The first few weeks as a design leader
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Service Transformation Branch members publish reflections on the what and why for their team.
This post is by Martha Edwards, new STB team member and temporary Director of Strategic Design.
At the end of January, I stepped into a temporary assignment as Director of Strategic Design, filling in for Kevin Ehman (you can read all about that in his excellent blog post about the transition.)
This is a bit of a departure for me, for two reasons:
- I’ve shifted from a mainly practitioner role to a leader role
- I’ve moved from a central government department to a ministry, meaning I’m closer actual service delivery, and working in a service area that gets a lot of media attention and scrutiny.
I’m almost obsessively reflective so I’ve been thinking a lot about this experience, and keeping in line with my dedication to being open and transparent, I’m sharing three of my top reflections and some of ways things I’ve been focusing on in these early days.
Reflection 1: It’s been a relief to know that many of the things I did side-of-my-desk as a practitioner are now my actual job.
My previous org didn’t have an official design leader, and so I took on a fair bit of extra responsibility for filling in the gaps, doing things like trying to connect designers across teams, supporting design practice and trying to figure out what tools are being used across the org. For the most part, that work was needed and wanted by the people I worked with and for. But it always felt a bit awkward to jam myself into that space without the official permission or mandate to do. We’re often told that leadership can come from any level, and indeed I’ve met a few people who find it easy and comfortable to insert themselves into a leadership role from a non-leadership classification. But whether because my gender or my personality or my upbringing, I’ve realized I’m not one of them.
Now I have that mandate and it feels like a bit of a weight has been lifted. I have explicit permission and responsibility to step into that space. So I wonder — perhaps it’s not enough to just give people capacity to do side-of-desk work. Perhaps people need the explicit permission and the job title to feel like they can take ownership?
Reflection 2: The importance of clear, findable onboarding materials and product documentation can’t be underestimated
The learning curve in moving to this new sector has been steep. The amount of acronyms, jargon, names and concepts I’ve had to learn is mind boggling. I still don’t know most of them, and I often get the different parts mixed up with others.
One of the extra complex things about my role is that I’m not just learning one subject area, like I previously did in a product team. I have to learn about what my own team is doing (the Service Transformation Branch) plus I need to have a working knowledge of all of the different programs and products across the ministry, in order to support the designers and the design working happening. It’s been a tricky balance, trying to figure out how deep I need to go, and I’m still working that part out. Additionally, most of my onboarding has been in meetings, where knowledge is shared to me like a firehose and I take pages upon pages of notes that I try to make sense of after.
All of this is to say, it’s really hit home the importance of reducing the cognitive load for people who are learning about a team, product or program for the first time. I’ve started to think that all teams should be required to have a “start here” or “read me” file that provides a painfully simple intro that anyone can understand, with links out to deeper knowledge. This is something I’ve always prioritized when planning for handover or onboarding, and will encourage the teams I work with to do too.
As we used to say when I was in Government Digital Service in the UK Government, “do the hard work to make it simple”
Reflection 3: Connection doesn’t have to be overly complicated
Loneliness is a default state for me — I’m introverted and independent and so isolation comes easy when I’m coming in to a pre-established group. But I’ve already been feeling more connected to my new ministry than I expected. This started with a slew of welcome emails, from many people (including our deputy minister,) and has continued through frequent engagement on our teams channels and regular STB catchups. Kelsey and Harry regularly send me thoughts and ideas, and we have an STB chat where we frequently share blog posts, notes, ideas, weekend plans and so on.
Connection has been a hot topic since the world went remote a few years ago and the orgs I’ve worked for have talked at length about new ideas and strategies for connection. But this experience has led me believe that maybe we’re over thinking it. Maybe we don’t need new tools or frameworks or strategies. Maybe we just all need to get more comfortable with reaching out more often, sharing our thoughts (even when they feel irrelevant,) and talking about non-work things once in a while.
What I’ve been focusing on in these early days
In the weeks prior and during this move, I tried searching various blogs, networks and even ChatGPT for some idea of what a design leader could do in their first few weeks/months on the job. I didn’t need a formula to follow, but I do like to have a sense of how other approach the job as it gives me ideas of what I can experiment with.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t find anything that was quite what I was looking for, so I decided to write something for others who might be approaching this challenge.
Meeting people and understanding their context
My first four weeks were filled with one-on-one chats with almost anyone in my sphere of work — I think I did over twenty of these. Not only do these help me understand the perspectives and contexts I’ll be working in, but they start to build relationships which are foundational to getting stuff done. I’ve been approaching these with my user researcher hat on, meaning I’m being curious and trying to see patterns. I’ve already pinpointed a few opportunity areas to focus on from these chats.
Finding quick wins
Design leadership positions in the BC Government are few and far between, and I want to make sure I’m showing some sort of tangible value. I want to be able to prove to other business areas that this kind of role is important to what we are doing. Some of the things I’ve worked on delivering:
- I did a quick assessment of our organizational design maturity, by adapting the UCD Quiz from Kara and Clara for our design team. This helps us see our gaps and opportunities.
- Harry and I did some work to understand our Figma licencing and came up with some options to align our approach across the ministry, which creates consistency in design work and saves us money.
- I led a very initial co-creation of a design practice guide with the different design teams in Environment.
Figuring out the balance between supporting the doing, and being strategic
As someone coming to leadership from a practitioner role, it would be too easy for me to fall into the role of a design or research ops person — someone who solves the immediate concerns for the designers I support like research recruitment, tool accesses and so on. But my job title isn’t design ops — it’s strategic design.
“The strategy is delivery” is another saying we used a lot at GDS, and it’s always really resonated for me. I’m someone who prefers the practical to the theoretical, so I’ve been working on figuring out what strategic design means in tangible terms. I have some ideas that I’m flushing out but I feel like I can’t know if they’re the right strategies until I start delivering on them. Like most things, I suppose it comes down to experimentation and embracing failure.
Discovering my own brand of authentic leadership and being kind to myself
Kelsey wrote something in her 2022 year-end reflection that’s stuck with me.
“I am a different leader than Jill. It took me a while to be okay with this. Stepping into big shoes is never easy.”
This is how I feel coming into this role. Kevin and I have different personalities — on meetings he’s much more articulate and outgoing than I am — and I often wonder if I’m a disappointment to the teams who’d become used to his candour and ability to think up useful things to say on the spot, which I can rarely manage to do.
At the start of my career, I often tried to mask my introversion by playing the “role” of the extroverted person I thought I should I should be, but it never went well so I’m doing my best to stop doing that. This means I have to make an extra, intentional effort to recognize the strengths I bring to this role, and the ways in which I am already a leader in this space, even if that style of leadership looks, sounds and feels different. I know that if I want to see more people like me — introverted, neurodiverse, quiet and awkward — to be in spaces like these, I have to be willing to show up in them as myself, unapologetically, and to save a few seats for others.
If any of this resonates and you’d like to chat, you can email me or add me on LinkedIn. I also write bi-weekly weeknotes on my own blog if you’d like to follow along.
