Your Team Is Your Most Valuable Asset

Remember the good ol’ days when every company was chasing rockstar-ninja designers with outstanding skills and breathtaking CVs? After all, they’d be able to move the needle and achieve outstanding results. The truth is, indeed, they’d be able to achieve that, but at painfully high costs of ruining teams and team spirit, often irrevocably.

In my personal experience, best teams are always balanced and diverse. In such teams, everybody is respected, promoted and treated equally. A wholesome team is so much stronger than a team built to support or enable a few extremely talented individuals. In the end, poisonous and unbalanced treatment damages team spirit, affecting motivation and the quality of work.

Good design reflects the personality of good people working on it. We often tend to believe that our work is all about pushing pixels or refining prototypes, framed by the strict boundaries of Sketch or Invision. Good design is also a seamless flow between teams that genuinely care about the quality of their work, and teams that feel like their work is deeply ingrained in the final result.

I couldn’t be more proud of our fantastic SmashingMag team, with a wonderfully diverse group of talented, passionate, hard-working people who support and care about each other, who care about people we are building and designing and publishing and run conferences for, and who genuinely care about the output of their daily work.

That also means telling me when I’m wrong, or when things seem to go in a wrong direction, and contradict and fight for what they believe in, and have the freedom and trust to arrange their workflow in any way they see fit. That’s the true strength of the team — the environment where everybody feels free to voice their opinion, to say “No,” to propose an idea and to refine the direction where they would love to go and grow into personally.

I’m so infinitely grateful to be a part of this wonderful family, and I know with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t be where I am today without their kind and generous support. So a huge shout out and thank you to my dear colleagues, friends and family — hard-working people who often remain behind the scenes: Iris, Rachel, Mariona, Amanda, Charis, Cat, Ricardo, Markus, Jan, Ilya, Mike, Marc, Andrew, Owen, Bruce, Scott, Cosima, Inge, Aya, Kristina and Yana.

If you have a moment, say “Thank You” to each member of your team, and make sure they understand how much you value them. They are your most valuable asset, and they deserve the best you can give them.