Book Review: Design Leadership

While the book suggests dedicating a modest budget to team morale—perhaps enough to cover a monthly dinner or happy hour—Banfield wisely cautions against the trap that some companies fall into. Installing ping-pong and pool tables in a common space and providing free beer on Fridays is not culture. These things may be fun, but such superficial trappings of positive culture won’t effectively counter dysfunctional team behaviors such as infighting, hypercompetitiveness, blaming, and lack of trust. As Banfield notes, “Culture is created by the people in the room at that time.”

Talent

Banfield’s discussion of culture flows naturally into talent—another complex topic. Any manager would tell you that hiring the right people is probably the most difficult part of his or her job. Unfortunately, many companies follow skill-based heuristics for hiring that do not contribute to team culture. A great piece of advice is to find motivated people who are passionate about their work. Good designers can learn specific skills. Intelligent, loyal, engaged employees who may lack particular skills can achieve much more than employees who have all the skills, but are not engaged in their work.

Culture and talent are inextricably linked. A positive culture sustains a team and attracts talent, while negative situations tend to repel people. Many have pointed out before—and Banfield notes here—that people don’t leave companies, they generally leave dysfunctional managers and teams. Based on my own experience, this is certainly the case. Most of the time, when a project has failed or a valuable team member has left a company, the fault lies in the team dynamic.

Designing the Business

Among the ideas that this book presents, I found Banfield’s insight that “the business is the design project” valuable. After reading the book and having seen this idea presented elsewhere, this seems obvious. But I think the realization that a business is a design project is one that most design professionals have as their career progresses. Over the course of my career, I’ve heard—and said myself—that UX professionals started out designing Web sites and products, then proceeded to designing processes for doing work, then to designing teams and organizations.

Of course, as with any design project, this implies that the business will iterate—and failure will happen. What’s important is to learn from those failures. Chapter 8, “Learning from Our Biggest Mistakes,” includes several lessons that have come from failure.

Your Experience May Vary

As I noted previously, the book largely focuses on the perspective of an agency owner. While this is a reasonable approach to managing the scope of the book, it may be too limiting.

Unfortunately, this limited perspective may lead to some dissonance between the ideals that the agency leaders who Banfield interviewed have expressed and the perspectives of their employees and midlevel managers. I found what is perhaps the most salient example in Chapter 3, which discusses office space and remote work. (The emphasis is mine.)

“We’ve always had an open work space, so we’ve worked without walls. It’s one of the values of the company, and I think that just breeds honesty. There’s nowhere to hide, everybody can see what everyone else is doing, and everyone can hear and tell what’s going on. The energy in an open work space just fuses, as opposed to walls that might separate people and keep that energy contained. Some people get annoyed by the open work space because of the noise or the lack of privacy, but I think the benefits in terms of the energy and the camaraderie it breeds far outweigh the advantages.”—Vince LeVecchia, Partner and General Manager at Instrument, in Portland, Oregon

“Lack of privacy,” “nowhere to hide,” “noise….” It sounds like a panopticon to me. Despite significant research that has identified the downsides of open office plans and the author’s own acknowledgment that some of his people don’t like their open workspace, this agency leader prefers an open office plan precisely for the reasons that employees object to them: a lack of privacy and noise.

I’m sure this agency leader means well, but he justifies his company’s open office plan with unprovable platitudes such as energy that fuses and honesty. Plus, his explanation of this open office plan as a value of his firm confuses the expression of a value with the value itself. What is the actual value that provides the basis for this decision? Following an architectural fad whose intent is, frankly, to reduce real-estate cost is not a value.

Banfield describes Fresh Tilled Soil’s Apprenticeship in User Experience program. The apprenticeship model is common in Europe for a variety of industries, and Banfield’s model provides a good exemplar for how to create a talent pipeline. It’s a smart way of ensuring you have qualified talent. It’s affordable. It allows you to evaluate and train talent over months. Plus, it gives new talent an opportunity to do some good work and gain experience, possibly resulting in full-time employment and the potential to earn some income. But this model would likely be most useful to larger organizations that happen to be design agencies. It’s not applicable if you are a UX team of one inside a manufacturing firm, have to contend with a human resources department, and have just enough budget for a summer intern.

Conclusion

How would I succinctly describe Design Leadership? It’s certainly not a how-to book on design leadership. (In fact, Banfield states this in his preface.) It’s a largely autobiographical piece that describes the experiences of a select group of design leaders at agencies. This is not a criticism. Some of my favorite books concerning leadership are autobiographies.

Who is this book for? If you have aspirations to lead or establish a dedicated design firm or a somewhat autonomous design team within a design-friendly organization—or already lead such a team or own such a firm—you’ll probably find a lot of great ideas in this book. If you are a UX professional or manager inside a product or services company, you may still appreciate the lessons, but you’ll probably scratch your head while trying to imagine how to implement them in your organization. 

Request for suggestions—I need more books to review! Is there a book you love—or hate? Have you recently published a book? I’d love to take a read. While I already have a list of books that I want to review, I would really appreciate your recommendations. Please send your suggestions to: [email protected].