From Designer to Design Manager.
Becoming a More Self-Aware Leader.

August 2021. 4 min read

Transitioning into Design Management after years of being a Designer was much trickier to navigate than I had anticipated.

When I decided to become a Design Manager, I had made the decision to step away from the comforts of a craft that I had spent years learning and start a whole new journey to leadership. I wish I could say I understood the choice I was making, but I didn’t fully understand the extent of the transition.

I thoroughly enjoyed my career as a designer, working hard with teams to fine-tune designs that put customers at the heart of the decision-making process. Over the years, I’d been lucky enough to work with, and learn from some great leaders. Not only did they take an interest in my general wellbeing, but they also taught and inspired me to become a better designer. After 12 years, I wanted to draw from what they had taught me and shape my own leadership style.

I wanted to help designers experience what it was to build strong and lasting working relationships, to trust that someone has their best interests at heart and to feel empowered to be the best they could be. I wanted to make space to enable designers on my team to feel safe, seen, heard, and respected.

My inner voice filled me with optimism as I started the transition into my new role: “The knowledge and skills you have learnt as a designer will make you a great leader… You’re an extrovert; outgoing and confident which are the winning traits of all successful leaders… ”. WRONG! These were just some of the myths I’d believed before I started to analyze what great leadership is truly about. I read this quote by Peter Perhalz in Org Design for Design Orgs: “The skills that make someone a great designer are almost wholly unrelated to the skills that make them a great manager and team leader,” which captures the reality of things brilliantly. As for extroverts having winning traits of all successful leaders, well some of the most famous leaders have proved that introverts can be just as successful.

The change was tough. I found it hard to strike the balance between becoming too involved and too detached from the work that designers on my team were delivering. I received feedback first-hand that they felt a lack of ownership and that their performance was under scrutiny or that they weren’t getting the help and guidance they needed. This was disheartening and went against everything I had originally set out to achieve. To add to my disappointment, it seemed the more I delved into leadership, the more I struggled to come to terms with my own perceived lack of value.

I needed to better understand what it meant to be a great leader. I set myself a goal to learn more about the four facets of leadership: Wisdom, Identity, Reputation, and Brand. In doing so, I hoped to become aware of my strengths, remedy my weaknesses and define my own leadership style. In this instance, starting from zero was actually a gift. In the words of James Clear, “If you don’t have much to begin with, you don’t have much to lose”.

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7 steps I took to become a more self-aware leader 

1. I started strengthening my relationships.

Trusting relationships are core to any job, particularly leadership. It was important for me to continue to build on existing relationships with my team and start building new ones amongst others.

Forming a new habit of stepping away from my desk and getting to know different people in the wider business without an agenda was a huge part of this. It meant sparking new conversations when walking around the studio, making time to eat my lunch in our communal space, and inviting people to join me on my daily turmeric latte run. I created opportunities to listen deeply, by accepting the pauses and silences in conversations that I had always found so awkward and made a conscious effort to speak last. I started learning more interesting and valuable information about people’s wellbeing, needs, and motivations.

2. I invited regular feedback from more people.

Priding myself as somebody who regularly asks for feedback, it was more important than ever that I continued to seek it. As my working relationships blossomed, trust soon followed. This gave me the opportunity to start regularly inviting others, not just my managers, to tell me their thoughts on the reputation I’d established and share specific examples of things I had done well and could improve. Finding out how others perceived me based on my behaviour was scary, but an integral part of me checking to see if my reputation aligned with my desired leadership style. It also gave me the chance to re-establish a healthy culture within the team of giving and receiving feedback with positive intent.

3. I wrote down good and bad traits from design leaders.

For me, this meant thinking about design leaders I’d known personally and analyzing what it was about those leaders that I’d like to emulate or avoid. Some of these traits related to interpersonal skills, others to the design practice, but it was important for me to write them down to get a full picture of the leader I wanted to become.

4. I reached out to the leaders who’ve had a big impact on me.

After thinking about these leaders and what they meant to me, I reached out to the ones who had the most impact and asked if they’d be open to a quick chat. These conversations gave me an opportunity to gain valuable insight into the biggest challenges they had faced and how they had overcome them. They also allowed me to gain multiple perspectives on the challenges I had been experiencing.

5. I started reading, watching, and listening to topics on all things leadership.

Julie Zhuo: The Making of a Manager was the first book that was recommended to me. Since reading it, I have been inspired to the point of obsession with learning about leadership. Getting insights into others’ experiences and learning new tools and techniques to help me understand just how I lead has been fundamental to my growth. Other notable examples of resources that have helped me gain a richer perspective of what being a great leader mean include:

• Simon Sinek: Leaders Eat Last

• Kim Scott: Radical Candor 

• Brene Brown: Dare to Lead

• Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project

With a need to bank all of this newly found knowledge to draw from and build on moving forward, I started an Interest Log. Full of insightful quotes and ideas to experiment with, it was refreshing seeing what these notes taught me about myself. It was also a great reminder of just how far I had come in such a short space of time.

6. I started writing a Little Wins Log.

It can be easy to lose sight of accomplishments as a leader. Documenting things that I had been proud of, no matter how small, provided me with a visual representation of the value I was bringing. Being someone who likes to see progress, this was something that was really important for me. It also tracked all the results of my experiments as I tried to figure out new, different, better ways, whilst staying true to my authentic self. Securing permission to ask questions and listening deeply in 1:1 meetings, empowering others to make their own decisions, bringing wisdom and expertise in situations where people are stuck, and having difficult conversations are just a few examples of little wins that exist within my log.

7. I started networking.

Moving to Sydney from London two years ago meant that all the strong connections I had created over time weren’t readily available. In Sydney, I shied away from opportunities to get to know my new design community and build new connections. It’s safe to say I should have invested time sooner. After carrying out some initial research, I found a variety of resources available to identify local ‘Meet Ups’ with other like-minded designers. This built my confidence to initiate new conversations, reach out to new groups, join design community slack channels, and sign up for future events. I’ve since met up with design leaders to understand new perspectives as well as gain a deeper understanding of the talent and resources available in Sydney and even made a hire from a slack channel. This shows just how important networking is to set you and your teams up for success.

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Being more self-aware doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a huge amount of ongoing investment and no matter how much progress we make, there is always more to learn. If you are currently in the process of transitioning from Designer to Design Manager and finding it tricky to navigate, remember it’s the small actions that add up and make a big difference. I don’t have all the answers, but these seven steps have helped me build confidence on my journey to become the best leader I can be.