Elevating design leadership: Finding the right flight level
Whether you’re new to a leadership role or have years behind you as a seasoned leader, something we all routinely encounter is the challenge of elevation and altitude. Finding the right level at which to operate day-to-day can be a huge learning curve, but one that is an integral part of how we succeed and scale ourselves as leaders.
Abstract too far from the work of your team(s) and you risk losing touch with process and practice and absolve a level of accountability for the quality of execution. Operate too close to the team and you may compromise their sense of autonomy and lose the perspective that allows you to see the bigger picture.
It’s a challenge more nuanced than simply finding the right personal operating model and where we’ll experience the need to flex and demonstrate agility based on a number of contributing organisational factors:
Leadership Culture: As an organisation, where does your leadership philosophy sit on the scale of command and control to trust and inspire and from top-down, directed feature teams to bottom-up, empowered product teams? To what degree does leadership champion, drive and advocate for autonomy?
Design strategy: At any given point what’s the emphasis of your design strategy, relative to the needs of the business? What aspects of product, practice or people require your immediate attention? Does it call for a macro-focus on the bigger picture or a micro-focus on specific aspects of execution (e.g. quality)?
Organisational structures: How are you set up as a design organisation and what are the expectations for how you/your role should interface with product and engineering partners? Are you managing managers or do you operate in a flatter structure that requires you to be closer to the team(s)?
Team maturity: What’s the level of experience and seniority across the team and to what degree are they equipped to deal with various operational challenges? Are they largely self-sufficient or do they require a lot of your time and energy to direct them through in-flight design challenges?
What’s clear is that one of our jobs, as leaders, is to understand the climate and landscape in which we operate and adjust and adapt our flight levels accordingly. This requires us to be adept at ascertaining the context around our individual situations and being self-aware enough to know when we might need to correct, refine or rethink our current approach.
Adjusting your altitude
To explore this in a little more detail, let’s consider some of the scenarios we may have encountered when trying to establish and maintain appropriate leadership flight levels.
Climbing
As we progress on our respective leadership journeys, one of the biggest challenges we have to embrace is elevating our view and providing a more holistic perspective on aspects of product and practice. This sees those who might have transitioned as ICs, abstracting from their daily interactions with product teams; biassing towards the ceremonies and activities that enable them to operate as an effective partner to their product and engineering leadership counterparts.
This shift in purview likely also requires changes to the circle(s) we’re required to influence and leads us to interface with more senior business stakeholders. Here we’re required to readily engage in matters of commercial performance and company strategy to understand and provide a position on how we can leverage design to achieve desired business and customer outcomes. In its truest sense, it requires us to take a holistic view of product, practice and people to formulate a compelling design strategy.
Descending
One of our jobs as leaders is to be accountable for quality. Quality of practice and quality of product. Having a perspective on quality, however, requires us, as leaders, to retain some sense of proximity to the work that’s happening. So, in our efforts to ascend and provide that bigger-picture view, we must also have enough context to form an opinion on quality. This will require us to adjust our elevation in order to better understand the work that is being produced and to what degree it meets the standards we’re looking to drive.
Based on the shape of our organisation, we may have trusted managers or leads who can act as proxies in this regard; surfacing work as examples for quality or drawing our attention to any issues or challenges. However, it’s imperative that we have and retain our own perspective on craft. So, as leaders, we need to find sustainable approaches to engagement that allow us to think and operate strategically, while still having a high level of visibility around what’s being shipped to customers.
Levelling off
In the leadership equivalent of auto-pilot, with time and experience we can learn how best to apportion our time and energy as the situation requires; relying on our leadership instincts to guide and adjust our focus. Take the example where we have concerns about quality. Here, we may take a strategic decision to drive improvements in craft, requiring us to ascertain the context we need to make informed recommendations. This requires the classic 1000ft to 10ft view of leadership, with the ability to zoom in and out of the problem space.
In essence, it is about our agility as leaders and coming to terms with the fact that our new purview will require us to operate comfortably across multiple flight levels. It’s not as simple as moving from a micro to a macro view, from 10ft to a 1000ft, from being in the thick of the work to being abstracted. It’s about maintaining a holistic perspective that comprises ideals (strategy) and actuals (execution) and where context enables you to make relevant, informed and impactful leadership decisions.
Traversing the void
From experience, this (changing flight levels) can be a particularly challenging concept for new leaders, where they come from a position of proximity and now have to be comfortable with operating at arm's length from the work itself. At times, we, as leaders, can feel quite disconnected, as we seek to operate between these levels and optimise our time and energy accordingly. It can feel like we’re making a series of uncomfortable trade-offs as we attempt to find our optimal altitude.
At its most extreme, we may feel a lack of belonging as we attempt to interface across all levels simultaneously. Operating in something of a void, that is neither tightly anchored to the work day to day, nor firmly integrated with senior leadership structures. A no-fly zone for leadership if you will, as a product of trying to find a new middle ground. To some degree, this is par for the course for leadership roles, as we adjust from team-centric relationships to being a member of multiple leadership circles.
Even for more seasoned leaders, finding the right flight level can be a process of learning and adapting. What works in one organisation may be very different to the needs and expectations of another (see organisational factors above). Our success and ability to have an impact at altitude are both a product of how we’re equipped to show up and the conditions under which we’re expected to operate. If the system itself isn’t receptive to that more senior design voice, this can be a limiting factor in said success.
