You’ve spent several years in the field of UX design and are starting to entertain the possibility of moving up the ladder. Perhaps your organisation is expecting you to step up. Either way, you are likely to go through a roller coaster ride of questioning your self-worth, your readiness, your creative confidence. As you assume a leadership role, you might also have bouts of anxiety, confusion or imposter syndrome from time to time. In this post, I’ll share eight questions to introspect to help ease into a design leadership role. As an aspiring or newly promoted design leader, you are likely to go through the following stages:

1. Dealing with the imposter syndrome
2. Inundated with an ever-increasing pile of requests
3. Activating your brand and expanding your network
4. Making the ‘empowerment’ count
5. Paying it forward

Here are the eight questions for self-inquiry as you navigate the above stages. These are based on my failings (read: learnings), insights, introspection and conversations with other designers.

Question 1: What has been my design journey like and its impact?

Dealing with imposter syndrome is the toughest and might take longer to overcome. You’ve put in a great deal of effort over the years as a designer. You’ve built a rich set of experiences, built camaraderie with your peers, practised the craft wholeheartedly. Despite all of that, the opportunity to rise to the occasion of a ‘design leader’ will (yet again) make you feel like an imposter. You will question the depth and bread of your expertise. You will ask yourself are you doing enough to stay relevant or mostly spending your time fire-fighting and operationalising design in your org. A good place to start dealing with these feelings of inadequacy is to reflect on your enriching professional journey and take pride in the wins along the way.

For example —

• how a journey map your created led to a successful sales pitch
• how your research helped uncover opportunities
• how your collaborative white-boarding helped come up with a UX strategy for your client
• how some of your prototyping ideas and platform awareness got your dev team excited
• how your workshopping techniques enabled alignment on key decisions across different members of the team
• how your designs gave someone joy, delight or enabled them to get work done effortlessly
• how you acted as a liaison between conflicted team members

Also, make time to revise the many lessons learned from setbacks too that made you strong and resilient to take on new design challenges. You will be the best judge of your body of work and your strengths and shortcomings based on your life experience. Revel in the positive impact of your work and your evolution into a T or X shaped designer — on your peers, your family, your organisation, your clients and the craft itself. Reminding yourself from time to time, the tangible and intangible impact you’ve had on yourself, your colleagues, your clients, and your organisation. The credible relationships you’ve earned will help you reinforce the belief that ‘you’ve got this’ because you ‘care’, you ‘matter’ and you are ‘intentional’ about your actions and decisions.

Question 2: What are your values and priorities NOW?

Starting out as a designer, you often inadvertently find yourself saying yes to all kinds of work coming your way over the years and understandably so. You have learned the skills and want to apply yourself and make yourself useful. You want to make a living, pay the bills, take care of yourself or someone you love. I did this for a long time. And it helped a lot. It helped me practice a variety of skills in design. It helped me make connections, build solutions, find joy in helping others solve tricky problems, develop humility when I failed, helped me sell more work, and above all, helped me build my self-confidence as a designer.

As you transition into a lead role, you will continue to be pulled into various directions —

• to fix operational challenges
• advocate for why design matters
• coaching and mentoring others
• solving people, process, tools and collaboration challenges
• making a meaningful contribution to the craft of design
• staying abreast with the ever elusive principles, trends and best practices

However, as you consider leadership positions or find yourself in one, you will want to introspect on what your values are as of today? What motivates you today? What are you against? What’s your relationship with money today? What energising you vs. drains you? What do you consider are your responsibilities? Once you have that clarity, then learn about what are the values and priorities of your organisation. When you clearly perceive the alignment and differences, challenge yourself to push for what your organisation isn’t seeing that needs advocacy and discover ‘the sweet spot’ to make an impact.

Question 3: What will you do more of and less of?

As a leader, you are certainly one of those people who has built a brand as an ‘design expert’. You will often find yourself obliged to help, lean in to fight figurative fires, mentor others on their own design journey, solve tactical design challenges for your team, give in to the temptation to ace another ‘cool’ work item in your portfolio, create thought leadership, spend time networking, hiring, onboarding design talent — the choices are endless so be careful what and how much you choose to take on. Your time is energy — it is not unlimited. You need to figure what you want to focus on as ‘essential’ vs what is ‘nice to have’ or ‘insignificant’. Greg McKeown in his book ‘Essentialism’ says “ To discern what is truly essential, we need space to think, time to look and listen, permission to play, wisdom to sleep, and the discipline to apply highly selective criteria to the choices we make.” The sooner you learn to say ‘no’ with ease and focusing on what’s essential, you will be much more at ease and have the clarity to flourish in this role. Especially in the pandemic, you will have probably lost a support system that made you successful professionally, so be realistic with yourself and pace yourself accordingly.

Question 4: What does this role mean to you?

This will help you determine what you do with this role. There will be expectations and feedback your peers, your community, your leaders and your organisation will have from you. You yourself will have set lofty standards for yourself. These lofty goals are the most taxing and unreasonable of all if you have been living up to the identity of high performing over-achiever in your head over the years. Based on your personal life situation, your family and society will also have expectations from you. It is natural to feel overwhelmed. So start with a simple question — do you really want this role for the right reasons and the fair share of stress and sacrifices that come with it? If you are like me who believes in servant-leadership, you will make the folly to want to help everyone by giving it your all; after all our mental model of a good leader is being able to cater to needs of all those who you ‘serve’ by being a good listener, being empathetic, being committed and relentlessly diligent— but quickly, you realise, its not sustainable long term. You will end up burning out before you can make any significant impact. So take time to jot down what this role means to you, revisit and iterate it every few weeks. It can mean some or many of the following: to have a broader influence in advocacy of the craft in your organisation and for your clients, to mobilise and empower your community to do better and unblock them, to invest time in elevating the skills of your design community and your own, to broaden your network both internally and externally, to continue as a trusted advisor by practising the craft. How will you slice and dice your priorities and distill it to the top 2–3 things that you can reasonably accomplish?

Question 5: Are you being compassionate with yourself and making time for play?

As you start responding to the needs the leadership role demands, you might find yourself taking away from your own needs. Do establish rules for yourself and educate others around your self care routines, invest time to grow your own skills in your craft, ask for help, or discern what’s urgent vs important vs ‘can-wait’. Everyone’s life situation is unique, so don’t compare yourself with others. Give yourself permission to unplug and rejuvenate from time to time. Make time for play — both on and off work hours. Stuart Brown in his book Play says “play allows society to function and individual relationships among many to flourish...Because play is all about trying on new behaviors and thoughts, it frees us from established patterns.” Don’t do yourself disservice by constantly trying to live up to the unreasonable ‘ideal leader’ identity you have established in your head. Take care of your mental health by being disciplined, regulating your own feelings, seeking help from time to time, unwinding with someone you trust, journaling, eating wholesome food and making time for physical fitness.

Question 6: Are you balancing the art of delegation vs. ownership?

This is trickier, if you’ve been a high-performing contributor, you will often find yourself tempted to take on more than a fair share of things to do on strategic initiatives. This is where you need to clearly understand and go back to your principles around what you can do more of vs. what you can do less of and might be better off delegating. Delegating doesn’t mean simply taking something off your plate; it means handing it to someone who is capable, responsible and interested, who can benefit from the exposure, and you having their back in case they need your support.

Question 7: Are you making the ‘empowerment’ count?

One of the best joys of being a leader is the tremendous sense of ‘assumed’ power that comes with it. The way you wield that power will make you a good leader or a difficult ‘boss’ that others have to deal with. Ask yourself at least once a week — Are you using your empowerment to empower your teams to do meaningful work, are you using it to shield them from unnecessary organisational challenges to let them joyfully practice the craft, are you using it to provide for things they need to grow themselves, are you using it to provide them a north-star vision to work towards, are you sharing your own experiences with vulnerability, are you availing reverse mentoring to learn new constructs and unlearn outdated norm and practices, are you using your empowerment to facilitate a sense of community, are you giving community members the autonomy they need to thrive OR are you ‘hoarding a title’ for the sake of it because it pays well and looks good on your resume?

Question 8: Growing your influence beyond your organisation

Over time, you’ll figure how to thrive as a design leader in your organisation. You are starting to get fairly successful at driving change. At some point, you will start to consider the power you hold as a means to influence society. You hold the key to have positive outcomes for the broader design community and society (if you have an altruistic streak in you). Many of us want to do work that’s meaningful and purposeful, so start exploring ways to facilitate that positive change, partner with other leaders cross-function and geographies to make a change, and support by designing for ‘causes’ that will elevate humanity and make this world slightly better, one step at a time.

The role of a design leader is a road less travelled and rife with uncertainty and self-doubt. Make it count by being your authentic self by making frequent self-reflection a part of your ethos. Let me know what are some of your challenges as a design leader and your mechanisms to wade through them. Happy leading!