The Four Archetypes of the Complete Design Leader
Talk highlights from Peter Merholz at the Design Leadership Summit 2019
Leadership is about leverage. Design leaders need to provide leverage. It is about how you enable your team and broader organization to do great work. You need to develop skills that allow you to leverage. At the end of day, design leadership is more talking than doing.
Coach, diplomat, champion, and architect are the four archetypes of the complete design leader. Moving from a designer mindset to a design leader mindset, this framework is to help design leaders navigate their new roles and responsibilities.
Coach: get the most out of your team
If you aren’t pissing your team off, you are not doing your job.
Articulate a vision for success. Tell the broad story. Focus on the outcome, not the output. Let the team figure out the details.
Set clear expectations on what quality looks alike. If you see bad design, it’s probably you didn’t set the right expectations.
Providing guidance. Lead constructive critique… and speak last.
Team stuck? Reframe the problem — how can they tackle it from a different point of view through another workshop?
Let them mess up. Let the folks learn from their mistakes and develop that muscles, so they do not rely on your inputs.
Hold them accountable. make clear what’s acceptable, don’t dodge difficult conversations.
Diplomat: working cross-functionally to ensure designer’s voices are heard
“Intake” is a symptom of a failed engagement model because it turns design into a black box that receives requirements and spits out artifacts.
Engage with non-designers: Appreciate cross-functional peers’ perspectives or clients’ perspectives. Learn their language. Welcome people into your work; make yourself a part of their work.
Assume positive intent: Avoid victim stances. Everybody is doing their best.
Stand strong for your ideals: Don’t accommodate to the dominant culture, where most departments just go with the flow. Have principles and purposes for your team. Speak up.
Set a charter that outlines clear purpose, vision, mission, values, and measures. When you have a charter, you have a foundation to engage with the peers and help them understand where you are coming from and why you are doing things differently.
Keep design weird. Design is a stereotypically right-brained approach: generative, creative, exploratory in what is typically a left-brained corporate world of analytics, reduction, mechanisms, and productivity.
Champion — fighting for your team & your function
Say no to unreasonable asks.
Evangelize: Managing up and out. You got to speak up and evangelize your team’s good work.
Protector: Fight for your team’s good work and help other stakeholders understand their good work. Say no to unreasonable asks. The Power of a Positive No is a great book that tells you how to communicate with a simple three-step method.
Relentless: Don’t give up on what your team needs — staffing, hardware, education, pay. Find a way to make others to understand why.
Architect — scaling from a design team to a design org
Figure out your org model. Be intentional. Don’t just accept or follow what others have done in other roles.
Design leader needs to adopt a kind of architect mentality that allows the org thrive. How?
Establish design operations. As you scale, you need the people in running the engine for the team. Design teams are the content of the work. Design operations are the enablers of the work, which allowing designers to do their best work.
Draft a charter. A charter is so important (not an “intake” process) because it demonstrates the value of doing good work.
Define roles and build a “levels framework”. From junior designers role to design leads role, make sure the expectations and responsibilities are set clearly.
Define design quality. Develop agreed-upon criteria and embrace subjectivity. There is no universally understood definition of design quality, so every organization has to figure out what their design quality is.
Leadership is a craft that you have to develop and work on.
Books mentioned:
Merholz, P. (2016), Org Design for Design Orgs.
Ury, W. (2007), The Power of a Positive No How to Say No and Still Get to Yes.
