Designers, there’s a lot going on in the world right now. Structural inequalities are increasingly revealed . A big obstacle for many of us is the “broken ladder” problem, where qualified individuals face major obstacles to entering even the lowest rung of leadership. This stunts our ability to rise up in the ranks of an organization. If people are unable to “see” our leadership, then we are unlikely to be recognized or rewarded with leadership positions.

It is ABSOLUTELY on institutions to own making meaningful change in how they guarantee equality in the workplace. We may not be able to change people who have outright decided to operate by bias. That said, everybody grapples with information gaps where unconscious bias can creep in. It is possible to help fill those gaps with real information that can enable people to make better, informed, choices.

If you have an opportunity to help correct those gaps in a way that enables you or your colleague to get beyond the broken ladder—why not try? What I offer here are some ways to try. This is not intended to replace courageous and conscious action from people already in positions of power. It can, however, be a supplement as we try to recover and correct against mistakes of the past, present, and future.

The composition of design leadership teams continues to contrast starkly with the composition of the general population. This shows we have a long way to go. As many teams are entering their review cycle, perhaps this can help us cut through some of the bias and create more visibility for the wealth and breadth of creative talent we have. I hope it helps more of us find solid footing in the career ladder. With that, let’s dig in…

In my previous piece “How do I become a design leader?”, I observed that leadership is typically recognized rather than anointed. The tl;dr on this is simple: if you are serious about exploring leadership, don’t wait for permission. Instead, look for opportunities to lead now from wherever you are in your organization.

Once you’re starting to do leadership work, it’s important to make sure that the people around you have sufficient visibility into that work. For one thing, this enables your impact to scale. For another: if it’s not seen, it can’t be recognized.

Leadership is recognized, rather than anointed. It’s your responsibility to shine a light on a well-rounded picture of who you are and what you contribute. As an ancillary benefit, this also enables you to take in all the hard work you’ve done and appreciate yourself more, too.

Here’s where to start:

1. Communicate your priorities & progress

Leadership, whether you’re leading the execution of projects or developing people, entails managing in all directions. In a healthy management relationship, your manager isn’t stalking you or constantly looking over your shoulder.

The tradeoff, of course, is that they won’t see everything. It’s up to you to show them. This is also true for your team. Therefore, intentionally set and regularly communicate your thinking, priorities, changes, and progress. This provides people with the context to work with you effectively.

Invest time to what’s important to your company, your manager, and your team. What are their KPIs or OKRs? Tailor your priorities to reflect them. This ensures that your priorities are impactful and relevant.

Demonstrate self-management

Someone capable of organizing themselves well looks promising as someone capable of organizing others. The inverse is also true: someone who cannot organize themselves looks incapable of organizing others.

Put yourself in the place of a manager with two reports:

Person A comes to their 1o1 with a question: “What should I be working on?”

Person B comes in with a tidy list of no more than 5 items: “This is what I will be working on and why.” Not a granular list, but one that shows where they will be spending their energy and how. Perhaps they also note a conflict of priorities and share how they made the tradeoffs.

• Who would you trust more as having potential leadership capability? The person who can’t even organize themselves and must rely entirely on you as the manager to set direction? Or the person who already has a vision for what needs to happen? Who would you assume to be most capable at setting direction for others? (Answer: Person B)

• Note that if you’re truly unclear on what you should be doing, it’s important to highlight this to your manager. Are you thinking about why you are unclear and doing your best to unblock yourself first? Or are you waiting for someone else to do it for you?

You’ll know you’re on top of things when someone can run into you in the hallway and ask you what your priorities are—and unassisted, you can list your stack-ranked top 3–5 top items. This should take no more than 30 seconds to share, much in the vein of an Agile standup. Combine that with you doing those things as planned and updating on what got done, and you‘re looking good—and you’ve made sure people can see it.

Leverage the people around you

Communication ≠ talking at people. It is not read-only. Different people may have additional insight that can help refine or shift your focus—which enables you to leverage your time intelligently. Effective leaders know how to capitalize on the capabilities of their team for optimal outcomes. Using the team to hone your priorities is just one way to do that.

• DO include things on your mind that you don’t have answers to but are exploring

• DO include real challenges you’re dealing with

• DO ask for advice and support. It’s ok to be vulnerable.

• DO ask if they agree or disagree, and DO actually listen

• DON’T assume that because someone is more junior that they don’t have insights or ideas to offer you, a senior person

• DON’T posture like you know everything and everything is fine when it isn’t. The whole point of working with a talented team is to enjoy the benefits of all that talent. The best time to leverage smart people is when there are issues, uncertainties, fires, and you’re running out of ideas.

Every company has “advisors”. These are people you leverage to keep your company on track. At Colingo, when we needed to make important decisions for the business, my co-founder Ben and I didn’t just explore options together—we reached out to our advisors to spar and unpack ideas with us. This helped us get clarity quickly and stay agile in our decision-making.

Similar to a company, you don’t want to be stopped in your progress. You’re measured based on your impact, not on the extent to which you are an island. Consider that anyone around you is a potential advisor, and reach out actively for the right advisor for your present context.

Pretending to know all the answers and that everything is fine is akin to being that balding guy with a bad combover — the only person fooled is the guy doing the combing. DON’T do the career equivalent of a combover.

2. Create & maintain a “Year in Review” Doc

Maintain a living list of all projects you’ve worked on to assist with formal review processes and ongoing career conversations with your manager and team.

Being human, we are forgetful

We tend to remember parts of things, rather than the whole. This might mean only recalling recent projects or the details that support the story we’ve constructed about a person or project. Memory itself is unreliable. To offset recency and confirmation bias, the best way to ensure the folks evaluating you have a clear picture of you is to create your “Year in Review”.

Demonstrate your value by quantifying your impact

What is more compelling as a promotion argument?

Person A: “I’ve done good work throughout the year”

Person B: “The projects I’ve delivered this year have netted $30M in revenue, increased customer engagement by 10%, and increased our NPS by 12 points”

If you had to choose between promoting Person A vs. Person B, who has the better argument? If you were choosing a leader who you would entrust to do the right thing for the customer and the company, who would you trust more? (Answer: Person B)

Crispy bullets beat hand-wavy narrative every time, so help yourself out by being extra crispy. This is particularly important if you are a designer reporting to someone who is not a designer, e.g. a PM, CEO, CMO, or Engineering Manager. Make sure you’re framing your narrative in a language that speaks to their values and what matters to the company.

How to write your “Year in Review” (YIR)

I recommend adapting the format to whatever dimensions/values your company uses to evaluate people, and aligning it to whatever language exists for the role/level you’re looking for. Here’s a framework to start with:

• A paragraph summarizing your accomplishments during the review period

• Years of industry experience

• Time in current level

• A living list of all projects you’ve worked on during that year
  What problem was each project was trying to solve? What was the impact of solving that problem for the user? (the more quantifiable, the better) What was the impact of solving that problem for the business? (again, the more quantifiable, the better) Who worked on that project? What was your role? (from discovery through execution) Include links to project documentation: spec/creative brief, mockups, prototypes, dashboards, etc.

• Culture development
  How is the team healthier and happier because of you? How do you help foster an environment where diverse voices and experiences are welcome? If so, show it! If not, time to start. Some examples include leading a team offsite, creating a club, and community service.

• Talent development
  How are you scaling and leveraging your skills to up-level the people around you? On your immediate team, in your org, at the company, and beyond the company? Brown bags, talks, writing, podcasts, workshops, etc. are all great examples.

• Recruiting impact
  How have you helped the team grow? Highlight interviews, referrals, etc.

• Values
  How have you embodied company values? For example, if “Be Authentic” is a company value, how have you demonstrated this? What was the impact?

• Self-development
  How are you actively improving on your strengths and growth areas? Say you got constructive feedback in your last performance review that you need to improve the way you collaborate with PM and engineering. A high performer would have a plan for addressing this and can point to concrete key milestones accomplished towards that goal.

• Make sure you also show that you’re actively engaging here so people can envision your trajectory. Highlight any progress made against weak spots from past feedback and areas where you are currently investing. Are you taking workshops? Reading books? Practicing a new skill twice a week? What specific actions are you taking? This can offset confirmation bias based on past weaknesses and shift the narrative to how you’re pro-actively turning that around.

When to share the “Year in Review”

• In review cycles, share it with anyone who is writing a review for you as soon as they’ve consented to write your review (manager + peers). This helps refresh their memory and potentially expose them to new amazing things about you. Let’s be honest — performance reviews tend to be very laborious. The quality of investment in crafting a quality review for a given person can be highly variable depending on how busy or tired the reviewer is. You have an opportunity to up the quality of your reviews by effectively creating talking points that they can easily adapt for their review.

• With your manager ahead of any negotiation conversation. It’s easier to make an ask when you have something that can help someone remember all the ways they can and should appreciate you. Remember: it’s pretty rare that a manager only has one report, so they’re often juggling a lot in their head. By providing focus for them, you get to sculpt the narrative you want — thus facilitating the conversation you want to have. It can also provide a higher level of detail for a conversation around gaps that your manager might want you to demonstrate more proficiency in in the future.

If you are aiming for promotion

• Align your YIR to the level you want to be promoted to, way ahead of the promotion cycle.

• Use this to craft your promotion with your manager, ideally 6–12 months from your next performance review. Where are you already meeting the bar at the next level? Where are your gaps? Together, you can plan out what you need to demonstrate and for a strong promo case.

• Regularly check in against that plan. Then, come the next cycle, you already know whether you have a viable case for promo.

• Note that most managers can’t promise that a promo will happen because the decision-making is rarely a solo-enterprise. That said, there shouldn’t be any mystery about whether or not you have a plausible case and whether your manager will back you up.

3. Evangelize your team’s work

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there…nobody knows about it…until you tell them. Create visibility, momentum, and appreciation for your team by sharing what your team is working on, why it matters, and what you’re learning and accomplishing along the way. If your team is doing good work, make sure people can see that, making use of any format that feels most appropriate.

Most importantly here, make sure you’re designing the narrative for your audience. Say you want the whole company to understand the project, but not everybody works on it. Write the narrative for the layperson.

Not sure what to say?

Keep it simple and clear

What is the objective of your message? What value are you creating for your audience?

Address the motivations of your audience

Different audiences care about different things. Pass your content through what I call the “Disaffected Teenager Test™”. Answer these questions clearly and compellingly, and you’ll find engagement:

1. “Sigh…Why does it matter, anyway????” (eyes rolling)

2. “What’s in it for me?” (arms folded)

Plan for how you want the audience to respond or act

How could learning from you help other people do better work and/or make better decisions? Are you expecting a response? Are you asking for something? Is this just to be informed? Set expectations clearly so people know how to listen to the information and know what to do next.

• This doesn’t always need to be about being successful. 
  Sharing hard-won learnings is super valuable and can model healthy vulnerability to your audience. If a project didn’t go well, but you’re actively learning and sharing why it didn’t, you can help yourself and others make a better decision next time. Obviously, you’ll want to be tactful, but a team that can own its mistakes and actively corrects them is a team with integrity. Compare that with a team that only shares good stories — even when you know not every project was successful (which is true for everybody, no matter how good they are). Which one would you trust more?

• Consider the altitude of information
  Start with what you want people to walk away with, and edit from there. Edit out details that fail to offer the intended value to the audience.

Share your tools and techniques

Did you, for example, have to create a new design sprint process or product thinking framework to get to a great outcome? How might you teach others that tool? Perhaps you could run a workshop or a brownbag to share it, thus scaling your impact from being a solo smart cookie to creating a more effective team.

Create new forums for exposure

If your team doesn’t naturally have forums for people to share, create a new one. You can start with a small audience of folks you know, build some confidence, and work your way to bigger rooms. Think about how you can create exposure for folks on your team to celebrate their unique contributions.

You don’t have to be on stage for this to reflect well on you, either. Be generous about giving and sharing recognition. We all know that nobody accomplishes something huge all on their own, and we all know how much it hurts to not be acknowledged for your contribution — so don’t do that to other people. Leadership isn’t about you; it’s about who you are for others and how you contribute.

4. Enroll people in the idea of you stretching yourself

This is critically important when you are taking on bigger challenges to demonstrate your leadership skills. It’s easy to mistake operating independently for acting like a leader. It comes naturally when you’ve been a star individual contributor and want to prove yourself. However, it doesn’t do anyone any good — least of all, yourself! You want support, visibility, and a tight feedback loop so the folks evaluating you know exactly what to look for — and you know what you need to demonstrate specifically.

Plan your journey

In looking for visibility, you need to sort out what needs to be visible. Where do you want your journey to lead? If you don’t know for sure, which paths seem interesting to explore? How might you develop a plan for testing your appetite for each path?

• Itemize your leadership goals/questions

• Then, plan out your development towards them in a timeline with measurable milestones.

• Share your goals with folks around you so you can refine them together.

• Particularly for your manager, if they don’t know what you’re after, they won’t know how best to support you. Make sure they’re involved. If you’re not sure where to start, ask: “What do I need to demonstrate in order to move into a leadership role?” And brainstorm together how your upcoming work might fold into that.

Bring people along with you on the journey

Leverage your manager, your peers, and other experts (potentially outside of work) on a regular basis for feedback.

• Letting your manager into the details of what you’re working on helps them see in higher fidelity how good your work is. Leverage your 1o1s and other forums to show your process, thinking, and execution. You might think it encourages micro-management, but it actually builds trust as you clearly prove yourself and remove outstanding questions.

• If you are stretching yourself on a project and are trying something new, tell them and enroll them in being a part of helping you be successful. You’re not asking them to solve problems for you, but you’re being vulnerable about not knowing everything and inviting them to assist with their knowledge and skills. This will help build trust with those folks as well through your humility and open communication.

• Regularly ask for feedback (stop/start/continue is a good starting place) and make strides on that feedback to reward people for investing in you.

• In doing all of this, you’ll feel a lot less stressed, a lot more supported, and you’ll learn much faster — thus reducing your risk of failure while creating more understanding and patience around any gaps you have.

Close the loop

For people who are investing in you, recapping what you’ve accomplished holistically every so often gives them a return on their investment and provides them with an incentive to keep investing. At the same time, you have some social accountability to stay the course should you have strayed from your plan.

Conclusion

It’s your responsibility to expose people to the great work you’re doing to know why you should be recognized as a leader. Again, four easy ways to create the visibility you want towards your leadership goals are:

1. Communicate your priorities & progress
   Build trust and awareness in your organization and focus, leveraging the team to do so.

2. Create a “Year in Review” doc
   Intentionally shape your holistic narrative rather than relying on people to know/remember.

3. Evangelize your work
   Share your roadmap and projects in a way that drives better awareness and outcomes beyond your team.

4. Enroll people in the idea of you stretching yourself
   Enlist the people around you in making you successful and hold yourself accountable to them — by establishing a shared definition of success and letting them see the details of the process for themselves. Follow up by recapping when you deliver results.

Note: Bringing horses to water won’t guarantee that they drink. It may not be possible to get everyone to see you for who you are and what you contribute. We know bad managers are out there. Most of us have been subjected to *at least* one. Similarly, there are corrosive team cultures that make spurious claims about meritocracy without being willing to critically examine leveling, promotion, and retention data.

Unless you have real institutional support to transform this, it may not be worthwhile to invest your time in a highly resistant organization. Nor may it be healthy for you. Toxic people and environments can rob you of your career not just by denying you near-term opportunity, but by creating an environment of struggle that leads you to churn out permanently. There’s no victory in being a martyr to such environments.

So, an alternate advantage: with these practices in place, you’re also well-documented for a job transition. In particular, tools like the Year in Review set you up for a powerful conversation with a team that would be delighted to have you and to invest in your growth.

If you’re eager to move into leadership or find yourself yearning for more ownership, the first thing is to start leading from where you are now. You can manage from any location in an organization —and that’s ultimately how you’ll increase your influence. Leadership isn’t anointed, it’s recognized.

Particularly for design, it’s important to recognize that being excellent at your craft is just one small part of what leadership entails. This is because leaders don’t merely “do” things. Rather, they inspire and move their team, and the team does the doing.

So, what gets recognized as leadership?

This is a short list of qualities I’ve observed in folks who rise—not just in standard role definitions or within organizations, but to the very top of their field. These are the kind of traits that make someone the first pick when people are starting a new business venture, looking for advice, or building an important new feature.

