Jesse James Garrett

Even the most experienced designers can be surprised and dismayed to learn just how little creative control comes with being a design leader. But once you reach the executive level, the tradeoffs become impossible to ignore.

That can be surprising because the path from young designer to seasoned designer is itself a path toward greater and greater creative influence over the products we create, and we earn that influence through our attention to design quality. But that path takes a sharp turn when we step out of design and into design leadership. Turning that corner entails letting go of more and more creative influence as we trade that for organizational influence.

As a leader, your role is no longer to ensure the delivery of quality design. Your role is to ensure the delivery of a quality design function, and that subtle distinction dramatically changes the intentions you need to set and the skills you need to bring to bear. In fact, if you’re an executive-level design leader and you’re having a lot of conversations about design quality, it’s most likely that you’re either in a real crisis or you’ve set the wrong priorities.

And moving our attention away from design quality can be dismaying because it challenges our sense of identity: who we are, what we stand for, and what value we provide. When your expertise has always been rooted in your creative judgment, when your role as a designer has set you up as the arbiter of what’s good and what’s bad—and then you don’t get to do that anymore—you can feel adrift and uncertain of exactly what you have to offer and what you’re doing there.

So becoming a design executive often means letting go of both the goal you thought you were pursuing and the strengths you thought you’d use to get there. Because the “auteur” design executive, who leads from a singular creative viewpoint and experiential vision, simply doesn’t exist. But the real design leadership challenge—aligning a team towards common intentions and orchestrating their work towards shared outcomes—has its own creative tests worth embracing.