Leadership approach
For coaching designers
- K
E.g. Check in on success indicators each fortnight like cost out, Design Maturity Index, Friction score and straight-through payment processing. Crowd-source wins from the team.
- Treat people as adults
E.g. In my Payments team at NAB, I’ve encouraged our Senior Designer not to follow “my way of doing things” when it came to leading teams. As long as she got different points of view, people felt heard and hit key discussion points, she could lead the project in a way that felt right to her.
- Clear and oftentimes visual communication
E.g. Lists of product design activities for early-stage designers, diagrams of expected quality check-in points throughout the design process, itemised workshop outlines.
Whatever is visual works particularly well when communicating with product designers. It might sound obvious, but I've seen plenty of Design Leaders skip this.
- Share what's been road-tested, not platitudes
Platitudes are too common. I recommend practical, tangible approaches, keeping in mind that each designer's context will be unique in some ways.
- Adapt my approach to their needs
Some key ingredients:
• Ask each team member to fill in “How I Like to Work” questions and discuss with the team.
• Apply the Deloitte Business Chemistry framework to understand someone’s natural style and how to best communicate / work with them.
• Leverage the Skill-Will Matrix to adapt my coaching approach to the person.
E.g. We hired a Senior Product Designer with high competence + high motivation, so I delegated him a project that stakeholders had been progressively escalating for 7 weeks. He completed it within 2 days. I made sure the timeline and historical stakeholder comms was clear, which I knew particularly motivated him.
- Care
e.g. Show up on someone’s first day and have lunch with them, be vulnerable about how I’ve personally failed at something the designer is trying to achieve. People can tell if care is there or not, mostly through my actions, consistency and tone.
For working with cross-functional partners
- Be proactive
I bring frameworks, schedule the meetings, reach out and introduce myself, discuss the research I proactively did in the background and why I think we should do x as a result. It’s the way to get things done.
- Understand the different agendas
Makes navigating group situations easier and more diplomatic. Where applicable, I often seek out their agendas before the big meeting / workshop via a 1:1 or ask a trusted colleague.
- Give people (reasonable) time to feel heard
Fundamental to working with groups of diverse people, otherwise we pay for this time later in the project at a higher cost. In workshops, in the hallway, in 1:1s, whatever works.
- Identify their style & work with it
I use the Deloitte Business Chemistry framework to identify people’s working styles, so that I can begin to speak their language, work with or gain empathy for their pace, hang ups, values etc.I also learned the hard way that one style is not better than the rest.
Some people like to move at pace, some don’t. Some people respond well to short and sharp comms, some like something more floral etc.
- Keep things moving
• e.g. At UBank, I delivered the high profile, innovation initiative UrHome Home
Loan mobile + tablet app in 6 months - after people spent 18 months talking about it.
- Fill up the trust bank account
Regular weekly/fortnightly meetings (with a purposeful agenda) are perfect for this. Building trust comes in many shapes. Sometimes it’s doing what we said we would, on time and up to quality, sometimes it’s making a reasonable concession for someone when they’re having a bad day. According to Brene Brown, people can even "fall into trust" through regular interaction.
- Visualise my approach, with clear input and time asks
Stakeholder management 101. Visualisation ensures people process the key points of how I propose we work together so there’s a lower likelihood of complete resistance, especially due to confusion.
- Bring energy
This is one of my strengths. It just makes working with a group more fun and they’re more likely to want to continue / do it again with me.