What I've Worked Out About Leading

Over years of leading design teams, I've noticed that I think less and less about "what should I be doing?" and more and more about "what does my being here mean for the people I work with?"

These sound similar. They're not. The first is a question about tasks. The second is a question about relationships and conditions. It took me a long time to realize that most of what I got wrong early on was because I was asking the first question when I should have been asking the second.

Here are five things I've worked out.

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Setting team goals sounds like a straightforward leadership task — take the business direction, break it into what the team can execute. That part is my job.

But if I do the whole thing alone, something important gets lost.

When I break down goals by myself and then distribute the result, each person gets a pre-cut piece of work. They know what to do. What they often don't know is why it was cut this way — how their piece connects to someone else's, what the whole thing adds up to, what completing it means for the team beyond "done."

When the breakdown happens together, something different occurs. Each person doesn't just know their goal; they know where it sits on the larger map — whose work it's adjacent to, what it enables. The goal becomes theirs in a more complete sense.

Short-term goals need clarity — specific, measurable, time-bound, so everyone knows what we're doing right now. But long-term goals, if only delivered top-down, are hard to actually believe in. They become real when people find themselves in the conversation that shapes them. Then it becomes our direction, not a direction assigned to us.

We talk about building "open-minded," "inclusive" team cultures all the time. These words are easy to say. I spent a long time trying to understand what they actually mean in practice, beyond being a thing one ought to do.

What I've come to think is this: an inclusive team is fundamentally about whether it's safe to be different.

Not "different" in a ceremonial way — different backgrounds on a slide deck. Safe to be different as in: I can bring an idea that isn't fully formed yet, or try something that might fail, and neither will be taken as evidence that I don't belong here.

Here's how they connect: if only one type of thinking gets taken seriously, then "offering a different view" becomes a risk. You might be seen as misaligned, out of step. So people don't offer it. But if the team genuinely contains multiple modes of thinking — all treated as worth considering — then "different" stops meaning "probably wrong" and starts meaning "another angle." And once that's true, "I'll try this, and if it doesn't work we'll adjust" becomes a sentence people actually say and mean.

My thinking on process has shifted significantly over time.

I used to think that defining clear process was a core leadership responsibility — how design review works, how the team collaborates, how the design system gets maintained. These are real concerns. But I used to believe it was my job to figure them all out and then explain the answer.

What I've found is that process I define and process the team discovers they need feel completely different in practice. The first gets complied with. The second gets maintained — people actually care whether it's working, update it when it isn't, and hold each other to it in ways that don't require me.

So now I try to let these conversations emerge from inside the team — through ongoing discussion, people noticing "this feels awkward, should we try something different." My role is mostly to clarify things when they involve other teams or need coordination across functions. Day-to-day internal process, I try to leave room for it to evolve.

What I've found reassuring is that when this works, people naturally support each other without being asked. Not because "the process says to," but because this is the way they built together. They own it.

Every day I'm working with people who need completely different things from me.

Some need a push before they'll move. Some are self-directed and need space more than guidance. Some are early in their careers and need to be walked through things. Some are experienced and have hit a wall — what they need isn't direction, it's to feel seen.

It took me a while to fully accept this: these different responses aren't compromises. They're not me being inconsistent. This is what management actually looks like.

There is no management style that works for everyone in every situation. The practical skill isn't having a method — it's reading, accurately, what a specific person needs from you right now, and being willing to change your approach without treating the previous approach as a failure.

I hold myself to a standard of continuous learning — because the directions I give my team are ultimately grounded in my own understanding, and if that stops growing, what I can offer them starts to age.

But team members' growth matters just as much, and I've found something counterintuitive about what "growth" means for individuals in a team context.

I've moved away from "help people fill their gaps" as the primary frame. I'm more interested in helping people go deep in the directions they're genuinely drawn to — becoming someone who's genuinely excellent at something, rather than adequate at many things.

This might seem like it would create imbalance — different people strong in different areas. In practice, the opposite happens. When each person is going deep in their real direction, the team as a whole covers more ground — because the coverage comes from actual expertise rather than everyone being reasonably competent at the same things.

And there's a quieter effect I've noticed: when someone grows in an area they care about and gets recognized for it, their confidence changes. Not "I'm better than others" confidence, but "I know I contribute something real here." That kind of groundedness is contagious in the right way — it creates an environment where people can focus on their own work without needing to perform or compete.