# Designing Leadership | Andy Budd ![rw-book-cover](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j6a9kMvN2Kk/maxresdefault.jpg) URL:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6a9kMvN2Kk Author:: awwwards. ## Highlights > Thank you, thank you, thank you what a lovely crowd I hate it when people like read out, sorry Pete, I hate it when people read out those bios they send a lot better when they've written than when they're read out in front of an audience I felt quite sort of embarrassed by that, but thank you anyway okay so um a few years ago I spotted a trend a lot of my friends had moved from being individual contributors to leading a team, to leading a whole > department maybe being a head or director even a VP of design that finally got the seat at the table they've all wanted for so long but rather than being happy they were more stressed than ever before, the hope that somehow being an leader would solve all their problems but actually it just created a whole bunch of new ones problems they'd never had to deal with before um I think they'd fallen for this myth of leadership that somehow all you needed is power to make change and everything would magically get better. However it turns out that authority and > power generally isn't enough, power gives you the opportunity to influence but power alone won't cut it instead you need to develop a whole set of new skills which I'm going to talk a little bit about in this presentation, so as I talk to my friends over tea and cake well I'm British um it felt like I was having the same conversation over and over again it felt like it was at a Groundhog Day all all my friends have found themselves in the brilliant position where the companies finally got design and they'd been hired to kind of > grow the team to improve the impact they had on design at the interview this sounded great but it was becoming problematic really quickly they were inundated by resumes but few people had the kind of quality of of sort of design schools they were looking for maybe only 18 months out of a General Assembly and already calling themselves a senior designer if they found the right people keeping them for longer than 18 months is really challenging if you've ever spent any time in Silicon Valley or know that people hop between jobs maybe every like 18 months every 12 months every nine months as a result as my friends weren't really designed leaders they were basic > recruitment managers which was really stressful if they did manage to keep their team for longer than 18 months it felt like everything was grinding down they thought that like adding new people would matter the increased capacity but weirdly things are getting harder and harder to deliver it was really frustrating especially for my friends that come from an agency background it seemed like a thing they would normally have done in agency Road that would take six months was now taking 16 also they were finding > that rather than focusing on the work they were kind of being lifted up and they were having to manage the rest of the organization so really well I'm having a seat at the table but quite often it felt like a high chair and the designers were sat in the corner playing with the crayons where the adults talk business now marketing had the budget IT had the headcount and the designers were just kind of like colouring in over the side and finally if they had any time left they were having to look after the team and make sure they were they were feeling loved they were feeling looked after and often they were the first > design leader in their company so none of the infrastructure was in place so it was all a bit of a mess in fact they started thinking to me in talking to me like maybe design leadership wasn't for me maybe I made a mistake maybe we should go back to the comfortable world of being a individual contributor well I know what I'm doing I'm sure we've all felt familiar you know in our careers this kind of idea that you're kind of stuck in this sort of valley of despair but that summer say someone would come and unmask you scooby-doo style for the > fake that you know deep down that you really are it's really stressful so design leadership is relatively new we've had technologists and marketers on the board for as long as we can remember but design leadership at board level was still a novelty I'd like to get an idea in the room so who here would consider themselves a design leader not necessarily a manager but a leader so only a small number of you may be sort of feeling 5% that shows you how far > we've got to go now I have to say like this talk is mainly for you so there's only about 5% of the audience your primary target matter but who has a manager who has a boss here whew okay you're my secondary personas so if you have a boss hopefully your boss will be the best boss in the world and if you think I'm gonna say now there'll be mirroring amazing behavior if they're not maybe you can go back to the math silca say actually i saw these guys speaking about what a good design leader is maybe you should watch his talk later > yeah you've got to do it sort of like you know in a nice way you don't want to get fired or have an awkward conversation so I myself have been accidental leader for 14 years I say accidental because who grows up dreaming of being a leader you know it's kind of like I came from sort of the slacker generation where you'd watch sort of office space and the managers were the enemy and then I suddenly found out that I was the enemy it's quite scary it's kind of tough to deal with um so to kind of like work for all of my anxieties I > did a couple of things I found in a design leadership community there's now a slack community about fifteen hundred heads directors and VPS mostly of in-house teams and I also started a conference leading design and I did both of these things because frankly I was failing and I thought the best way to get better as a design leader would get the help from other people and talk to other people and and get get this experience and it's been