Member-only story
The UX of design leadership: winners & losers
Six ways creative leaders can avoid obsolescence and obscurity.
The other day a senior design colleague reached out to me looking for advice. He was part of one of the unfortunate rounds of layoffs affecting big tech companies across the globe.
I was trying to help him find his next fit, but when I started to go through how he had been spending his time, I realized he was very out of touch. He had stopped pushing himself and learning new things for quite some time.
In today’s economic climate, depth and breadth of skills are paramount to survival. Companies of all shapes and sizes are expecting more with less. So, creative leaders need as many business and strategic skills as they do functional capabilities.
I call this creative dexterity.
Successful creative leaders understand how to translate customer behaviors and mindsets into solutions and pull together the teams and resources to move the needle fast. There’s no reason you can’t do all of that and more.
But there are plenty of excuses.
Too often, middle managers are out-of-touch leaders who haven’t left the ivory tower or their studio apartment in so long that they find themselves frozen while the world keeps going.
