Everyone, this way!

Whenever I interview someone, I like to always end the interview with:

As an individual contributor, I like autonomy. Tell me the goal and trust me to go and figure it out.

But early in my career, I didn’t want the autonomy. I wanted to be told specifically what was needed.

So as a manager, I like to make sure I give each person on my team the right level of autonomy that makes them work best yet grow.

So which of these do you fall in?

It’s always fun to see how people respond. If I get a response that fits the generic interview prep structure of “I like this but I can also do that,” I know that I need to dig deeper. At the end of the day, I know what works for me, doesn’t work for everyone. So the only way both of us succeed is if I let you work how they prefer and I work how I prefer. 

Tell it like it is.

Throughout my career, I have always felt this cloud of secrecy between myself and my manager(s). There is this invisible curtain individual contributors can’t look behind but managers can with the disguise of “leadership talk”.

To me, this is not beneficial. It creates distrust and a lack of empathy on both parties. 

This led me to two values that I stick to as much as I can; transparency and honesty.  

Teach empathy.

Ask anyone on my team and they will tell you that I am brutally transparent and honest about decisions, why they are happening, and what is happening. Being transparent has helped me build a strong relationship with my team where we are brutally honest with each other. Through this transparency and honesty, we’ve all come to an understanding that nothing anyone says should be taken personal, but as an opportunity for personal growth. 

At the end of the, there is no trust better than one built on a framework of empathy. If I can get you to understand that I have your best interest in heart and I am empathetic to YOU, you are going to be that much more understanding of any decision I make; from layoffs to changing the color of a button.

Teach strategy.

I look back in my career and think about what allowed me to go from a financial analyst hating his work to a designer making an impact on people like my parents. I always come back to my ability to think strategically. 

So this is something I try to teach my team (or anyone I mentor). I truly believe everyone has a UX designer in them and if they put in the effort, they can become a UX designer (I know I am going to piss off a lot of people by saying this but oh well). But in order to be an exceptionally successful designer, you need to think about every project strategically. 

What do I mean by this? Well, take for example when I first joined GoCanvas, I realized there was a lack of consistency across ALL of our offerings. We had 10 styles of buttons, 5 styles of alerts, typography was all over the place and there was nothing getting fixed. I recognized this was an opportunity to stand up a design system. I knew how much effort it took to stand up a design systems (I was researching design systems like crazy during this time). And I also knew management was not going to let me spend the time and resources to do this. 

But I knew that if I tackled this strategically, I could get it done. I started small and strategically made partnerships with developers and designers that I knew understood the value of building a design system. 

I’ll spare you the details but at the end of it all, I got buy-in from leadership, tech team leads, and got a design system built for the design team and implemented as a framework for developers. 

I don’t give this example to show off (jk…I am) but to prove that if a design problem is tackled from a strategic state-of-mind, there is potential to make immediate and long-lasting impact. 

This is what I try to teach my team, think about how you can make a long-lasting impact, not just solve the problem for now. 

What else can you do, show off?

Team culture is BIG for me. In fact, I will put team culture above any other project upon joining a team. If I don’t have the culture, I don’t have a team putting in their best. 

Instead of telling you what to do or how to do it, I am just going to list out what I have done with my team at GoCanvas that has really built up our team culture.

1. Make humor the core of the team. I will be the first to make fun of myself. And if I can get you to make fun of me, I am a happy camper. As cheesy as it sounds, humor can really make or break a team. I have designers that have left my team go on to other teams/companies and the one thing they all complain about is a lack of friendship because there is no humor. 

2. Make 1:1s about them, not you or the company. I follow the same structure for all my 1:1s in my team. I set the expectation in the very first 1:1 that this is my time to be their therapist. Tell me what’s wrong so I can help you fix it; this includes personal and professional life. If your team trusts you enough, they’ll open up and let you help them in their personal lives. Going above and beyond is in my genes. I’ve been told this my entire life so I lean into it heavily. 

3. Top-down communication needs to be constant. By having a constant stream of top-down communication to my team, I actually don’t need weekly or monthly team meetings. They sort of became useless for my team because we all talked enough to know what was going on. And everyone loves one less meeting.

4. Admit your failures. Man, this one really makes me happy when done right. When I joined GoCanvas, implemented a #failurefriday, where I had someone from engineering, product, or design to do a quick 30 minute talk about a time they failed miserable at work. For that 30 minutes, the most successful team member is forced to be vulnerable showing the larger team that mistakes happen so don’t be afraid to try and fail. That’s how ideas are born. Fun story, our CPO did the first talk and talked about how he cost his company $10 million dollars because of a failure! I also implemented a weekly meeting called Friday Feels within the design team. It was really simple structure. Every Friday morning, we got together and each person gave told one thing they failed at that week, one thing they succeeded with, and a kudos to someone else on the team. At first, it felt awkward but eventually, we got to a point where we looked forward to it. Even the smallest recognization or talking about the smallest failure can make you feel relieved and elated.  

5. Have design critiques with your developers. Many of our successful projects at GoCanvas have been a result of designers working closely with developers. When developers can give their feedback and see it implemented, they feel empowered and more willing to try out your crazy design ideas.

When he started mentoring junior team members, I received nothing but praise for his guidance. He’s always put others before himself, and he’s managed to balance all of the things a good leader learns to balance from 1 on 1s to creative sessions, to critiques, still making time for his own work.

Emily Ryan

Presidential Innovation Fellow at White House Presidential Innovation Fellow