really really valuable and if you happen to be a design leader in the audience of five or six of you you put your hands up if you want to get access to the slack > community drop me an email I'd love to kind of have you on board like I said never set out to be a design leader I mean sometimes I feel I'm the living embodiment of the Peter Principle if you don't know the Peter Principle the Peter Principle is the idea that people rise the level of their own incompetence which is why most of your bosses are probably incompetent because that's where you sort of sit and I know that might seem harsh but when I started clear:left I still hated the classic model of design leadership the superstar designer in the sort of black sort of like you > know turtleneck that would sort of surround themselves by young syncamatic juniors and they would like the the one source of truth when everyone else would kind of run around kind of like sort of praising them the design gods I hated them it was all very Mad Men it was this traditional sort of pyramid to the view of leadership that the person sits above can avoid having the sort of the ability to scan over the horizon sitting on the shoulders of all the rest of their team but the thing is if you talk to people on the team the weight of all those > people above them ends up crushing them ends up crushing their creativity that never really attracted me instead I preferred a more egoless sort of form of leadership which I lay discover was called sermon leadership in a book probably the weirdest book title I've ever read called orbiting the big giant hairball it's all about sort of creative leadership um they talk about leadership in creative terms more like a kind of a fruit tree the leaders are the trunks and the branches pushing the fruit to the sky to get nourishment and > the fruit are you the creative people and your job as a leader is to push the talent to the to the sort of skies carrying their weight on your shoulders rather than the other way around and for me this was a much more attractive model of leadership it's a model I try to adopt it just seemed more grown-up it seemed you know a way of sort of prioritizing continuing learning so like I said there were these sort of five problems are kept reoccurring the first one was finding talent and I ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdk0ezp1g5evjkbzfp9e5zcr)) > hate ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdk0fcnfq575vc08e6b25p04)) > much ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdk0fgs51b90f7jg79wfnhz3)) --- Title: Designing Leadership | Andy Budd Author: awwwards. Tags: readwise, articles date: 2024-01-30 --- # Designing Leadership | Andy Budd ![rw-book-cover](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j6a9kMvN2Kk/maxresdefault.jpg) URL:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6a9kMvN2Kk Author:: awwwards. ## AI-Generated Summary What makes a good design leader? Andy Budd CEO of Clearleft Ltd shares the five key challenges design leadership can bring, and the skills necessary to recruit, manage and foster a successful collaborative culture, at Awwwards Conference Amsterdam. Experience our conferences! Get out from behind your screen, learn the secrets of industry leaders and connect with cool designers from all over the world https://conference.awwwards.com Subscribe now for the latest talks and interviews from top digital creatives: https://www.awwwards.com/subscribe/ For the latest web design trends - follow us: Blog: http://awwwards.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/awwwards Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awwwards/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/awwwards/ #design #leadership #designteams ## Highlights > Thank you, thank you, thank you what a lovely crowd I hate it when people like read out, sorry Pete, I hate it when people read out those bios they send a lot better when they've written than when they're read out in front of an audience I felt quite sort of embarrassed by that, but thank you anyway okay so um a few years ago I spotted a trend a lot of my friends had moved from being individual contributors to leading a team, to leading a whole > department maybe being a head or director even a VP of design that finally got the seat at the table they've all wanted for so long but rather than being happy they were more stressed than ever before, the hope that somehow being an leader would solve all their problems but actually it just created a whole bunch of new ones problems they'd never had to deal with before um I think they'd fallen for this myth of leadership that somehow all you needed is power to make change and everything would magically get better. However it turns out that authority and > power generally isn't enough, power gives you the opportunity to influence but power alone won't cut it instead you need to develop a whole set of new skills which I'm going to talk a little bit about in this presentation, so as I talk to my friends over tea and cake well I'm British um it felt like I was having the same conversation over and over again it felt like it was at a Groundhog Day all all my friends have found themselves in the brilliant position where the companies finally got design and they'd been hired to kind of > grow the team to improve the impact they had on design at the interview this sounded great but it was becoming problematic really quickly they were inundated by resumes but few people had the kind of quality of of sort of design schools they were looking for maybe only 18 months out of a General Assembly and already calling themselves a senior designer if they found the right people keeping them for longer than 18 months is really challenging if you've ever spent any time in Silicon Valley or know that people hop between jobs maybe every like 18 months every 12 months every nine months as a result as my friends weren't really designed leaders they were basic > recruitment managers which was really stressful if they did manage to keep their team for longer than 18 months it felt