Seven lessons from leading a large design team

For three years I was part of an operational leadership team running a large design department, which at its largest was over 120 strong, with designers at a wide range of seniority levels. I loved working with so many designers, but it did create some unique challenges.

What’s a large design team?

Rather than focusing on numbers, let’s use how connected your leadership feels to determine whether your design team is large. I’d consider a design team large when:

• The ability of your leadership layer to know everyone individually becomes impossible to prioritise over business as usual work.

• Your team structure consist of two or more reporting tiers (ie you, your manager and the people you manage are all in the same team)

• Gathering feedback from the team, or undertaking any kind of temperature check is too laborious to do on a one to one basis, so you use surveys, forms, and line-of-command reporting to check in

Now, onto the lessons…

Designers are pathological problem solvers, their profession necessitates the belief that every problem can be solved. And often their profession embeds them with the notion that asking for help before having a go at problem solving is a bad thing. For matters of people and relationships this ‘have a go’ approach at problem solving can mean by the time the designer asks for help or intervention the problem is a lot worse. When it comes to people issues asking for help sooner is a key part of problem-solving, not a failure or sign of deficiency.

Lesson: Make it really easy to ask for help and get support on people issues, and encourage them to ask for help first.

Designers are trained to uncover user needs and generate ideas or experiments to meet those needs, so when they’re in a situation where their needs are not being met, deliberately or otherwise, and it doesn’t appear that anyone is doing what a good designer would do and figuring out how to address them, they will feel poorly represented, and react accordingly.

Lesson: Be transparent about how decisions are being made and how their concerns are being taken into account.

Being an employee in a large organisation is not a personalised experience, decisions and rules are written in policy; and policy, by its nature is an uneven compromise and best-fit solution. The designer's worldview doesn’t like this and will kick back.

Lesson: Involve your team in decision making around policy, allowing them to input or codesign the way the organisation will work. Make sure feedback channels are in place to raise issues and concerns in a safe, productive way.

The rhetoric of user centred design is impassioned and volatile - they advocate for, defend, empower. This rhetoric is useful in making space for design but in organisational reality it can become a problem.Employment isn’t the same as service delivery; working for large organisations isn’t like a customer service experience.

Lesson: Be transparent about how decisions are made, and give all the context you can to help designers understand the bigger picture.

Designers are the decision makers, the choosers. They talk about the user, the audience but they rarely see themselves part of either group. So when they find themselves the subject or recipient of policy or change they don’t know how to behave. They are the designer, they make the choices, they don’t feel the effects!

Lesson: Prepare comms and consultations with this in mind, and be clear how you want your designers to participate.

Designers make proposals, recommendations, come up with ideas and influence decisions for a living, so they are going to be extremely opinionated and judgemental about anyone else's decisions. I once asked a tiler friend if he ever judged the work of other tilers, he responded with a laugh - he can't look at tiles any more, all he sees are the problems, the ways he would have done it differently. Tiles and tiling—the craft he's dedicated his working life to—have become things he can only judge, no longer appreciate.

Lesson: Expect designers to be highly critical of organisational policy and decisions made without their participation. Put in place feedback channels, and where possible, involve designers in the decision make process.

Designers are complex creatures. Designers talk things through, they collaborate loudly and messily, but they can also be quiet, anxious and fearful. Their reactions can be loud and messy, but they can also be broody, simmering and mordant. Spillover of reaction, in either direction, is to be expected.

Lesson: Let them react, help them use the energy of the reaction to guide you where the change or policy needs more detail, more attention. Use the loud, opinionated designer, and their quieter more thoughtful peers.

If you’d like to learn more about working with large teams, I’d love to have a chat, drop me a line!