How to build a happy, productive design team
There are many articles and books out there that will give you great advice on leading and growing design teams. Some are theoretical, making the advice hard to put into action, others are very detailed but hard to refer to and use on a daily basis.
This article attempts to be short enough to read in one go and detailed enough to start building your own version that works for you.
These are the key areas we’ll cover:
- Measuring and coaching happiness and productivity
- Psychological safety
- Company-wide culture
- Default frameworks and expectations
- Leadership principles
- G.R.O.W. individuals
- Hiring
Know your value to the team
Approach team leadership like you approach a project… by putting users at the centre of it, or in this case your team members. Listen to your team as much as you listen to your leaders. Just like a Venn diagram of user needs and business needs, you’ll want to show the value of the sweet spot in the middle where they overlap.
To give your team the best chance of success now and in the future, work not only on the team itself but also the culture of the organisation that your team sits within. What are the touch points of your team? Do your team’s ways of working flow well with others? Does your team and everything it touches work as a healthy ecosystem? This may seem like a lot to take on, so find the right balance based on your specific team needs. To find their needs, set up feedback loops on both sides. Gather information and react quickly.
When considering structure and responsibilities, try to avoid a model that spreads responsibility of a single domain over multiple managers. You’ll want feedback and issues to ultimately come to a single manager to understand and resolve.
Set up regular, short catch-ups with individuals. Let them know that the time is in your calendar and you are dedicated to protecting it because you value their regular input.
You are both a member of the team and you lead. Here’s a way to execute that: enable, lead, and grow.
Enable
The key to enabling a team is to listen. Understand what they need. If you are a researcher or designer this will sound familiar. It’s the same best-practice approach we use for building systems that end users love.
Listen to understand the needs of your team. What are their pains? You can only resolve a pain if it is first understood. What are the benefits they enjoy? Make sure you keep on top of the good things your team enjoys so you can protect them. What are the individual jobs they do on a regular basis? As you have the benefit of looking at their activities from a more strategic level, is there anything you can recommend to improve their enjoyment, efficiency, creativity? Do they need tools? Get the cost signed off for them. Do they need better relationships with other teams? Get close to those other team leaders and help identify a solution that benefits everyone.
Measure happiness and productivity
Let the team know that your priority is their happiness and productivity as a team and as individuals. Let them know that you will be regularly asking them to self reflect on these two areas and to share their thoughts with you.
So how does it work? You’ll ask them to rate themselves by plotting on a visual map for happiness and productivity. Putting individuals in control of their own ratings helps them understand that this is a tool to reflect upon how they think they are doing, and to spark conversations relating to their goals. It is not a stick to use against them.
[Additional alt text. Top left quadrant text is comfortable, unchallenged and creative. Top right text is motivated, learning and innovating. Bottom right text is Anxious/burnt out, development where practical and work quality at risk. Bottom left text is Apathetic, unengaged and work quality adequate.]
Plotting happiness is quite straightforward as it is completely determined by the individual. Encourage them to not overthink this and go with their gut feel. Productivity needs some calibration in the early stages of the relationship, but once you figure them out it will be an ongoing conversation between you both. A self-deprecating individual’s rating might be lower than you’d expect, but this can lead to the affirmation they need to recognise this.
In your regular catch-ups ask them how happy they are and how productive they feel. Ask them plot their own ratings onto the map (this is rooted in an approach called psychological safety… more on this later).
Ask them if the section of the map reflects how they feel accurately. If not, that is no problem, the important thing is to discuss it. Consider changing the map wording for that individual and use it for just them in the future. Continue the conversation to find out why they are happy or not, or feel productive or not. Remember, it’s as important to understand what makes them happy as what their pains are. This is also a great opportunity to discuss increases and decreases from previous scores and explore their thoughts on why. The scores themselves aren’t important, they simply offer a tool to show an increase or decrease in a very clear way that might be hard to clearly communicate in other ways.
If your opinion of productivity is different from theirs then discuss this. Always be transparent about what you need from them as much as you encourage them to be transparent about what they need from you.
Coach towards happiness and productivity
Here’s how to approach moving people towards the top right of the map. It’s incredibly hard to move from the bottom right to the top right directly. Why? Because they don’t have the time or energy to focus on the actions needed. Instead, move them counterclockwise through the four quadrants.
[Additional alt text: Chart lines indicate to reduce workload and pressure to give the individual space to think. Then identify and enable worth that makes them happy and enable opportunities. Lastly direct, motivate and inspire then get out of their way.]
Make sure you leave the meeting with actions for them, for yourself or both. For your meeting to be productive, something needs to happen either within the meeting or outside of it, so be specific about what you will do or what you recommend they do. This could be as simple as them keeping up the good work, or it could be as detailed as an agreed schedule of actions and outcomes.
Remember, all of this can apply to whole teams as well as individuals. It may help team members to have both individual and team sessions to know if they are feeling the same as others in an anonymous way. For example, collect 1–10 scores through an anonymous Google Form, add the numbers together and plot them onto the chart. Present this to them as a group and use a lightning decision jam activity to create options for next steps that they vote on.
For all of this to work, the team needs to trust you and to trust each other. This is crucial. To achieve this piece of the puzzle we can look at psychological safety.
Embed psychological safety
To avoid looking stupid, we don’t ask questions. To avoid being intrusive we don’t offer up our ideas. To avoid being negative we don’t challenge the status quo. Unfortunately, this is the default psychology of many workplaces and teams.
Creating a psychologically safe environment means feeling like it’s ok to ask a question that may sound stupid, and not worrying about it. It means we know we won’t be punished for challenging the status quo. Essentially, we shift from managing impressions and ego, and move towards contributing to create a better organisation/product/environment without fear.
Here’s how to implement it:
Frame each project as a learning opportunity and an experiment
Failure is expected at some point, and learning can come from it, but only when the story is shared. When a team doesn’t have the threat of judgement hanging over them they approach it with an enthusiasm that improves the quality and amount they would otherwise. Encourage them to explore and learn new areas they think are appropriate. Fail fast and learn along the way.
Let your team know you make mistakes
Normalise talking about mistakes you make and show them how you deal with them. You acknowledge them, you ask for help where needed. You laugh. You resolve them and you take on advice to help to mitigate them in the future. Doing this helps your team feel comfortable raising issues earlier, helping them to prevent some, learn from others, support each other and all the while keeping morale high.
Encourage asking lots of questions
Most importantly show that not knowing the answer is an opportunity to discover and learn something new. Never let anyone be subjected to ridicule or feel anything other than curiosity and wonder if they don’t know the answer to a question. Encourage challenges to ideas in the form of opportunities for improvement. Use language such as ‘Yes, and…’ to add new perspectives to ideas. Avoid language such as ‘but how will it work if…’.
For a more in-depth look at how to create psychological safety check this article out on the psychsafety website https://www.psychsafety.co.uk/create-psychological-safety-in-your-workplace/
Company-wide culture
Influencing company-wide culture to better understand the role and value of design may be one of the biggest challenges you encounter.
Your team will have a set of principles they have created for themselves. In addition, some principles will help the wider company be a part of the design process so they can become familiar with the value of it. The principle of open design is a good example of this.
Open: Anyone interested, welcome to collaborate both internally and externally.
Design: Not just logos, layouts, branding, also features, strategy, innovation…
This may seem obvious to us designers, but the audience is everyone in the company.
Communicating the value of design requires involving as many roles around the business as possible. Invite finance officers to interview users, invite developers to usability testing. Present test results as an open invite to anyone who wants to drop in. As early as possible get everyone involved. Why? Because it’s the difference between explaining the plot of a film and watching it yourself.
A successful design team doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The team and the company culture will need to be a good fit so you will need to open up design to show how it can be part of problem-solving for any team. Invite them in, use accessible language and demystify design.
Read more on company culture and its link to psychological safety in this article by Tom Geraghty https://tomgeraghty.co.uk/index.php/psychological-safety-and-organisational-culture/
Lead
Default frameworks and expectations
Your team may be made up of varying levels of experience and skills. Choose or develop a go-to framework for ways of working that the whole team agrees upon. In addition, the flexibility to break free from it occasionally will help the team work on broader subjects and test new ways of working.
One caveat to this is that collaboration must be built into whatever framework is chosen or created. They must work as a team and the team must work well with other teams.
Introduce an existing framework as default and also the freedom to change it or replace it as they see fit. It gets everyone on the same page even if it’s to discuss how they would improve it.
A framework like the triple diamond works well in most product design scenarios, but the team should be in control of their own process.
In addition to a framework that ties together their ways of working the team will need a foundation level of skills including collaboration, agile, and whatever is standard across other teams. Even if they work well as a team they should not be a siloed island within the company.
Jump over to this article for a designer perspective on the triple diamond https://uxdesign.cc/why-the-double-diamond-isnt-enough-adaa48a8aec1 and here for more of a development angle https://medium.com/zendesk-creative-blog/the-zendesk-triple-diamond-process-fd857a11c179
Leadership principles
Communicate accessibly
Whatever you communicate to the team make sure your message is simple enough and accessible enough for all team members to engage. If what you are communicating doesn’t seem simple, learn it more deeply and re-work it until you can explain it simply.
Strong opinions loosely held
Make sure you know your stuff. Your position of authority should not be used as a tool to force your project ideas. Have strong opinions backed up by research and knowledge, but also be ready to let them all go when a member of your talented team comes up with a better idea.
Pitch, don’t tell
Whether you are discussing team structure or getting input on a project concept, engage the team with an initial idea first. Let them know you want their input and it’s absolutely fine to keep the idea as is, adapt it, or throw it out and start again from scratch. Often it’s more efficient to give something for them to react to than it is to start from scratch.
It’s important that the team feels safe enough that they can challenge you, and that they feel comfortable enough for you to challenge them. My rule of thumb for being challenged in the moment is to give four seconds of thinking time. If I have any information in my brain to counter, it will come to the surface within that time. If I don’t have a counter then the better idea has won.
Grow
G.R.O.W. individuals
Goal, Reality, Objective, Will.
Frame each as a question to provide a structure to individuals that need a little support and direction.
The beauty of this approach is that the individual provides the answers themselves, which means you’re be able to coach in an area you are not an expert in, and the individual is the master of their own destiny.
Goal
This should be a S.M.A.R.T goal of the individuals choosing that fits within their role objectives and their aspirations. This could be something big like becoming a creative director, or smaller like learning a new skill e.g. animation. What inspires them?
Reality
This is a chance for the individual to reflect on their starting point. What skills do they have now? Who do you know what could support you? Do you know what you don’t know? Does this conflict with any of your other needs or goals?
Options
Brainstorm all of the possible options to reach their goal. What paths are there? What else could they do? What if a constraint was removed, would that change anything? How will you weigh up and choose from these options? What obstacles are in your way? What do you need?
Will
They will now need to make choices and commitments to them. What will they do? By when? What could stop them? How might they overcome it? How will they track progress? What is the next task? From 1–10 how committed are they to the next task?
Find more detail about G.R.O.W coaching here https://www.performanceconsultants.com/grow-model
Don’t rush hiring
Don’t rush hiring. Measure twice cut once as the old proverb goes. You may feel pressure to hire as the appetite for more designers comes from the company needs, but push back on this if necessary.
Growing the team should only be considered when the overall team are happy and productive. Why? Because only a happy productive team can withstand the challenges of change that come with growth. If you scale when they have problems, you scale the problems too.
When the team becomes big enough they will need dedicated support to plan changes for themselves and to structure collaboration with other teams, and that will require much of your time and focus.
Building a happy, productive team is about managing bottom-up, not top-down. It’s not fair to hire someone you think is only ‘alright’. Hire people you believe in, that you think have the potential to be very happy and incredibly productive in the environment you are building. Hire motivated, team players, and trust them to get the job done.
Summary
- Lead without ego
- Provide direction and autonomy
- Manage bottom up
- Finish meetings with actions that relate to the vision
