It’s Scary Up Here — Design Leadership — Year 2

Design Leaders, you made it through Year 1, congrats. Now you have a good sense of the players, rules and the game. You’ve built trust with your team and CFX partners and now it’s time to level up. Year 2 will require self-reflection, decision making, and balance.

Have an honest conversation with yourself about your career trajectory. The IC path may be calling you back, management might be where your strength lies or perhaps you’re a hybrid. Many design leaders linger in this miasma for too long; wearing too many hats and saying “yes” to everything en route to invisibility and/or burnout.

The visible ladder — follow the path of those that came before you. Not everyone needs to be a change agent. The quiet corner — reduce your scope, tackle fewer initiatives, make your goals very clear and deliver on time. Remodeling — commit to being an agent of change. Greatest risk/reward ratio.

You’ll need to paint a picture of what your ideal team looks like and align your current employees against a projected headcount plan. Riding alongside that plan should be a career pathing framework that provides a vision for career growth.

You should have a strong team leader to support you. The team should have a clear sense of what is expected of them as a department and as individuals. Resist the temptation to add infinite layers of management between you and your team.

If you don’t have a career pathing framework you likely have unhappy, fearful employees. Start digging into the numbers that drive the business. You’ll need to speak the language of your CFX peers. This is a make or break year for most design leaders.

If you don’t have a career pathing framework you likely have unhappy, fearful employees.

Take a hard look at the present political ecosystem. Look at what you are outsourcing and determine whose budget it comes out of. Take a look at attrition rates across the organization, break them down by department and seniority.

Year two is a balancing act. Stay alert.