While design waits for a seat at the top table, is it missing out on other places to sit?
Hearing the perennial discussions around getting a “seat at the table” from designers and design leaders who feel neglected or misunderstood results in a good debate but often one that often overlooks an important fact: most companies have more than one table that designers should strive for.
In fact, it sometimes feels a bit like going to a dinner party or a wedding, when guests complain about the seating plan. Planning of seating is up to the hosts. Sitting in a specific place is not a given but is earned through the relationship building and relevance of those who have already earned the right to sit there.
Building relationships, consensus, collaboration and relevance can be done in many different ways.
Consider that Engineering and IT provide technology solutions to all areas of a business. Consider that marketing and sales provide recognition of brand, products, and services, generating revenue through their efforts that keep all areas of the business alive. Consider that Product helps shape what the company offers to its customers, a strategy, vision, and roadmap that provides a sustainable path for people to create and build.
This brings me to another important fact: each of these areas also tend to have major responsibility for substantial budgets, investment, and making operational cost savings, forcing their leadership to develop a high degree of business acumen as well as deep knowledge of the discipline.
So, it stands to reason that for design to be promoted up, it must not only deliver within a product or service pipeline, but it must also find a way to be relevant to other disciplines across the company and develop an equally high degree of business acumen.
Where else can design make a difference?
Consider the needs of other disciplines in your company, such as:
- Engineering
- Finance and accounting
- Human resources
- IT
- Marketing
- Product management
And what could design offer to gain a seat in one or many of these places?
- Workshop design and facilitation
- Sketching, storyboarding, mapping
- Research and prototyping (lo-fidelity, walkthroughs)
- Co-design activities
- Creation of vision and mission statements, and principles
- Model and activity creation
- Use of design to illustrate team artifacts, visuals
- Training, seminars, coaching, mentoring on design practices
- Helping to design workflows and process maps
…just to name a few.
Any or all of these capabilities could be offered in the support and service of other teams to help them think more critically, be more successful, and in the process, demystify the design process demonstrating there is more to design than wireframes and UI.
Similarly, Evan Osherow illustrates this point in his UX Collective article Designers, stop asking for a “seat at the table” where he states “If we want to change how people engage design we have to change how people think about design. And to change how people think about design we have to demonstrate our value. Demonstrate, not just advocate. Show and tell.”
If you disintermediate digital delivery design outputs and artifacts from the models, methods, and tools that designers use in their creation, you will expose a whole host of skills and capabilities with relevance to other areas of the business.
So, you’re still focused on that seat at the top table?
Those with aspirations to ascend to a seat at the top table will need to develop Commercial maturity. According to Wharton University, the top executive management skills needed to succeed in the C-Suite are:
- Senior leadership skills
- C-Suite communication and presentation skills
- Change management skills
- Subject matter expertise
- Strategic thinking and foresight
- Decision making
- Emotional intelligence
- Employee development
- Delegation
Leaders are required to develop those skills before they enter the C-Suite. How many design leaders today have had the opportunity to develop them to an executive level while building and running their design functions?
Kate Aronowitz emphasizes this point in an article for Fast Company, titled Designers Finally Have A Seat At The Table. Now What?, “As we shoulder new responsibilities and take bigger design leadership roles, we are falling short. I see us paying too much attention to the “design” part of the role and not enough to “leadership” — defending our own interests without deeper understanding of the businesses and broader contexts we must operate in.”
Being an expert SME in design is one skill set. Developing the other eight skills to the same level will likely require sacrificing time spent in design. In many cases the educational programs of other disciplines contain more business focus, providing a stronger grounding for them to advance. Designers are required to make a distinct choice to deviate from their creative discipline to build a parallel set of skills in business and management.
Loving and doing design is not the same thing as leading design as an executive.
Those who love the “act” and the “discipline” of design may find they struggle to make time to develop further than being a great design leader, reporting into, but not sitting at, the top table. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
To influence business strategy, you need to understand the business side of the business you are in.
I’ve seen too many times over the years that as designers advance into leadership roles they grow to regret the distance their new responsibilities create between their leadership responsibilities and the practice of design.
Douglas Powell makes this point in his article, Designers As Leaders: Now that we have a seat at the table, how do we prove we belong?, “As we step into leadership roles in complex organizations, how do we retain, enhance, and maximize our differentiating core skills as designers to contribute to the businesses we’re helping to lead?”
Unless designers are willing to make sacrifices to develop the commercial maturity and management skills required to be a successful member of the C-Suite, why would any Board want, or need design to sit at the highest table in a company?
Being a great designer or design leader can provide an opportunity to advance within the discipline of design, but on its own isn’t enough to garner a cherished seat at the top table in any company.
That doesn’t mean that great design leaders shouldn’t try to develop that acumen, but it does mean they need to be prepared to sacrifice some of their engagement with design to develop all of the right skills and capabilities that only may one day earn them a seat.
And let’s not forget all of the disciplines across the company whose tables would directly benefit from the very skills that designers nurture and love to practice. There are other ways to add value, build recognition, and even build some of those skills to deliver the right shape of design leader to the C-Suite.
Design should focus on sitting at tables where it will add the most value.
Where design feels that it has become a cog in a delivery engine, remember what I said above — there is more to design than most people ever see. Open up your working practices. Be transparent. Use your tools, skills, method and models to not only be the best cog in the engine, but to help others express their plans, strategy and value in the company using design-led thinking.
The highest table in any company will always serve a higher purpose that encompasses the full range and breadth of disciplines across the company.
At the end of the day, you need to weigh up the benefits to you as a design leader, because the honest truth is that sometimes up isn’t always better.
Brian Hoadley is the founder of a transformational change consultancy focused on digital product, research and design.
Article written with consideration and input from @clare.munday.
