The cultural disconnection between design and the rest of the organization is one of the biggest recurring issues I see among my leadership coaching clients these days. It’s a risk to the success of products, teams, and leaders alike.
Don’t get me wrong: Design is a distinct function that tends to need its own distinct culture and practices. But when the design team’s sense of its own mandate—primarily articulated by its leader—doesn’t align with the perceptions and expectations of other executive leaders, it can lead to frustration, breakdown, and failure.
When that cultural breakdown does occur, it can usually be chalked up to one of two things, which I call “value and values”.
”Value” is the way the value delivered by design is perceived by the organization. What is all this investment in design doing for the business? Why should business leaders continue to invest time and effort in design activities, and continue to vest power in design leadership? Without a clear sense of that value proposition, it can be difficult for design leaders to make the case for themselves and their teams.
Then there are the “values”, the aspects of the organizational culture for which design is the standard bearer, the caretaker, and the conscience. Every organizational function calls the organization to evolve to some higher level. Customer service seeks to make organizations more responsive. Engineering seeks to make organizations more sensitive to issues like reliability and scalability. You can probably think of other examples besides.
Design, in turn, has its own values that it upholds. But your sense of those values as a design leader, and the sense of those values held by your peers at the executive level, might be two very different things. It’s not just about how you help the organization make money or move a business metric. It’s also about how you help the organization grow towards what it truly needs to be.
The less mature your organization’s understanding of design is, the more you might need to emphasize value and values in your communications as a design leader. If you’re feeling a sense of disconnection between design and the rest of the organization, explore where those visions of design might be diverging. Is it that you have different ideas about the value of design? Or do you have different ideas about the values of design?
Reconciling this distinction for yourself can help you clarify your strategies for communicating and engaging with your executive leadership and partners. Without it, your message about what you and your team bring to the table isn’t really your own.
Jesse James Garrett 