Build your leading voice.
Photography by @codypboard
Leadership is a crucial skill in all aspects of life. While there are numerous books and articles written by top industry leaders about leadership, there are not many written by non-managers. As someone in the early stages of their career, I have found it more helpful to have a down-to-earth definition of leadership that I can apply practically. So, I have created a set of exercises aimed at building leadership skills, which I believe are authentic and effective. While there is still much for me to learn and put into practice, I wanted to share what I have discovered so far in my journey to becoming a true, authentic leader.
I was luckily nominated by the leadership teams in Outlook Design Studio to participate in a leadership training program, The Leading Voice, for a year. This workshop motivated me to dig even deeper into the meaning of leadership. So in this article, I’m going to share takeaways from the workshop itself but also extended learnings about leadership from the day-to-day Product Design process.
Here are words which we came up with during the brainstorming activity and started to come up with many words which we think leadership. Some are stereotypes but not necessarily to be positive, but a few words resonated with me more and the words which I am leaning toward and growing toward were highlighted in blue below.
What is Leadership
You might have grasped my POV of leading voice based on the highlights above. While digesting the learnings and activities of the workshop, I categorized four essential factors to concretize leadership as practice. Because I am always on the learning curve to develop a good leading voice, I believe that the following four elements help me form my own healthy leadership voice furthermore take action to generate impact.
Understand objective trade-offs. Let them or you admit the trade-offs.
First, know thyself. Then, build your healthy and strong core.
Impact. Connect the dots for bigger impacts. Gently but correctly.
Let them being heard. Respect them and yourself.
Perspective
Perspective
Design is interdisciplinary; it is not only about how a product looks but also about how it functions. Also in another aspect, success in design cannot be achieved by a single fragmental effort but it is achieved by multiple people, skills, knowledge, communication and processes. With or without the given environment, Perspective isn’t something that could be surprisingly built whenever we want. It’s shaped by the individual’s experience, beliefs, values, knowledge and emotions. Thus, it is important to build a healthy, insightful and strong fundamental of it. Then, the leader’s perspective becomes integrative but pivotal based on the strong core.
Let’s look at a few studies to get some hints about what the strong core means:
A research from a business consulting agency found that among leaders with multiple strengths in Emotional Self-Awareness, 92% of leaders had teams with high energy and high performance.
The second study, by Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, was conducted with 5,000 people to learn what self-awareness is, why it's important, and how to cultivate it. Most people think they are self-aware but only 10 to 15% really are.
Based on the research, it is important to achieve self-awareness. It is not only understanding my strengths and weaknesses but also the topics like “What makes me happy? what’s my value? what do I most care about among the values? what’s my personality?” Yes, it requires quite a rigorous effort to conduct self-awareness in-depth, it is a must-have quality as a seasoned leader and it is not the last quality to be a good leader.
Know thyself, first.
In order to build a strong core as well as to set up an insightful and in-depth perspective, the first step is to understand yourself very well. Then, how do I get to know myself in-depth?
Know thyself so that you build strong core muscle.
• Know your emotional capacity, strengths and weaknesses, etc.
• Build a strong core to balance yourself in any stormy situation
• Influence your team with your perspective and knowledge
One effective method for improving self-awareness is meditation. I meditate every morning to reflect, refresh, and reset myself for the day ahead. Even after facing challenging meetings or days, this daily ritual helps me maintain a firmer emotional and intellectual core. Finally, you find how design and career fit in the whole of yourself. Then, mindfulness leads you to respect yourself and amplify it to others.
Who are you capable of becoming?
Perspective
Attitude
This is the most important aspect of leadership. A good leader is ready to listen, ready to respect peers at any moment and ready to be respected. Compassion is a word that leaders should practice over time in this view.
Compassion can be cultivated from the exercise of self-awareness by empathizing with self and others, we discovered this in the Perspective aspect above. Once we gain the firm core to respect ourselves, it amplifies to respect for our peers and stakeholders. Here are a few practical ways to show your respect and build a further layer of compassion:
• Be open to listen
• Be willing to support
• Build trust and loyalty
Compassion is essential but not enough to lead your people and project to be succeeded. If we wanted to become genuinely empowering leaders, we should train ourselves to achieve wise compassion.
