Buildng a design team
The most difficult design challenge I’ve untertaken was that of team building. What I learned early on is that it isn’t enough to throw people together and hope for the best; chemistry, talent, company goals and individual needs all need to be considered if things are to work well.
After some early mistakes I learned that assembling a group of high performers would require a greater level of craft then I had first anticipated, and that a collection of impressive portfolios did not automatically give you a cohesive team.
Culture.
Culture isnt something that can be forced on people, it isn’t defined by what your write on paper, it’s how you operate when nobody is watching. What I hoped to give my team were things that I wanted for myself.
The chance to learn something new.
The freedom to explore and take chances.
Space to operate and make my own decisions.
A mission driven objective that values tactical execution.
These would be the tenets that I would carry with me to help me hire, manage and grow the members of our budding design team.
Skillset.
Competition is healthy, it pushes individuals to be better and working alongside talented people will bring the best out of you. Competition however can also breed resentment if the workplace is territorial. This was something I was always conscious of, I’ve seen designers compete for accounts or awards, and it always bred resentment which in the worst times is impossible to mend.
Individuals who have the same skillsets and competencies working on the same projects dont get the opportunity to learn from each other, the only thing that's left is individual performance.
So to promote my desire to help individuals learn something new, I began to take a more measured approach to hiring. I took a page from Noah Levin (Design Director at Figma) and began to put my team through a skill mapping exercise.
As a group we needed to take inventory of our own individual skills (hard and soft). From those lists we would decide what were the core competencies needed for a new designer joining the team.
We had all been with the company long enough to understand what the daily demands were for our department and we would use that to list out the needed skills for someone to be successful at our company.
Our baseline and complimentary skills as decided by the team.
Although we shared many of the same competencies no individual is exactly the same. It was the differences that I hoped would bring us closer as a team, and give us all a chance to learn from eachother.
Mapping our individual skill shapes.
Plotting our competencies on a star chart would reveal our individual shapes.
The Team Shape.
Combining all of the individual shapes into a single form began to reveal the teams strengths and gaps.
Using that team shape I can see what areas the team lacks in, and gave individuals the opportunity to grow into those areas. Or if there is no interest, I would look to bring in the next designers with skills in those areas that we lack.
This gave people an opportunity to learn from one another, the goal was not to build an echo chamber, but a well rounded group that complimented eachother.
Growth plans.
People development can take months to come to fruition and it’s tough to chart out an accurate growth plan for individuals.
But getting to know your teammates at a personal level is important, it let’s you see what their long term goals are and gives you an understanding of what resources you should be making available to them, and what types of projects they should be getting assigned to.
Pairing designers with offsetting skills also helped the team grow closer, and allowed for a cross pollination of hard and soft skills.
Execution and process.
To get the best performance from people a clear and defined process needs to be in place, so that execution is second nature. That meant the right tools and practices needed to be in place.
