Forming and Coaching Elite Design Teams

Yolanda Martin Olivas at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/YOJxfdAVx0w

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction

[00:00:01] Hi guys, I'm Yolanda Martin, I'm the global VP of design for ClearScore. I have been in this industry for well over two decades and I have managed teams for almost that long. I was, I don't know if lucky or unlucky, to actually start managing teams very early in my career, so I have learned through success and failure how to actually manage teams, how to get them from performing to high performing to really amazing and really elite teams.

[00:00:45] It hasn't happened very often, I have to say. It's not usual, it's not easy, and it takes a lot of different moving parts to actually take teams from high performing to that moment where you think, oh my God, I really have the best team in the world, they are just working as one, and the quality of the work and the outputs are just incredible, and they are having fun and they feel safe and all of these things. I'm going to go and explain to you how I've done it, or how it happens.

The different types of teams

[00:01:20] As I was saying, there are several types of teams. Underperforming teams, we probably all have seen or been in one. It's the kind of team where actually nobody talks to each other, they are incredibly silent. Maybe there is a bunch of really talented people together, but it's not really a team. It's usually distributed designers, solo over the organization, that don't talk to each other, they don't have common practices, don't have common ceremonies, and they don't feel like a unit. And as such they end up underperforming even if the individuals are really, really good, because there are neither economies of scale, but also not the design culture and the quality control and the learning that can happen when a team is placed together.

[00:02:10] Then there are the ordinary teams, the teams that are on the traditional management structure, usually with a boss at the top that assigns all the work and basically tells everybody exactly what they have to do and how they have to do it. Command and control style. Again, something that probably all of you have seen or lived through.

[00:02:32] When it comes to high performing teams, usually they're more focused than ordinary teams, they have a mission and a vision. They usually exist in companies that are more evolved in their management style, that have been honing their practices for longer, and as such there are processes and frameworks and ceremonies and team gatherings that actually allow for learning and the correct communication to happen. And that is when you start seeing really high performance teams, when the performance of its members self-corrects to manage problems that are larger scale.

[00:03:22] And there are also hybrid teams, which is basically the mixture of both. You have a bit of command and control, but you also have kind of the freedom of the team members to actually set their work towards goals, although the goals might have been set as a top-down type of situation.

[00:03:40] And then you get to elite teams. Elite teams usually happen when you take those high performance teams one step further. It's when the fears of the team, the psychological safety, has been reached, the fears have been removed, the designers feel in their environment, they know that they're in a place of innovation, that they can be bold, that they can take risks. And then the magic happens. Suddenly these amazing great ideas happen, everybody in the team wants to get involved in initiatives, they all want to participate, they want to communicate. And then you look around and you think, this is amazing, the team has reached that level of working together towards a common goal on their own terms, not being told, just setting a direction and letting them go.

What elite people look like

[00:04:45] For that to happen — and I'm sure all of you by now are thinking, oh my God, this is what I want, this is the team I want to be in, this is the team I want to grow, or, oh yes, I have seen this type of thing — usually these types of things happen in sports. And there is some reason why now, or the last 10 years, a lot of elite sport team coaches and managers are becoming public speakers and in general workplace coaches. And it's because they are probably the best people to understand how to manage teams that work together towards a goal, and their talents and their knowledge is being used now by many companies to actually move design teams, product teams, engineering teams into that kind of level of elite team.

[00:05:35] But for attracting and retaining elite people to the organization, you have to understand who you are hiring and what type of characteristics you can. You cannot actually form an elite team if the people that form that team do not have at least half of these characteristics, or more. And probably you're reading them and going, yeah, absolutely.

[00:06:00] Enthusiasm for the work: obviously, if you don't like your job you're never going to play the game properly. Confidence but without arrogance: nobody likes the person that thinks that they know everything. Adaptability under pressure: absolutely, if you break at the first moment that there is stress you're never going to do high quality, high-end work.

[00:06:24] This one is one of my favorites. We are expecting people to be their authentic selves. Later I will talk about diversity, but you don't want the team to be uniform. You don't want to bring people that suddenly will kind of morph into the one kind of style of the team. You want people to keep their uniqueness and to keep their authentic selves and be themselves, and have the freedom to talk their truth and bring their culture and their knowledge and their experience to the whole, without actually losing it inside the team.