Compassionate Leadership Is Necessary — but Not Sufficient, Harvard Business Review
When we think of a situation where a seasoned doctor is at an emergency room, the doctor needs to handle many severe and tough cases with medical knowledge and is required to make difficult but precise decisions. If the doctor only has compassion without insights or with wrong knowledge, the case could turn extremely negative, whereas if the doctor only has abundant knowledge and insights without compassion, also the outcome of the case and patient may not be sustainable.
Then, how could we build wisdom along with compassion?
Perspective
Strategy
All leadership books and articles provide “leadership strategy”, which is significant for leaders, like a conductor with a baton for an orchestra. As a design leader, there are two key aspects of strategy that are especially important to keep in mind: communication and prioritizing. While you can develop your own unique approach to these, it’s crucial not to overlook them.
Then, why do we need strategy and planning for corporate-scale projects and even for your personal projects? We wish to use our time and resources efficiently and effectively. Efficiency leads to better outcomes with fewer hiccups. Communication and Prioritizing are the key strategy bucket to get the best outcome.
Effective Communication
I translate ‘effective’ to ‘healthy’ in the communication aspect. For a set of conversations to be effective in your project, each discussion should produce alignment, next steps, or conclusion. Even though we have our points of views in mind, it is hard to get one of these without the consensus of the participants. Here is the strategy to get our peers to achieve the completion together:
• Listen to what they wanted to speak, not a way that you wanted to listen to
• Respond with what they wanted to listen to, not with a long thread of your statement
By mirroring the people whom you communicate with, you can truly understand their perspective, get the buy-in but also lead the conversation towards successful outcomes. This strategy could be behavior but also could be applicable to written, and verbal communication. I’ve got many communication strategies from a book, Articulating Design Decisions.
Efficient prioritizing
The second strategy aspect is prioritizing. If we could set up objective goals. The objective goal is specific, measurable, and achievable. It is based on concrete data and facts, rather than subjective opinions, abstracted goals or personal preferences. It would help to speed up the process and to be more effective in terms of outcome. Understanding trade-offs and applying it
The objective goal can be set by understanding trade-offs. Since we don’t have a magic wand, we cannot build everything at once and we don’t have to. Aligning on trade-offs also can make it easier to align on objective goals because trade-offs often involve making difficult decisions and weighing different priorities.
I know this process requires quite a little pain in my experience but it is essential if we could make a big impact and improvement in a more efficient way.
Perspective
Influence
Your influence significantly matters to your peer designers, PMs and even senior leadership. Influence means making an impact and skillset to connect the dots around the team and product. Gently but correctly. I’ve been learning that once we get a good amount of assets in Perspective, Attitude and Strategy, Influence will follow. There are a few questions to think about in this context:
How do you present and behave? Peers surrounding you are learning about your point of view, skillset, tendency, style, or even your pet peeves by directly & indirectly working with you. Do good work. Produce a great output. Be diligent & faithful about your work. These are the first and best ways to constructively influence your peers.
Do your questions stimulate your peers? Your input matters. Asking insightful questions can inspire your peers/audience to expand their creativity and opportunities to think further. Also, cast penetrating questions to high-ups. The courage shown inspires the rest of the teams. Of course, it requires seasoned experience and deep insights.
Are you able to encourage and motivate your peers? Leaders who have wisdom along with compassion give not only practical advice or solutions but also in-depth insights. Think about where we get motivated or encouraged in your life-long experience. Something or somewhere can make us get out of the tunnel vision, that’s the root of motivation.
My Two Cents;
Start with your inner strength. Practice learning & knowing yourself & your emotional capacity. Try these: Gratitude journal, Use creative outlet
Listen. Truly. It’s communication; Listen to what they wanted to say. Respond with what that wanted to listen to. Ask questions. Clarify what you agree to, and they do.
Utilize various communication methods. Understand the objective factors like trade-offs to communicate with your team. Try writing down trade-offs on your design options in engineering cost, long-term vision, and impact on another area of the product. You’ll be able to communicate with your team more confidently with your best proposal but also it totally helps you to get confidence in your design.
Once you are getting more and more confident in yourself, your design and your communication, your influence is already impactful and powerful to your peers and your product. Start building your leadership from small steps and from one of the aspects I’ve gone through.
Outro
Leadership doesn’t mean leading people to me anymore. Leadership is about navigating ourselves, the people we work with, and the products we build. It is a fundamental asset in turbulent times like now, and it cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence technology. I truly believe a seasoned leading voice acts as a faithful navigation on any occasion.
Then, what is your leading voice?