The Designer’s List of Leadership Skills
The 6 Leadership Skills that every designer needs to have
Leadership skills are character traits and interpersonal skills that help people to reach a shared goal, motivate people to work together or generally guide others towards success. These skills compliment UX Disciplines and Human Skills.
Each Leadership Skill should be present at certain levels, though continued refinement and maturity in these particular areas is expected.
Empathy
Required at Level 2 (3–5 years of experience)
How can you create products and services that accomplishes your users’ goals if you do not understand their needs, motivations, and challenges? To be a successful designer, it is paramount that you put yourself in your users’ shoes so that you understand their needs.
“People ignore design that ignores people”. -Frank Chimero
You must be able to design and solve for various types of users. Learning to empathize with your users is a skill that will develop more deeply overtime. You must feel what your users feel to shed light on what will be most beneficial for them.
One of the best ways to do this is to talk to your users — whether it’s through surveys, user interviews, or usability tests. The core of a usability test is not about understanding your product, it is about understanding how your users use your product. What is the path they take to get from A to B? What frustrates them the most? What makes them happy?
Another great technique forgetting to know your users is through observation. Immerse yourself in their environment. It is our responsibility as designers to be empathetic toward users of the product and make certain that their needs are met, pains are relieved, and gains are created. This is a big reason behind a key objective I put into every job description for people on my team; “Observe people using what we have designed or what a competitor has designed for at least two hours every six weeks.”
Strategic Thinking
Required at Level 3 (5–10 years of experience)
Strategic Thinking starts with strategy, which is simply a plan for how to keep a user’s experience — service level, product level, service area, or touch-point — with a brand in line with the overall goals and objectives of the company. Strategic Thinking can help ensure an organization’s vision of what they want their customers to experience can become a reality while staying within predetermined company guidelines.
To engage in strategy means to go beyond only executing the “how” and being able to articulate the “what” and “why” for products and services. To conduct strategy, you must make clear tradeoffs and positioning within business, technical and customer contexts. Michael Porter defines strategy as “deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value”. This applies to many different scopes and spaces. Strategy can be applied to the overall business, sales and marketing, technology, products and services or overall experience.
The scope of one’s execution of Strategic Thinking depends on their level of mastery and level within the team. Every designer should engage in strategic thinking at the appropriate level of scope for their role.
In short strategic thinking focuses on:
Understanding business needs
Understanding user needs
Finding the right scope
Making clear trade-offs
Crafting a plan
Planning
Required at Level 3 (5–10 years of experience)
Planning helps an individual and team realize an outcome. This requires a deep understanding of a wide range of disciplines, tools, methods, time and effort needed to practice them. It leads to coordination across multiple scenarios and deployment in order to achieve the intended results.
Projects
Design work for the direction, scope, time needed and outcome for projects requires effort and intentionality. At the project level, planning is required for your work to succeed.
Products & Services
Products and Services span a wide array of touchpoints and departments and require many perspectives and areas of expertise in order to execute and maintain. Without extensive planning for time, skills needed, strategic considerations, and intentionality, this will fail.
Team Compositions
People have unique skills, experiences, passions and perspectives. Finding the right composition for teams is critical. Compositions for workshops, projects and meetings all require planning.
Individuals
Each person has different passions, skillsets, level of experience and goals. Developing the right destination, creating expectations and crafting a path requires effort, time, and intentionality. In order to mentor and develop people effectively, you will need planning as a skill.
Mentoring
Required at Level 4 (10–15 years of experience)
Getting the most out of the team and helping team members reach their potential means putting effort into developing people through mentoring. On the whole, a mentoring starts with a seasoned professional who brings all of their experience to the table. They share insights and experience while providing guidance, feedback, and support as another designer establishes themselves in the field. Mentoring should be about growing individual skills in a two-way direction that improves the knowledge transfer of more senior designer, which should lead to a shared understanding of how UX looks and is implemented in the organization.
Mentors should:
Enable designers to grow in their craft, disciplines, soft skills and leadership skills.
Grow in their ability to teach and articulate principles and rationale.
Help designers see alternative perspectives and trade-offs.
Assess the areas that need growth and attention in another designer.
Provide honest feedback.
Versatility
Required at Level 4 (10–15 years of experience)
Leaders at various levels are often tasked with many different functions and activities. The ability to quickly switch modes is imperative. Designers have been responsible for multiple projects from multiple areas of the organization — all with different scopes. Versatility allows a designers and leaders to effectively manage their time and attention between different areas of responsibility, functions, and activities and essentially “switch modes” when appropriate.
As a leader gets further in their maturity, this aids in switching between “Thinking modes”:
Creative Mode
Focuses on creativity, the possibilities, alternatives, and new ideas. It’s an opportunity to express new concepts and new perceptions.
Listening Mode
Aims to take in information without attempting to interpret it, adapt it or analyze it.
Analysis Mode
Works to solve a problem while consciously using standards or probabilities to make judgments.
Vision
Required at Level 5 (15+ years of experience)
Vision is the ability to create a narrative and representation that makes strategy concrete and provides a “north star” and inspiration for the teams building toward it. Driving this allows design leadership to stand out, from leadership of other functions. The leader’s success in this skill goes beyond the development of a vision. Success is shown in how the vision catalyzes action, inspiring people within a company to charge forward because they want to see that vision realized.
Executing leadership vision may be among the toughest skills for leaders to develop. To successfully execute your leadership vision, you must be able to define the vision, strategy, and tactical plan for your organization or team, and then effectively communicate it to your team in a way that engages and focuses them on a common goal.
To effectively achieve vision a leader will need to utilize all their Human Skills — Professionalism, Communication, Collaboration, Facilitation, Adaptability, and Confidence. Along with most of their Leadership Skills — empathy, Strategy, Planning and Versatility.
More on Career Development
To learn more about developing a career in User Experience check out some of these articles I’ve written: