Rules for effective design choices
Before I got into any form of writing, I spent years working as a designer and advisor to companies of all sizes in a variety of industries, from designing spaces to helping people with hearing problems. After overthinking the intent of this enough, I decided to present a few rules for making better career choices in the design industry.
I wish this article will help you to organize your thoughts around where your next move will be and why. Whether you are a leader or an individual contributor, mastering a few key areas below will help you to manage your own success, as well as give you a sense of purpose, that to me is an essential part of our lives and design practice as a whole. If you are a member of a larger organization, this article may also help you to be more effective when evaluating candidates, promoting employees, and getting rid of the deadwood of your company.
The first area is diversity, which is above all not just a tick box or a PR stunt. It’s the way we work and allow voices to be heard across the board — be it a team or a single organization. Just like Joel C. Peterson, I will reference the topic of diversity to an orchestra. If you have an orchestra that’s made up of bassoons, it would be miserable to listen to. No diversity. But if you have a diversity of pieces of music, if everybody’s playing a different piece of music, that’s a kind of diversity. But it’s a mess. What you want is that everybody plays the same piece of music (they share values), but you want them to have different optics, different experiences, different things that have happened to them growing up, so they see the world through their optics. In the end, what you want to do is build a complementary team that functions well and trusts each other.
The second area is leadership. Regardless of position within your organization, a single lesson here is to always remove boundaries, that we never had to face ourselves, for those we manage and lead. Be proactive and don’t assume that just because there is a silence, everything is on the right track. Include everyone and step out of our own line from time to time, to remind people that they can say anything out loud. Make no mistake, this isn’t the way to make everyone talk nice to each other (of course, yes!), but it’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. The human mind is a deep well of creativity and it is now your job to guide people through that thought process. Outside of an enormous impact on an individual, a combination of leadership and psychological safety can be tracked on a team and organization level too, and clearly became a competitive advantage. If some of the terms are new to you, I strongly recommend reading or listening to a book by Amy C. Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
The next area is above all something, that is very hard to change and may not be easy to influence, whether you want it or not. It’s a character and personal values. First thing, you have to know yourself. Understand what you stand for, what’s the world like according to you. If everything would work out the way you want, what is it like? Once you have that, surround yourself with people who are aligned with your values. And people always bring their values with them. You may have heard about no D policy. Same thing. It’s an essential part of having functional teams across the board, where you can rely on people’s character, regardless of their role.
People are people. Whether or not they’re trained as engineers or doctors or lawyers, or whatever, they have these human emotions. Their brains work in certain ways.
Next up is learning when to look for new people, hiring, and sometimes letting go. After years in different agencies, large consulting groups, I learned some lessons about the good ways to bring on new talent. Before you begin looking, learn how to spec the job. It’s hard but essential to yielding better people in your context. Ask yourself, what is this job really about? How do we make a decision? The very fine way to do it is to write a nice thank you letter, pretending to congratulate your hire for the first year in your company and for everything that got achieved. Simply judging someone in a first interview, from a resume, even from reference checks, is really hard. A lot of times these interviews are 20 minutes, 30 minutes. You can’t make an important decision in that.
What we learned at our mother’s knee is really what drives us.
When you care who is the next hire, aspire to understand that person from the very beginning, understand big decisions of their life. What have they read? What do they think about? What issues concern them? People’s values don’t really change very much. And they will bring their values with them since day one.
Naturally, there’s a tendency to be focusing on growth and hiring and holding onto people. What happens is if you don’t pay attention to that, you build up deadwood in your own organization, and people get shuffled off to places that don’t matter, and pretty soon you build up these little corners of silence. And that’s when people sense that things aren’t hitting on all cylinders.
I will pause here because I have indirectly experienced following going wrong too many times.
There are no perfect decisions — there are probably no perfect hires either. It’s an essential part of the company’s culture to grow people who seem a little out of place, giving you signs of a wrong hire. A mistake. But how do you enhance people’s strengths and then help them overcome their weaknesses so you don’t need to let them go? After all, it takes money to make money, and hiring without a strategy can be expensive. In a study published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, hiring an employee costs an average of $6,110, with individual costs spanning from career events, job board fees, onboarding activities to internal and external teams involved in the process.
Once you catch a signal that some expectations are not being met, discuss things out loud immediately: How are you feeling about your job? How are things going for you? If you have inklings, that things may get even more uncomfortable, start talking about some possible objectives and goals that will set expectations for all sides. Having a great Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is crucial and please make sure you understand that inside out. If you don’t have one, the Society for Human Resource Management published a short guide on where and how to start.
When it comes to letting people go, it’s an equally important decision you make as the one when you hired them. It can be the best news you’ll ever deliver. To me, we are all equal humans, but with slightly different paths. One lesson here is to never communicate what went wrong (communication bias ftw!) from your own perspective and professional assessment. Chances are, it will be far from the understanding of the person. Think about comparing understanding of the same thing in two different ways and one is yours. And you simply lost the other person along the way. Communicate when you lost the other person and suggest friendly tips for improvement, so this person avoids this situation in the future.
The last chapter of this short article is about your own vision, and what’s the future you want to create. I’d like to divide this part into two parts: the future and strategy. Ultimately, it’s all timeframes vs. outcomes and how to helicopter between them.
The future is a 5 to 10 years timeframe, depending on your business setting. It’s a definition of something that will help influence decisions in your short term business strategy. To be able to get there, I think it’s really important to go through your own values at least every month and think where are you doing really vital things? Who’s really vital to it? Where’s the future taking us? How do we recalibrate, reorganize? Having these answered is essential when you want to start talking about the future in the context of your business. The second part of this is having a curated space within your organization, to have that conversation with your peers periodically. Where are we going? Who are we in 10 years? How do we operate? How do we make money? What do we want to change? If we were to solve the issues in a split second, what’s the outcome? What’s different in society or your customer’s life? How did we change the people we breathe for? Did we take care of everyone? Having this formulated will then ultimately plant seeds of the immediate and near decisions you will have to make.
When I think about the strategy, I always imagine a path, a beautiful landscape, a mountain. Deciding what peak you’re climbing together with your team. It’s the process of getting there and what goes into it. And like most things in life, it’s full of obstacles you need to remove, execute, postpone, manage… — you know what I am talking about! There is an ocean of knowledge around design operations and product design and I don’t want to get too much into execution in this article.
If you take care of your people, they will take care of you.
Before you take some time to rethink different areas I mentioned above, or better yet start practicing some of the lessons, I’d like you to remember the fact that at some point the organization is going to outgrow you, one way or another. And you have to be willing to let go. Above all, strive for your own ethics and values to match that.
I hope you appreciated my view and I wish you take something out of it. You can follow me here on Ivan Nevrela, Instagram or LinkedIn.