1. Integrity

If you have integrity, you’ve earned the trust of the team. You’re thorough, you’re a team player, and you listen. When push comes to shove, you don’t hide in a corner. You show up in a way that others can’t, don’t, or won’t. You offer clarity, not excuses. You’re unstoppable around your commitments. You set expectations and deliver.

You’re honest. You give people credit for their contributions. You take responsibility for articulating expectations. When you fail, you don’t deflect it onto others. You own up to it and course correct. You own outcomes, whether they met expectations or not, whether those expectations were said or unsaid.

2. Vision

Visionaries are both great listeners and great storytellers. They can talk to anyone and pull value out of them. They know how to leverage the ideas from their team and assemble a holistic vision through that conversation. Most importantly, their vision for the future includes clear stepping stones for how to get there.

What that looks like: you’ve got a running hypothesis (or a few) and you’re communicating about them with your team and enrolling them in your ideas. You have skin in the game. You can share your thoughts in a strongly stated, loosely held way that invites discussion and debate from the folks around you.

• You inspire people

• You create safety for others to take risks and think boldly

• You always present with a point of view

• You don’t design by the tool, you make the tool

• You don’t solve problems, you dissolve them

3. Focus

Highly effective people demonstrate focus and strategic thinking by paying attention to problems that are high-impact and reflect company values.

With focus, you set (and honor) boundaries with your team on how much exploration to do. You know how to break a giant problem into testable iterations. Once the time period of idea generation has passed, your crosshairs are on the challenge/phase at hand. You’ll explore the occasional wild card idea after finishing strong on what you’ve agreed to deliver.

You’re also making sure your time is high quality. You decline (or have your manager triage) requests that eat at your time. Similarly, you avoid designs that don’t immediately impact the project or that complicate experiments.

When you’re managing yourself effectively, managers don’t have to actively manage you. This leads naturally to more independence. Engineers feel confident about when they can start work. Your projects stay on projected deadlines. When your projects run smoothly, people are only too eager to let you make more projects run smoothly.

4. Craft

Solid craft enables you to connect your visionary thinking with the architecture needed to get there. Design solutions that enable the team to be flexible about exploring future ideas. At the same time, construct each iteration with clear directionality so you’re starting to train both the team and your users toward the idea of where you’d like to go.

Impeccable craft leaves no loose ends

• Remove harmful ambiguity and usability holes that impact user comprehension and focus

• Develop solutions in concert with engineering needs — as simple as possible while still enabling the team to learn

• Design process is informed by existing user behavior patterns and where those behaviors are trending

Craft is also communication. When you hand over your designs to engineers, they’re not guessing about edge cases or interactions. They feel secure that you have fully thought through everything, even more than what they’ve thought about. A thorough designer would never, for example, hand someone a single screen as an example of a multi-step flow, and expect the engineer to “make that”.

How this impacts your role

• Managers trust you to know the problem

• Cross-functional team respects and trusts design

• Fewer revisions needed after reviews

• Experiments built on your solutions move faster

5. Managing the team

Great team management creates order through powerful communication and teamwork. Give other people responsibility and hold them accountable: get a commitment affixed to a date. Then, check in on that date.

On the more personal level, you’re creating a culture of excellence through safety. You draw out the “quiet” ones. You constructively leverage the passion of the “difficult” ones. You create space for other people to participate in the creative process. You help people work better together.

This might be the great secret about leadership and ownership: much of it is determined by what you enable other people to do and be. It’s not actually about you.

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6. Managing the project

Regardless of your title, you own your project when you are 100% clear on what the problem is and the factors that go into that problem. If you can quickly paint a picture for stakeholders in 1–2 sentences, and the stakeholders are bought into the idea, that’s a good sign.

Always be clear on what you’re doing and why

• Figure out which things are open questions or negotiable via data or research

• Determine what factors are non-negotiable via data or research

• Document thinking and decisions to prevent the same conversations from cropping up again

Use your cross-functional partners and managers

Sometimes, people avoid asking for help because they think it will undermine their image as a leader. “If I ask for help, people will assume I don’t know what I’m doing.” Wrong! Great leaders unlock the best solution through leveraging the collective brainpower around them.

If you reach a stalemate or if new questions arise, resist any temptation to make uninformed promises. Bring the issue to your cross-functional team. If need be, don’t hesitate to reach out to higher levels of management. Leverage the support you have in your organization to drive better outcomes.

This is particularly important because the implications of what you’re building can inadvertently dictate the future development potential of the product. It can be catastrophically expensive longterm to commit to architecting a feature in a way that ultimately hinders what the team can easily explore in the future.

Drive alignment

If you want design to be an equal partner, that starts with making everyone else an equal partner.

• Work with the cross-functional team to frame experiments

• Get involved with what metrics are best indicators of project success

• Alongside product and engineering, take responsibility for open product questions and actively unblock the team

• Be connected to ship dates and schedule design reviews with the engineers so the team ships true to vision

• Design is a black box to non-designers, so make time to communicate about design organization processes to the cross-functional team, including design-driven reviews and feedback

• Own and manage any production work being done for you and liaise between production and engineering as needed

How this impacts your role

• The cross-functional team trusts you to represent projects on your own and hold true to the project vision

• Changes become a conversation, not something only designers own (way better for us since we’re all better informed about our particular product areas)

• People on other teams don’t ask the same question to different team members and get different answers — we’re in agreement because we’ve talked it through.

• Engineers, production, etc. feel totally supported by you

• Shipping quality goes up

When you can drive projects forward, you become a design powerhouse, an authority who truly owns the user experience. You are a reliable team member that creates stability and organization around you. You tackle challenges like a sniper. People will notice when you’re regularly shipping quality product that helps the team learn quickly.

7. Managing yourself

Be real, be patient, and be kind about what you expect from yourself and others.

Use your team to help prioritize what you work on

• What will have the most impact on the team, the org, and the company? What deliverables are most urgent and depend on your contribution?

• If you ever sense yourself slowing down, feeling confused, or losing interest — reach out to your manager and teammates. It’s the perfect time to get another perspective (and perhaps some inspiration) on the problem. It may also point to a latent issue with the problem itself.

Pick your battles

If everything is an emergency, then nothing is an emergency. While you may feel passionately about any number of things, hearing about constant upset causes a lot of thrash for the team. So if there are causes that you feel strongly about, pick 2–3 and focus the energy and attention span of the team on those few critical areas. This will also help prevent you from burning out.

Be professional

These last points may sound like nitpicking, but details like these demonstrate respect for your teammates, your manager, and the company in a way that no words can.

• Attend the meetings you accept and show up on time

• Don’t accept meetings you don’t plan on attending

• If you’re planning on working form home, notify folks via email before end of the previous workday, so your manager knows exactly where you are and the team can shift any planned meetings around your situation.

• For paid time off, ask for manager approval via email a minimum 4 weeks lead time for taking 1+ weeks off, so the team can plan around you without losing velocity.

• Ask your manager for approval before expensing anything. This will save you and your manager from the awkward scenario of rejected expenses falling back on your own dime.

• Ask your manager when you want to start an unplanned project or participate in a project with another team, so management can assess priorities and team impact. This helps find a balance between passion projects and meaningfully important projects.

Why do these things matter?

Leadership draws upon mutual respect. It is not a magical power bestowed upon a special person. Acknowledgement bubbles up naturally through demonstrating trustworthiness and competence.

As you begin to lead from where you are now, powerful inter-communication will be your tool for developing, testing, and advocating for ideas. Should you want to enroll your team in building a bridge, you’ll get more traction when you can show 1) how it can be done and 2) how it will lead to something meaningful. It’s pretty hard to execute solo on a strategy, so you’ll need to build it with people and inspire them to work on it. Think of yourself as tending the conversation, even if the idea you end up advocating isn’t your own.

Poor leaders evade accountability and avoid choosing, and this is fatal to teams and companies. Making strategic decisions requires taking a position and prioritizing which positions merit attention first. It’s not necessarily easy, and it’s certainly not for everyone.

The emphasis on integrity, vision, focus, and so on is not accidental. When you lead a team, any personal disfunction you have gets amplified to the rest of the team. On the plus side, any personal effectiveness is also amplified. So start by working on your personal effectiveness. As you extend it to how you interact with the team and your projects, the folks around you will naturally begin to observe how you’re leading.

Coming soon: How to help people observe how you’re leading. Follow me to get updated when it drops. Thx!

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