The Accidental Design Leader - Andy Budd

"Thank you very much thank you.

So much for having me here it's you know. Amsterdam is one of my favorite cities in the world, I've spent the day here listening to all these wonderful speakers having some really great conversations out around the coffee area. so I'm having such a good time so you wanted to thank PPK in the team for putting this on I just like to suggest we give him a big round of applause for the first amazing day thank you so much, well-done guys, awesome stuff.

So a few years ago I spotted a trend a lot of my friends had moved from being kind of designers to senior designers to leading a team a department sometimes even a whole the company. They'd finally got that seat at the table they've always been after but rather than being happy, they were more stressed than I've ever seen them that hoped that becoming a design leader would solve all the problems that had experiences, individual contributors, when in fact, they just created a whole bunch of new problems I hadn't even thought about before.

Problems have never had to deal with they'd fallen for the myth of
leadership that all you need is power and authority to make the change and somehow everything would just magically get better however it turns out that power and authority generally aren't enough power may give you more opportunity to influence but power alone won't cut it instead, you need to develop a whole new set of skills which I'll be talking about over the sort of the course of this presentation.

As I talk to my friends over tea and cake well I am British a pattern sort of started to emerge it was though I was saving the hate the same conversation with people over and over again the exact same conversation but with different people. Most of my friends have found themselves in companies that are actually genuinely valued design and they'd been bought on to kind of grow their teams and significantly raise the profile an impact design was having.

That sounded great at the interview but it's proving problematic they were getting inundated with resumes but few people applying actually had the level of skill they needed they were mostly said at 18 months out of a general assembly course and calling themselves a senior designer when they did find somebody suitable those people were in such high demand that a bidding war would start when they did find the right person those people only seemed to stick around for 18 months before being attracted to the next opportunity, as a result, my friends were not really leading design they've basically become recruitment managers just chasing that next kind of hire..."

[...]