The Downfall of Design Teams and Products- How to Recover and Facilitate Inclusive Design Culture
When you work on a team, a leader’s job is the guiding star. A leader makes sure everyone works together in the most effective way while setting goals around a project.
I love working with people. In group projects, I automatically embody the leader role because I am not afraid to take responsibility. I am also able to look at the big picture, take specifics, and prioritize them to ensure success both with the product and team dynamic. If you asked my peers or teachers, they would say my (rising) strengths outside of design include, but are not limited to: time management, setting goals, leveraging the best ways people can work together effectively, scaling the size of ideas to ensure they are executable and creating a vision.
By myself, I have full control of how I get things done. In a group setting, I can get a bit carried away in regards to how I work. Often times, I assume people will work the same way I do. As a leader in a group, this leads to being too controlling. I can come up with ways to do things and immediately come up with a vision of how I would want things to look or happen. As a result, I take control of majority of the work, making sure everything is done in a particular way, my way.
The dynamic of working by yourself does will not work in a group because nobody works your way. Everyone has their way of getting things done and we all need to accommodate for each other.
There may be people who enjoy being told what to do because they cannot structure things on their own. From experience, I have worked with people like this. For most people, this kind of leadership results in distrust, disempowerment and causes (a lot of) tension. Known as micromanaging, to micromanage is to control everything, regardless of how small it is in an organization. It is a destructive behavior that we might not realize we do in group settings.
I am quite aware of my micromanaging tendencies in previous group projects. I know because I always tell ask myself, Am I being too controlling? The last thing I want to do is come off as a bossy woman (let’s face it, we are wired to believe that’s worse than a bossy man *rolls eyes*). With my drive to succeed and passion of supporting others, I try my best to make sure everyone is involved in the project and that I give people space to do things that they are good at. But sometimes my resolve to make things “perfect” is so strong, I take control of what other people are doing. I did not realize how bad my micromanaging was until a few months ago. It was so bad, I did everything that was detrimental to my teammates and myself.
When I was working on a project last semester, I wanted to make sure I was informed of what everyone was doing, so I told people to update me frequently. I would volunteer to take part and oversee multiple roles thinking that my teammates would need help or hands on guidance. Though I did not see this in the beginning and nobody mentioned it to me, I believed my way of being involved in all aspects of the project was okay. I would be helping everyone! I thought until I accidentally noticed my name in one a Slack message my teammate was typing to her friend. My teammate was complaining about how she couldn’t do things on her own without telling me, nothing was getting done and she had no freedom. This made me reflect on my leadership methods and whether or not I was being too much of a control freak (I definitely was).
Here are a few tips I learned to not be overbearing and micromanage people:
Delegate Roles (and stick to them)
In the beginning, I assigned tasks and roles based on strengths each of my teammates possessed and we all agreed. That was the easy part. The hard part was sticking to my role when my teammates needed direction the most. This means letting my teammates make independent decisions about their roles while my focus is on the larger tasks only I can perform.
I would laser in on the small details of certain parts of the product, harming my teammate’s productivity as well as mine.
Though I did not realize it then, I found that I subconsciously did not trust some of my teammates because I believed everything had to be perfect right now and that I was the only one who knew how to fix it.
An example was designing screens. I had two of my teammates be in charge of the UI and prototype. When they showed me the screens they designed based on our sketches, I noticed there were inconsistent elements and I started to fix them without telling them how to do it themselves. In the short-term, a controlling boss might get things done faster because only one person gives the final “OK.” But in the long run, things slow down because employees won’t learn how to complete tasks themselves. (rd).
I did not believe in my teammates ability enough to let them focus on what needed to be fixed, but instead taking on their responsibility without showing them how to do it by themselves. This diverted my focus to my job as the leader which was directing the team. Because I was trying to take part in my teammates roles, I wasn’t doing my job as the leader. This caused lots of frustration for one of my teammates because I was essentially doing her job.
Doing something for someone is more counterproductive because it shows you don’t trust them to do it themselves and it discourages them from providing their own value.
If you see something wrong, don’t fix it for others. Empower them to fix it themselves by guiding them or asking them questions to help them see what they need to do. Let them flex their creative freedom.
After receiving feedback from my teammate, I took a step back and instead of fixing the UI for her, I suggested creating a style guide to help her do that on her own. By giving full ownership of her role, this allowed my teammate to trust me more because she could see I trusted her with the work she was good at. As a result, my teammate felt empowered and produced amazing work on her own without me constantly checking up with her. We got more things done.