That said, the ideal conditions may never exist and so the onus is on us, as experienced leaders, to provide a strong, credible perspective; not just on matters of UX, but with a rounded view of where product strategy (inclusive of design) meets business strategy. At more senior levels the lines between what’s product, engineering or design naturally start to blur and the common goal amongst leadership peers is: how do we enable teams to succeed based on our business objectives?
Navigating the airspace
So, when we find ourselves in a new leadership role or join a different organisation, what are some of the things we can do to help us orientate, establish expectations and calibrate our flight levels accordingly?
Clarify expectations
Expectations regarding the altitude at which you operate are likely to be determined by the nature of your role and where it fits into the wider organisation. To determine your operating model and the most appropriate flight path for the current situation, leaders should first seek clarity around roles and responsibilities. This may be explicitly outlined through artefacts like role definitions and accountability matrices, or implied by observing the activities and interactions of your peers and partners.
Understand the system
We are often products of the systems we operate in. As such, we need to ascertain where we have scope and latitude to operate. Is there an existing leadership model that creates a forum for you to bring a design perspective, or do you need to manufacture the time and space to have these conversations? Are you pulled up into established leadership circles or do you need to foster relationships from the ground up? Understand how decisions are made today and who you need to persuade and influence in order to see success.
Establish a perspective
Whatever scenario we find ourselves in, the shift to leadership requires us to build and maintain a perspective on design. To shift our purview and effectively zoom out, we should, at all times, seek to hold a clear perspective on aspects of strategy, quality and operations. As a minimum, these are the three pillars of context required to establish a viewpoint on the practice, where you should focus and what you should seek to change or improve to support the business with its goals.
Keep the work in sight
As we’ve discussed, forming a perspective on quality requires all leaders to keep one foot in the work. This isn’t about intervening and suppressing the expertise of your more experienced hires, this is about having the context to talk sensibly about the state of practice and quality, and to ensure a sense of accountability for the work that is being produced. As leaders, we have an obligation to uphold standards for design, whether directly or indirectly — by virtue of those we lead — and to do this effectively maintaining visibility is key.
Empowering other leaders
Subject to the size and shape of the team, you may be in a position where you have trusted managers or leads who can enable you to have an impact on a larger scale. Your job is to empower those leaders and in a similar fashion, help them find the right operating level(s) that will amplify their impact. No one person can be the master of all things, so this is your opportunity to optimise for a setup that allows you to invest your energy into the most pressing, strategic challenges while enabling your first line to both support your agenda and chart their own growth.
Build strong peer relationships
Our success as leaders will in large part, be based on the strength of the relationships we build. As with any team, the foundations of those relationships start with trust. Are you a credible, reliable and authentic leader? How do you show up for your partners when it matters most? To operate effectively at an elevated altitude we need to forge strong relationships, where we have the safety to create a state of healthy tension. As peers, we strive for the respect and support needed to make well-rounded product decisions that are aligned with our common goals.
Zoom in, zoom out
As we know, leadership requires adaptability and with that, the agility to adjust your perspective relative to the needs of the business and your team(s). This will call for you to not only have holistic oversight but the capacity to zoom in and out as you encounter different challenges, necessary to gain context and clarity. This, in itself, is a skill. Just as we would with research, we sense for the signals that allude to a problem and then use that as a provocation to deep dive and contextualise the issue. Armed with that context we can again zoom out, rationalise relative to the bigger picture and, as necessary, formulate a strategy.
Filter through the noise
Given the purview of leadership, it’s fair to say you can be exposed to a lot of noise. Each structure, circle and ceremony will generate any number of ideas or issues, all vying for your limited attention. Unmanaged, it can feel like you’re drowning with a seemingly endless list of actions. The only strategy here is to strategise. It’s critical to filter through the noise, adjust your levels and create focus by bringing things back to strategy. How and to what degree do these challenges hinder or enable your current goals and objectives? It’s a classic case of prioritisation, using the guardrails of strategy to narrow your gaze.
A smooth landing
Speaking from experience, this is perhaps one of the trickiest lessons to learn as a leader. Knowing how best to position yourself, relative to your peers, relative to your reports, and in a way that meets the expectations of your seniors, is not always straightforward. It can often require some trial and error, and what works in one organisation will not necessarily translate well to another. Here, we have to use our design sensibilities to understand the problem space, explore and refine our approach and measure the resulting impact.
If our success is tied to our ability to operate at altitude, we have to approach this mindfully and with a view to being able to pivot as needed. If we get this wrong we risk the sense of disconnect I described and may end up drifting between product and leadership constructs; operating somewhere in the wings and not feeling tightly connected nor aligned to any concept of a team. Not only can it be a very lonely place, but it severely limits our ability to have the impact we desire.
In contrast — where we’ve employed some of the tactics above to course correct — we find ourselves involved in the right conversations at the right times, are working in lockstep with our trusted leadership partners, and are actively sought out to bring a critical design perspective on all manner of strategic decisions. We’re engaged and motivated by a sense of engagement and impact, we retain the context we need to make informed decisions, and successfully enable those we lead to have the latitude they need to do their best work.
