Leadership
The five elements to good management: ask, listen, take action, empower, and follow up
There isn’t one magic recipe for management. There are many of recipes. The challenge with giving advise to managers, especially in design, is the changing environment in which managers operate. Different environments require different styles of management at different times. Different people have different personalities and imposing a single
Building psychological safety into the core of a team’s culture
One of the most important aspects of any team is its culture. When teams grow, culture is generally a representation of what people believe the culture to be instead of what leadership might want the culture to be. For example, although the leadership team might want an open and inclusive
Find the strengths in people’s unique backgrounds
Before leading design at VMware, I was an engineer. I guess I am still an engineer in addition to being a designer. I studied computer science at the University of Washington [https://www.cs.washington.edu/] (Go Huskies!) and worked as a front-end engineer within VMware before co-founding Clarity [http:
Productivity, not activity. How I try to ensure I am focusing on the right priorities.
A few months ago, I had a conversation with a designer on my team about managing her work. She was subtly hinting to me that she’s overwhelmed with the level of work she’s been handed and is trying to figure out how to manage it. As we went
Have an opinion and earn your “seat at the table”
I spend a lot of time on cross-collaboration with product managers, engineers, and designers working together to deliver the best experience possible to our customers. Overall, it’s a healthy environment of genuine focus on our customers, even when our opinions differ. In enterprise design, we’re transitioning design as
Ask for your next promotion
This article will probably land a few more emails in my inbox over the coming weeks and months, but here we go. The more conversations I have with design leaders, individual contributors, and even design managers, the more I am reminded how much of what I know today as a
Leaders are great at one of three: Vision, Operations, or Coaching
I ran into a tweet the other day that said most leaders are generally great at one of three things: vision, operations, or coaching. Few leaders are great at two, and you can rarely find one that is good at all three. Thinking about it, this has been true throughout
Delegating work
One of the hardest skills to learn as a new manager moving from an individual contributor (IC) role is how to delegate. How to use the power of a team to achieve more. Delegation by its nature is a hard task. There is a balance between being absent as a
