behaviour is one of them. You want to be a design leader? Great have at it, we need more good ones. You want the title but not the responsibility or the people skills that come with it? Add the fear of being found out to your stress levels.

Be the design leader you would like to have. Who knows, maybe you'll not only inspire your team you may even inspire other leaders to do better.

Wouldn't that be nice?