My Management Style
I will keep this short and sweet. When it comes to describing my management style, it comes down to four things:
Emotional Safety
This is the bedrock upon which my management style is based. In work, friendships, and anything else where your presence matters, this is what I lead with. Since I believe in a partnership style management approach, my direct reports need to be able to trust that I am always working on their behalf. Depending on the person, this can take different forms, but the basic tenets are:
Listen more than I speak
Do my best to not judge what I hear.
People are usually dealing with something somewhere in their life and that can impact who they are at work. People have good days and bad days and they need to know that I support that.
Partnership
In terms of growth and mentoring, I take a partnership approach with my direct reports. Together, we assess and take aim at goals, and I figure out how to best support them in those efforts. Depending on where they are at in their growth journey, this can look like me providing growth opportunities on projects, finding new areas of interest that I think can serve them and our organization, or helping them construct plans to hit a personal goal. My main goal here is to set up an environment to give them the space to get excited about growth. I’m not here to pull it out of them, I’m here to structure the opportunities.
The chart on the right reflects where team members are at in their trajectory. Depending on their goals and their needs, we work together to figure out how to give them what they need.
Care Personally, Challenge Directly
I’m a big fan of Radical Candor. I have personally tried every wrong style of management that I could think of until I stumbled upon this and it helped point me in the right direction. The gist is this: I invest time into people. I care about them. I try to make sure that is the biggest message. With that in place, it is easier to give difficult feedback because I’ve already made the upfront investment to establish that Im telling them something hard because I care and the need to hear it.
Transparency
Being in a leadership position involves alot of moving parts and decisions that are made on a “what we know right now” sorts of basis. You almost never have enough information to feel super informed and make a decision easy. With that in mind, I do my best to be transparent as possible, whenever possible. Helps keep the trust.
“If you can build a trusting relationship with people so that they feel free at work, then they’re much more likely to do the best work of their lives. But you’re not “getting it out of them”; you’re creating the conditions for them to bring it out of themselves.”
Questions I have been asked during interviews
In 5 words or less, how would you describe your leadership style?
Empathy. Care personally, challenge directly.
How have you advocated for UX in the past and improved the overall know how of the company's employees?
Helping leaders understand that UX is not “UI” has been a regular challenge, and to help balance that, I work to get my designers to be closer to product definition processes so that the UX strategy solves both user and business problems. This helps get the voice of the user where it belongs, and helps people less familiar with UX practices see that we aren’t there “just to make things pretty”.
What is the hardest problem you have solved for a team?
Clarity. When everything needs fixing, and you have a culture of ambitious people who are good at solving problems, sometimes we want to boil the ocean. I try to bring focus to what we can control and have the greatest impact on.
Assuming you can’t get everything you want, what’s your process for triaging the things that are deal breakers from the nice-to-haves?
Have a list of what you want, criteria for it being done, dependencies and risks all layed out and prioritized. Take that list to the whoever the decision maker is. Re-prioritize, discuss. Make a plan based on the common agreement. Know if you have a hill to die on, so to speak. Move forward.
If you could solve one problem in the world using your UX process, what would you choose and why?
The power law of distribution. Everything we need, more than we need, already exists. This applies to knowledge and information as much as it applies to food and fuel. But it isn’t distributed evenly or usefully. If I had to be more specific, I’d probably focus on the US healthcare system and how it’s abject failure is not explored to improve ways of working and then shared as part of the learning process within it. It is the exact opposite of say, the aviation industry. This makes for bad medicine and higher costs.
What are the things that make you get up from bed every morning apart from a great alarm clock?
I go to work everyday because I believe in who I work with. Even when the company and the job itself is sometimes on the skids. It is a ride or die mentality, and we all roll together.
What do think your current boss would say if I asked what you needed to improve?”
I’ve had a lot of exposure to data and analytics lately and learning to tell stories from data is still a learning process.
How do you approach a situation in which you don’t agree with the majority?
See answer above regarding not getting everything I want. It is that, wrapped in a package that says “try that plan twice”. If you can’t beat them, join them. Assuming “them” is your team.
Tell me about the last time that you encountered a rule in an organization that you thought made no sense. What was the rule? What did you do and what was the result?
Too long to type. You will just have to ask me personally :)
When you had extra time available in a previous position, describe ways you found to make your job more efficient, or what techniques you learned to make yourself more effective or productive?
Just chipping away at making designops more effective and efficient.
What are the most important qualities that distinguish a great UX {Designer/Researcher/Leader} from a mediocre one? Which qualities have made you successful or helped you grow in your career?
Curiosity and problem framing. Most designers can solve a problem, the question is if they can find the correct problem to solve in the first place, and dig deep enough to get insights about users to determine what motivates them.
Tell me about your favorite failure.
I work to handle failures regularly and hedge my bets so they are less catastrophic and I can just move on. As a result, I can’t pull any one off the top of my head, but I know there has been a ton.
However…Weaknesses I have listed:
Visual brand design from scratch
Legal documents like business contracts are not a first language to me. Takes time for me to decipher them.
My background is in design, not development. I only understand technical architecture and front and development enough to determine how it impacts the experience layer of any given project, but always pair closely with development to ensure technical feasibility
Walk me through your 100-day onboarding plan.
Assess, empathize (team and business) make a plan that support the team, the end users and the company’s larger strategic initiatives
What’s one critical piece of feedback you’ve received that was really difficult to hear?
I can’t remember the specific words, but it was basically that my communication style was not professional enough. Not terribly off, just it needed to be better.
Why was it difficult and what did you do with that information? What did you learn about yourself?
It wasn’t made clear as to what “professional” was or should be.
What's the last thing you really geeked out on or taken it upon yourself to learn about?
Excel…it hurt at first, but I’m starting to geek out on it now…