like everything was grinding down they thought that like adding new people would matter the increased capacity but weirdly things are getting harder and harder to deliver it was really frustrating especially for my friends that come from an agency background it seemed like a thing they would normally have done in agency Road that would take six months was now taking 16 also they were finding > that rather than focusing on the work they were kind of being lifted up and they were having to manage the rest of the organization so really well I'm having a seat at the table but quite often it felt like a high chair and the designers were sat in the corner playing with the crayons where the adults talk business now marketing had the budget IT had the headcount and the designers were just kind of like colouring in over the side and finally if they had any time left they were having to look after the team and make sure they were they were feeling loved they were feeling looked after and often they were the first > design leader in their company so none of the infrastructure was in place so it was all a bit of a mess in fact they started thinking to me in talking to me like maybe design leadership wasn't for me maybe I made a mistake maybe we should go back to the comfortable world of being a individual contributor well I know what I'm doing I'm sure we've all felt familiar you know in our careers this kind of idea that you're kind of stuck in this sort of valley of despair but that summer say someone would come and unmask you scooby-doo style for the > fake that you know deep down that you really are it's really stressful so design leadership is relatively new we've had technologists and marketers on the board for as long as we can remember but design leadership at board level was still a novelty I'd like to get an idea in the room so who here would consider themselves a design leader not necessarily a manager but a leader so only a small number of you may be sort of feeling 5% that shows you how far > we've got to go now I have to say like this talk is mainly for you so there's only about 5% of the audience your primary target matter but who has a manager who has a boss here whew okay you're my secondary personas so if you have a boss hopefully your boss will be the best boss in the world and if you think I'm gonna say now there'll be mirroring amazing behavior if they're not maybe you can go back to the math silca say actually i saw these guys speaking about what a good design leader is maybe you should watch his talk later > yeah you've got to do it sort of like you know in a nice way you don't want to get fired or have an awkward conversation so I myself have been accidental leader for 14 years I say accidental because who grows up dreaming of being a leader you know it's kind of like I came from sort of the slacker generation where you'd watch sort of office space and the managers were the enemy and then I suddenly found out that I was the enemy it's quite scary it's kind of tough to deal with um so to kind of like work for all of my anxieties I > did a couple of things I found in a design leadership community there's now a slack community about fifteen hundred heads directors and VPS mostly of in-house teams and I also started a conference leading design and I did both of these things because frankly I was failing and I thought the best way to get better as a design leader would get the help from other people and talk to other people and and get get this experience and it's been really really valuable and if you happen to be a design leader in the audience of five or six of you you put your hands up if you want to get access to the slack > community drop me an email I'd love to kind of have you on board like I said never set out to be a design leader I mean sometimes I feel I'm the living embodiment of the Peter Principle if you don't know the Peter Principle the Peter Principle is the idea that people rise the level of their own incompetence which is why most of your bosses are probably incompetent because that's where you sort of sit and I know that might seem harsh but when I started clear:left I still hated the classic model of design leadership the superstar designer in the sort of black sort of like you > know turtleneck that would sort of surround themselves by young syncamatic juniors and they would like the the one source of truth when everyone else would kind of run around kind of like sort of praising them the design gods I hated them it was all very Mad Men it was this traditional sort of pyramid to the view of leadership that the person sits above can avoid having the sort of the ability to scan over the horizon sitting on the shoulders of all the rest of their team but the thing is if you talk to people on the team the weight of all those > people above them ends up crushing them ends up crushing their creativity that never really attracted me instead I preferred a more egoless sort of form of leadership which I lay discover was called sermon leadership in a book probably the weirdest book title I've ever read called orbiting the big giant hairball it's all about sort of creative leadership um they talk about leadership in creative terms more like a kind of a fruit tree the leaders are the trunks and the branches pushing the fruit to the sky to get nourishment and > the fruit are you the creative people and your job as a leader is to push the talent to the to the sort of skies carrying their weight on your shoulders rather than the other way around and for me this was a much more attractive model of leadership it's a model I try to adopt it just seemed more grown-up it seemed you know a way of sort of prioritizing continuing learning so like I said there were these sort of five problems are kept reoccurring the first one was finding talent and I ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdk0ezp1g5evjkbzfp9e5zcr)) > hate ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdk0fcnfq575vc08e6b25p04)) > much ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hdk0fgs51b90f7jg79wfnhz3))