Guide

What does good creative leadership look like?

Good creative leadership is mostly invisible: you clear the path so your team can do their best work, and you protect them from noise. You help people grow, even if that means leaving, and you get the rest of the business speaking the same language.

When we recorded this episode, my Faster Horses co-hosts Mark Sutcliffe and Nick Tomlinson had both recently stepped up from senior roles into leading teams. I'd been managing design teams for years, at Barclays and Blue Prism. So we compared notes, starting with a quick exercise: describe creative leadership in one word.

What's the one word?

Nick said "important". A good manager decides whether people grow or leave. Mark said "empowering". He was leading a team of more than 20 creative people, and at that size you can't micromanage, and you shouldn't want to. As he put it, you'll never have the creative power of a whole team on your own.

I said "empathy". People's lives and ways of working vary a lot. When I had my own team, I told them I didn't care where or when they worked. I cared that they loved the work and got it done. If someone does their best thinking at 3am, why force them to do it at 3pm? Most people repay that trust. The worst teams are the ones where people spend their energy justifying their own jobs instead of doing them.

Who do design leaders actually manage?

Everyone except their team, according to Nick, and I think he's right. A good manager manages their own people as little as possible. Most of the job is managing the rest of the business, so that it doesn't get in your team's way.

That means unblocking things, stepping into conversations that are going nowhere, and keeping your team out of the politics coming from above. It also means being honest with them. If a decision is still up in the air, tell them a conversation is happening, even if the answer might change.

When I was junior, I assumed managers got the fun jobs. It's the other way round. The really sticky, horrible jobs come with leadership. If you want to lead people but don't want to deal with that, it's the wrong career path. If all you want is to tell people what to do, it's definitely the wrong path.

Mark pointed out that one of the stickiest jobs in UX leadership is convincing the business why it hired you. You can have a team of 24, know it isn't enough, and still have to sell your whole profession to the people already paying for it.

Should you help people leave?

Yes, if leaving is what's best for them. Nick's view is that you should give people every chance to grow, through training, through time with other teams like SEO and analytics, and through you. If someone joins with no UX experience, spends two years with you and gets offered a job at Google, that's a win for you as a manager. Keeping them is then the company's job.

I've managed a lot of apprentices over the years. Some now run their own companies or lead departments, and seeing that is one of the best parts of the job. Admittedly, it would be nice if one of them offered me a job back.

Why do small changes matter so much?

Because they snowball. I once built an accessibility toolkit for a whole business and put it on SharePoint. It's not the most exciting tool in the world, but everyone in the company could get to it. At a work do that Friday, people from all over the business came up to tell me it was exactly what they'd been looking for.

Change three or four people's minds, and they take that thinking with them to their next jobs. Nick says that's what happened to him. He joined my team as a graphic designer convinced he knew best and left as a UX designer saying he didn't know anything, so ask the users. Now he's teaching that to his own team.

How do you get everyone on the same page?

Teach a shared language. Getting your team, and then the whole business, using the same terms for the same things is one of the most useful things a leader can do. Once people agree what a component is, or what "done" means, communication speeds up and problems get solved faster.

Mark breaks leadership into three Ps: people, process and product. Where people meet process, you get your culture. Where people meet product, you get identity, how your team's skills show up in the work. Where process meets product, you get delivery. When his team ran a session to air their grumbles and praise, every point fell into one of those areas, which made it much easier to decide what to fix first.

What habits make the biggest difference?

• Listen before you fix. Sometimes people just want someone to agree that a situation is ridiculous, and jumping in with a solution makes it worse. Programmers talk to a rubber duck to work through problems. Sometimes you're the duck.
• Keep meetings short. I aim for 30 minutes. Past an hour, nobody is listening.
• Take the chairs away. I once ran a 45-minute workshop with no chairs and no laptops. People said it was the best workshop they'd been to, because standing up forced everyone to talk to each other.
• Protect time together. Nick's team blocks out a "UX day" every other week, with a retro, a component review and time with developers.

If you're leading a team that's about to grow, the next step is hiring well. I've covered that in how to scale a design team.

Leading a team, or about to?

At Designed for Humans I coach new design leads and train design teams, from first-time managers to established heads of design. I also work as a fractional head of design when a team needs senior leadership but isn't ready for a full-time hire. Part of building a shared language is a shared design system, and Design Systems for Humans gives designers, engineers and product people one place to find it.

See how we can work together, or listen to the full episode, S4E6 of Faster Horses, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.