My leadership style is people first, some call it servant leadership. People are fundamental to building great things. I believe the role of a leader is to serve those below and around them, and empower them to succeed.
Five building blocks of my leadership persona:
Catalyst (Bias toward action)
Believer (Doing the right thing)
Deliverer (Take responsibility of my actions and follow through)
Coach (Facilitate others to succeed)
Self-Believer (Resilience risk taker)
The solutions usually comes from within the team
When there’s a problem, empower people to solve it. Don’t jump in and take over.
Never lose touch with the essence of the work
“Walk the floor” and speak to people everyday. You can’t help improve the work unless you understand it.
Be the change you want to see in others
The best way to get people to adopt a mindset, process, or tool is to have them see an example of it working well.
Over the years, I have discovered what works and what doesn’t in my DesignOps and UX leadership. Here are some of my leadership thoughts, beliefs and approaches:
Design and UX as strategy (and competitive advantage)
A great product don’t just happen. It is designed and crafted with intention; by putting users as its primary driver. A company that cares about UX is deliberate about placing the importance of user experience as key differentiation in their business and product strategy. An effective UX team are those who can serves as partner to their design and engineering peers.
Designers should learn business, not (just) code
While many celebrate unicorn designers (those who can design and code), I believe it is more important for designers to learn the language of business. As of today, a lot of programming activities can be automated by smart algorithms, so by doing tasks that AI can do better jobs than humans, IMO, is prioritising on the wrong thing. UX Designers should learn the business lingo as we often find ourselves managing up and be part of the conversation amongst business stakeholders. Getting buy-in from business stakeholders is not about pushing the best pixel forward, but about speaking in the language they understand (and care).
Design expert as effective leader
I genuinely believe that effective leaders are those with experience in the deep trenches of their discipline. Design leaders, particularly front-line managers, need to have deep expertise in tactical design expertise (or in certain cases, UX Research), and capable of serving as player-coach when the occasion calls for it; they cannot be generalist managers.
This is not to say that Design or UX leaders need to be the best designers or researchers on their team — but they should have experience in each aspect of UX so that they can effectively help plan projects, hire the right talent, provide mentoring and coaching and architect a good process to enable the team to do their best work. (Research shows that leaders being an expert in their field gain trust quickly and great for team morale too). Having the experience as an individual contributor in each aspect of UX design enables me to provide contextual advice, give relatable feedback based on personal war stories, understand the constraints and opportunities that my teams are facing.
Love the problem, not the solution
Taking a leaf out of Ash Maura's principle on 'Running Lean’; I am a firm believer in doing an honest investigation of real problems, as opposed to inventing problems to fit with the solutions (ideas) we (already) love.
To quote Ash Maura:
“Starting with a solution is like building a key without knowing what door it will open. You can try testing your key on lots of doors or you can start with a door you want to open. When you fall in love with the problem, versus your solution, you start building keys to doors that actually take you places.”
To date, I still find myself continuously learning and coaching my team on the importance of not jumping to the solution train before testing the integrity of the challenges we try to solve.
Hire right and grow team capability with each new person
Highly performing teams don't just happen, they are made. As such, a great team leads or managers are made, not born. Not everyone is cut out to be people managers, even if they are a great individual contributor. Therefore, one of the most critical parts of being a manager is hiring the right talent. Hiring the right people is partly about spotting a diamond in the rough and knowing how to weed out the mediocre from the awesome.
To that end, I have set up a transparent, rigorous and effective hiring process; that I continually improve over the years. I also believed in empowering my team to make the best judgement on who they want to work with; after all, they are going to spend a lot of time working together.
I am also deliberate and intentional in documenting and tracking individual skills on my team, so I can hire strategically. I'd like to ensure that with every new person on board, they are adding value to the team.
Achieve great design through leadership, not micromanaging
In my opinion, the most significant achievement for my team is when they believe they can succeed without me. I have a high bar and strive to ensure my team produces excellent work they can be proud of.
I view my leadership role primarily as a facilitator for my team success by architecting better process, giving them space to experiment and learn from their mistakes, allowing them to innovate without constant intervention on my part. Most importantly, I provide actionable, contextual and timely feedback to improve my team's work, but I try not to position myself as the final gate for every design or UX tasks.
Mentoring and coaching to pay it forward
I prefer to teach and show people how to do the job, as opposed to doing the job for them.
Throughout the years, personally, I learn better by doing, by jumping to the deep end, instead of watching others do it. I wanted my team to love the joy of learning and for them to experience the delight in sharing their knowledge with others.