Listen
When my teammate expressed her unhappiness working in the group, I was determined to be a better leader by reflecting on how I was behaving and taking action. Though I did not confront her directly about the message (I wasn’t supposed to see it in the first place), I spoke up about my concerns of being too controling. If that happened, I wanted my teammates to hold me accountable for this behavior. By being honest about my feelings, my teammates comforted me with open arms and told me how they felt. They wanted me to focus on giving them direction in their work.
Not too long after, I received feedback from the teammate who was previously unhappy and based on sharing my thoughts, she gathered the courage to tell me what I should focus on. This was extremely valuable because I would have never realized what I was doing. Instead of being nitpicky about the small details and fixing them myself, I needed to encourage my teammates because they craved encouragement and creating a successful product in the short period of time we had.
Your teammates got your back. Trust them and they will trust you.
When we create a safe space for design and nurturing feedback, it doesn’t just make us better designers, it makes us better people. Listening to my teammates has allowed me to compromise and become a better leader by focusing on the things I haven’t seen as things I needed to do. Being vulnerable and giving each other feedback allowed us to open up and trust each other to communicate more effectively.
Establish inclusive meetings
Every class, I would gather my teammates together and go over everything we did leading up to the time we meet. Reminiscent of standup, we would go over what we did, blockers and if we needed help with ongoing tasks. Depending on where we were, we would go straight to breaking down what we needed to get done in the time we had together and give feedback on each other’s work. This ensured transparency in that we were clear with what we had to get done, what everyone was working on and whether we needed to work together on something.
Meetings are great because it allows everyone to contribute their unique perspectives and opens the opportunity to share ideas which can greatly influence the project moving forward in eye-opening ways. For my team, meetings allowed us to make sure we were on the same page with the project and contribute to it as a whole by discussing and balancing ideas.
For the team, it allowed them to understand how their roles aligned with the product vision and how to strategically prioritize tasks. As a leader, this helped me understand what everyone was doing without focusing on one specific part of the project. It also allowed me to create a cohesive narrative of the project in terms of where we were at and where we needed to go next.
Meetings ultimately eased my anxiety of having to take control of everything. When you involve yourself in every step of a project, things often get bottlenecked because your teammates are forced to wait for for approval.
Focus on results
Like I said before, focusing on the small details prevented me from overlooking how all of our tasks would lead to fleshing out aspects of the final product. I wasn’t focused on the results that our product would have.
Based on feedback and the feeling of being boggled down, I had to compromise and not push my unrealistic expectations of perfection on my teammates by doing their work. I stuck to the milestones we created in the beginning of the semester and focused on directing my teammates to meet them. This was by giving them advice when they asked me, focusing on parts of the project which needed extra help in order to meet our goals, facilitating conversations on how to move forward and consantly iterating on the overall experience. By being conscious about getting results instead of the pixels of our prototype, I was able to focus on helping my team meet their goals regarding their work and my goal of tying in everyone’s efforts to create a strong concept that encompassed the product.
Conclusion
I still have a long way in becoming a leader, but so far it has been a worthwhile learning experience with every project I have led. By refining my leadership skills, I am determined to fix my micromanaging tendencies every chance I can get in order to foster optimal communication between teammates and embrace everyone’s diverse perspectives to make bigger impact. HBR says while micromanaging may get you short-term results, over time it negatively impacts your team, your organization, and yourself. You dilute your own productivity and you run out of capacity to get important things done. You stunt your team members’ development and demoralize them. You create an organizational vulnerability when your team isn’t used to functioning without your presence and heavy involvement.
In order build a team you need to learn how to replace yourself.
Micromanaging is like telling somebody to breathe. We don’t like being told what to do for everything. People know what they can do, they just need a little push in the right direction to produce a desired outcome that a leader might be able to see the bigger picture of. As a leader, trust your teammates. There is always something else to be done and replacing yourself allows you to identify this and add value in new ways (Andrew (Andy) Warr).
References: Forbes, F2, Activia, Time, Independent
For more of my experiences on leadership, here are links to what I learned:
- Standing Up as a Design Leader
- The Things People Won’t Tell You About Leadership in the Design Industry
Check out my Skillshare Course on UX research and learn something new!
To help you get started on owning your design career, here are some amazing tools from Rookieup, a site I used to get mentorship from senior designers:
- Build a portfolio with help from an experienced designer
- Essential tools to strengthen and build your portfolio
- Take control of your time and career by becoming a freelancer
- Tips and tricks to get an amazing design job
Links to some other cool reads:
