Now, more than ever, I believe it's critical that Design leaders map the power relationships inside the companies they work for. Why? Two reasons.
- AI isn't going to fix how you deal with power and people in real-time.
- No matter where you work, there will be peers or stakeholders who are excited by what you and your team can do… and there are others who are skeptical.
Your emotional energy is precious
In my experience, a lot of design leaders have spent a significant amount of their emotional energy trying to convert powerful skeptics into believers. And, that investment has seen limited returns. As a result, they've burned out, become cynical, or worse, become easy scapegoats for powerful stakeholders who think a good outcome will happen just because they say it should.
Your emotional health is not worth that kind of energy. Not only because it's vital for you but also because if you're a leader who is stuck, your entire team is stuck.
A stratactical way to approach power dynamics
I think there's a more practical, and dare I say it, more strategic way to approach powerful skeptics at work. This approach is not for everyone and might make you uncomfortable, but it's proven to be a very valuable exercise for the 100s of students who have done this with me.*
A few months ago, I mentioned that when you lead Design, Design is the Product. With any product, you have a cycle of adoption. There are early adopters, the early majority, and then the late majority.
The powerful people you work with who are skeptical about design are late majority adopters. They might be really good at execution, but they're really risk-averse. And any new process that isn't their idea sounds risky to them.
As an analogy, they're not the people who lined up for the first iPhone. They're the Blackberry folks who held on tightly to their devices for years, then relented because the rest of their family was complaining about them not being able to see emoji reactions on group messages.
Here's a quick example of how I teach students to map power relationships in their companies at Chief Design Officer School. The goal of this exercise is to find peers and stakeholders who are willing to try new rad things. It's a deliberate and intentional exercise to find evidence that good design works and find the stakeholders who will champion more of it with their power.
*In all our courses, we talk about the importance of ethics and values. It's paramount that those come first. It's only after establishing principles of ethics that we do this exercise. The exercise is not a judgment of someone's character. It is an evaluation of how best to meet their needs while giving you every chance to make design a more relevant and valued business unit at your company.
