When you’re a new design leader creating a new design function for an existing organization, establishing your credibility and authority can be challenging. Some leaders choose to lobby at the top, seeking an executive mandate they can wield to bend their partners to their processes. In my experience, though, this approach creates so much potential friction that there’s a high risk you haven’t been set up for success at all, despite your power on paper.
An alternative, more organic approach for establishing and then scaling the value proposition for design is suggested by Rebecca Nordstrom of LEGO Group in our conversation on the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. The five-year journey she shared with me and Peter reflected a more patient, intentional, and inclusive approach to building that credibility and authority. A few elements stood out to me as key to her success:
Start with a problem the organization has tried to solve before and failed more than once. This is a problem whose business value is already understood well enough by the leadership that they’ve previously invested in solving it. But that history of failure gives you the opportunity to provide hope for a different outcome.
Emphasize your differentiator to generate demand. Having solved a difficult problem isn’t enough to base a value proposition on—you have to demonstrate that you’re more than a one-hit wonder. That means prospecting for new problems to solve, and showing the business owners of those problems that your success comes from repeatable practices.
Keep leveling yourself up out of the weeds. In order to scale the value she was delivering, Rebecca had to move quickly from individual contributor work to serving as lead communicator and orchestrator. If her definition of her own role and her own value proposition had remained static, however, she never could have taken the team from herself and a handful of students to a formally structured and mandated organization with a leadership layer under her.
By approaching the development of her team in this incremental fashion, Rebecca was able to keep the expanding value her team was delivering tightly linked to the promise of a future value proposition that left her stakeholders wanting more.
Jesse James Garrett 