Build your leading voice.
Photography by @codypboard
I’m no longer a rookie in the corporate world — but I wouldn’t call myself a seasoned expert just yet either. It’s hard to believe a decade has passed since I graduated and stepped into the industry. Still, the word leadership has long felt daunting to me — serious, weighty, and slightly intimidating.
Thanks to the team I currently work with, I’ve had the opportunity to explore and practice leadership more intentionally. Through The Leading Voice, a cohort of women designers at Microsoft, we shared personal stories, discussed our challenges, and supported one another in developing the skills we aspired to strengthen. As I process my own journey and learnings, I’m writing this for those who are just beginning their careers — and for those who may one day feel lost or uncertain along the way.
Leadership: The Skill to Lead (People and Self)
Leadership, to me, isn’t just about guiding others — it’s also about leading yourself. I truly believe that someone who lacks self-awareness cannot lead others effectively. Mindfulness is not peripheral to leadership; it is foundational.
While many books and articles frame leadership in the context of management or executive roles, there’s less discussion about leadership as a universally applicable skill in life. This essay explores leadership from a human-centered and employee’s point of view. Drawing from my experiences, I’ve translated leadership into four essential elements that I believe are critical to growing a healthy and impactful leadership voice.
The Four Pillars of Leadership
In the first session of our leadership cohort, we brainstormed what leadership means. Words poured in — some empowering, others rooted in stereotypes. I selected the ones that resonated most and reflected on them further, which led me to identify four key aspects of leadership:
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 and communicate trade-offs with clarity.
Know yourself. Cultivate strong, clear thinking.
Connect the dots. Make an impact — gently, yet firmly.
Truly listen. Respect others and yourself.
Perspective
Perspective: Know Thyself
Design is interdisciplinary. It’s not only about aesthetics — it’s about functionality, systems, and people. Great design, like great leadership, requires collaboration, communication, and alignment across many perspectives.
But perspective doesn’t appear overnight. It’s shaped over time by our beliefs, values, experiences, and emotions. A leader’s perspective, when grounded in a strong internal core, becomes both integrative and pivotal so becomes healthy perspectives to others.
Consider these insights:
A business consulting firm found that 92% of leaders with strong emotional self-awareness led high-performing, energized teams.
According to organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, although most people believe they are self-aware, only 10–15% actually are.
So how do we build true self-awareness?
Start by asking yourself:
What are my emotional strengths and limitations?
What do I deeply value?
What brings me fulfillment?
One practice that’s helped me is daily meditation. Each morning, I use it to reset — especially after difficult days. Over time, this has strengthened my emotional resilience and helped me better understand how my work fits into the broader arc of my life. From this foundation, leadership emerges naturally.
Who are you capable of becoming?
Perspective
Attitude: Lead with Compassion
I believe attitude is the most important aspect of leadership. A great leader listens deeply, respects consistently, and leads with humility.
Compassion stems from self-awareness. When we learn to respect ourselves, it becomes easier to extend that respect to others — our peers, teammates, and stakeholders.
Here are a few ways to practice compassionate leadership:
Be open to listening.
Be willing to support others.
Build trust and loyalty through consistency.
That said, compassion alone isn’t enough. To truly lead, we must pair compassion with wisdom. Wise compassion balances empathy with action, kindness with clarity.
Let me share a brief story. One day, I was leaving a grocery store when a car ahead of me suddenly stopped at the exit, holding up traffic. The driver, flustered, was digging for a wallet to donate to a homeless person standing nearby. Though well-intentioned, the act caused confusion and congestion until honking cars finally prompted movement.
This moment made me think: how might that driver have expressed compassion more wisely?
Compassionate Leadership Is Necessary — but Not Sufficient, Harvard Business Review
The story also leads us into the next pillar, Strategy.
Perspective
Strategy: Communicate and Prioritize with Purpose
All leadership involves strategy. It’s like a conductor’s baton — guiding timing, coordination, and harmony. For design leaders, two strategic skills stand out: effective communication and prioritization.
Effective Communication
To me, effective communication means healthy communication. Every conversation in a project should result in alignment, action, or clarity. It’s not enough to speak — we must understand how to listen well and respond meaningfully.
Listen to what they meant to say — not just the words they used.
Respond with what they need to hear — not just what you want to say.
This approach applies to meetings, emails, and design reviews. I’ve learned a lot about this from the book Articulating Design Decisions.
Efficient Prioritizing
Strategic prioritization begins with setting objective goals — those based on data, not just preferences. To reach these goals, we must accept trade-offs. We can’t (and shouldn’t) build everything at once.
Trade-offs force us to weigh costs, timelines, user needs, and long-term vision. Though this can be challenging, it’s necessary for progress.
Perspective
Influence: Gently Shape Outcomes
Influence isn’t about authority — it’s about the quiet, lasting impact you make through presence, intention, and connection. It’s how you bring people, ideas, and outcomes together — not with force, but with clarity, empathy, and vision. Sometimes your influence is visible right away, and other times it moves slowly, taking time to ripple outward. But true influence doesn’t require immediate recognition; its power often lies in its subtlety and sincerity.
Rather than measuring influence by what comes back to me, I choose to find meaning in the act itself — whether it’s asking a question that sparks new thinking, showing up with integrity, or offering encouragement that uplifts a teammate. Influence grows from how I show up consistently: with curiosity, with thoughtfulness, and with the willingness to shape the environment around me through small, intentional acts. If I can enjoy and trust that process, then I’ve already succeeded in making a difference — regardless of when or how the impact is felt.
Youjin’s Two Cents;
Start from within. Know yourself — your emotions, strengths, limits.
Journal what you’re grateful for. Use creative outlets to express yourself.
Practice mindful listening. Communicate with empathy and clarity.
Write down design trade-offs — engineering cost, user impact, long-term value. This helps you present stronger proposals with confidence.
As you grow more confident in your communication and your design, your leadership will already be making a quiet but powerful difference.
Conclusion: Leadership, Reimagined
Leadership no longer means “leading people” to me. It means guiding myself, my collaborators, and the work we create together. It’s a foundational skill in a turbulent world — one that cannot be outsourced or automated.
Leadership starts small. It begins with knowing yourself. And from there, it grows — into attitude, strategy, and influence.
Let’s continue shaping the kind of leadership that our teams, our industry, and our future need — starting with who we are.
Then, what is your leading voice?