How a group of designers approached professional growth in a virtual space
Recently, we launched a new initiative for alumni called d.MBA Circles. It’s a program built around small circles of alumni who support each other in achieving career goals. This program brought together a global group, united by the goal of professional growth. A group was already connected as like-minded, growth-oriented people through the alumni community, but the new three-month d.MBA Circles initiative gave them an even more focused platform and accountability to succeed.
By d.MBA alumni: Alicja Gackowska, Diego Jaramillo, Michael Schade, Raigo Lilleberg, Raven L. Veal, PhD, and Renee Lin.
Our Process
Phase 1: Aligning on shared goals
Each week, our team set up one-hour virtual calls to brainstorm and ideate around shared goals and next steps. Each member left from these calls, with “homework” items to be discussed in the following call. We quickly realized that we all shared the goal of transitioning into a leadership position—whether design leadership, strategic leadership, management, or the like.
It was also clear that we all came from different backgrounds and were in quite different phases of our journeys. Nonetheless, our weekly calls provided a lot of value throughout our Circle journey, especially the art of holding each other accountable and the use of feedback loops, which were intellectually enriching.
Phase 2: Defining leadership
While reflecting on what it takes to be a design leader, we began to shape a shared understanding of what leadership means, starting with the distinction between management and leadership. Design managers are often tasked with coordinating, growing, promoting, and challenging designers based on their skill set and level of experience, closing the gap between design operations and the business goals of the company. Design leaders, on the other hand, are visionaries who move the profession forward, inspiring the next generation of designers.
However, to be a true design leader, we came to the realization that you need both capabilities. With an ever-growing design profession, both variants of leadership can co-exist separately or be unified in design-mature companies, a reflection that would help us in the next phase of shaping our personal leadership profiles.
Phase 3: Developing leadership profiles
During the first d.MBA Circle meeting, we were asked to list our professional growth goals. Several meetings later, we created the Design Leader Persona, a canvas that enabled the second round of reflection on the following: our personal goals for leadership, including the achievements and progress we want to make in the next few years; catalysts or triggers for our decision; challenges we face on the way; and constraints, or the main elements holding us back. The canvas also included a list of influencing factors that impact our growth (context & attributes) and key milestones to track our professional development.
Design Leader Persona canvas
Overall, this exercise helped us create individual leadership profiles, which narrowed our goals by filtering out less important aspects that made it difficult to take action. After exchanging feedback, we discovered that many of our profiles overlapped, regardless of our professional situation and varied backgrounds. For example, some of our shared goals included finding industry/company fit, identifying role requirements, and evaluating work/life balance. Shared challenges included gaining management experience, growing in confidence, and finding mentors and sponsors. At the end of this phase, we were ready to pursue the last step of goal setting and generate measurable actions.
Phase 4: Creating actionable steps
One of the key objectives of the Circle was to generate action items in order to progress towards leadership roles. In the previous phase, we identified our future profiles as leaders, breaking down our high-level professional goals into trackable milestones to understand both long-term and short-term objectives.
In this phase, we conducted a collaborative workshop to further identify timelines and key actions for achieving our milestones. During the workshop, we diverged for individual brainstorming and converged to provide each other feedback with probing questions, resources, and directions. The outcome included personalized professional growth plans for each individual.
Phase 5: Inviting a guest speaker
During the program, we were fortunate to have guest speaker, Tina Slåttedal Jacobsen, share more about her journey and transition into leadership. Tina is a business design manager and lead at Accenture Interactive, as well as a d.MBA mentor. With a background in engineering, Tina boldly pursued the design path and her passion for making the world a better place, capturing opportunities that fit her goals and building her way up organically. As she says, “it’s a process and not a destination.”
Here are more highlights of Tina’s wisdom:
“It’s important to understand yourself and occasionally good to step away and reflect.”
“The more you go through in life, the more you understand what is right for you.”
“Mentors have always been there, whether people you meet over time or even family. It’s more about who might be interested and who also benefits from the conversations.”
“Leading is always about the team. It’s about nurturing your people and protecting them from extra stress. It’s also about personal stress management and emotional upskilling.”
Lessons Learned
We’ve learned a lot in the past few weeks, particularly some key considerations for future engagement in virtual, peer-led spaces:
Select an accessible time for global participants. It wasn’t always easy to manage work, family, and other commitments while attending Circle meetings. Furthermore, being in different time zones made it even more difficult. Looking back, it’s important to find a good time that works for everyone.
Use a leadership framework. Choosing a framework upfront on which to base our leadership exploration would have enabled us to more fully take advantage of the Circle. Ultimately, frameworks offer a clear path to achieve goals and provide a better way to set objectives and action items.
The structure is key. Lastly, having a more structured space, especially for a virtual team, would have saved us time to make even more progress.
This journey was a well-deserved effort that allowed us to meet new people who are walking our same path. According to this article, “People don’t take courses for information—that’s what Google and Youtube are for. They take courses for outcomes, accountability, process, and community.”
Next Steps
Although this is the end of our Circle, it’s the beginning of a new journey and the start of the next chapter (in fact, a circle never truly ends). Our team has gained more clarity of what leadership positions we want to pursue in the near future, as well as what steps to take towards that destination. Meanwhile, we plan to keep in touch semi-frequently to keep tabs on our progress and hold one another accountable. Think of it as a private mastermind group. Finally, if allowed by the crazy world we’re living in now, we would eventually like to meet up in person to see who we really are—not merely our avatars on Zoom.