[00:07:00] Resilience: not only high performers, everybody needs to have it, especially in difficult times like we're going into right now. Attitude of service, very, very important. If you're only thinking of yourself you're not going to play a team sport. You have to have a level — actually in an elite team, quite a high level — but you have to have a level of service, of actually putting your goals and priorities as a secondary thing and start doing work for the team and helping others to actually achieve things.

[00:07:34] Bold and brave, no fear of failure, is difficult to achieve, actually. Everybody's afraid of failing, everybody has imposter syndrome, everybody feels like a failure at some point. So achieving that level, or actually hiring a few people in a team that are brave and unscared, actually is contagious and it brings that within the team. So you're not going to have all of them, you probably won't be able to hire everyone who is completely fearless, but just a few individuals would bring that boldness to the whole team.

[00:08:12] And then, fundamentally, that teamwork is better than lone work. When you work in a team you never fail, because you glean from the failures, you learn from what has been collectively done, and you not only learn from your failures but you learn from everybody's, and also from the successes obviously. But when you are in that type of attitude of growth and that mindset of growth, even when things don't go right you are winning, you are learning something, you are moving on with that knowledge and that experience. So these are the main characteristics.

Strategy, knowing each other, and a training field

[00:08:51] Then, elite teams don't happen magically. They are hard work, there is a level of understanding of what you want to do and where you want to take the team. And these are a few of the things that I think work to take those teams from performing to elite.

[00:09:12] Repetitive and focused strategy and problem solving. This is very important. You have to always have a strategy of where you are going, but also make sure that that strategy kind of changes over time, taking into consideration how things move, how the team members change, how the ecosystem changes, how the company is changing, the products, whatever it is, and constantly strategizing around it. You cannot just pretend that you set a direction and a mission and a strategy of how to get there and it's going to be the same forever.

[00:09:50] Knowing each other. There's a lot being told about team building and norming and forming. It is super important, it's very important that all the members of the team know each other well, know where their strengths and weaknesses are, know their skills and their talents, and have an understanding of who can do where, when, with the best results.

[00:10:15] Having a training field, also super important. A team is never going to perform correctly if they don't have a place where they can play, where they can actually go every day and hone their skills and talk together. So creating that environment, that space, which can be a physical space but also a digital space. I can't believe that I'm saying this, but you know, two years ago before the pandemic I could never think that creative teams could be successful without actually having rooms to put things on the walls, or whiteboards, or physical spaces to talk and collaborate. But we are over that. Definitely tools like Miro have helped us overcome that, and we have learned new and creative ways of collaborating in the digital sphere in many amazing ways. I still prefer the face-to-face and the tactile things and the papers and the Post-its and the Blu Tack and so on, but I'm also quite a fan of a good Miro board and a good collaborative session and a lot of inspiration materials put there. But this is very important and very necessary, to create that space, physical or digital.

[00:11:32] The independent minds mindset, and the trust within it. You have to have both things. You have to have people that are very critical and have their own mind, as I said, that they bring their true souls to the arena, but also you have to have that trust that everybody else has also their views and their experience, and have that respect to actually create that collaboration. And that only can happen if you have 100% alignment on the team on what that mission and the vision are. Otherwise all the critical thinking goes and scatters, and then you spend the time just herding cats.

Mission and vision, and design as a team sport

[00:12:15] So having a mission and a vision is incredibly important for that success. Which is, you know exactly what it is, I'm pretty sure that most of you know what a mission and vision are, so these slides are just a repetition for educational purposes. But here you are, you have to have a team mission, there's not a good team without it. You need to have a clear direction and clear outcomes for it, and then present it in a nice way.

[00:12:45] There you go, a team mission and a team vision, or a team vision of the mission expressed in a way. Where we want to become the best design team in the world, the personally skilled[?] individuals that leaves the users informed and empowered, stimulating change that will help them. That's a round, good mission to have. And then how is it going to happen, when is it going to happen. It gives direction and purpose to the team, and it gives them something to actually rally towards.

[00:13:24] This is, as I said, I was talking about the sports before. I'm a great believer that design is a team sport. I have been a freelancer, I have been my own design team of one, both in startups and as a consultant. But for big meaty problems, for really groundbreaking features and products and services and so on, you really need that team. It's impossible that one person can hold the whole set of skills necessary for the success of any product. There are too many. You have all of that business strategy, UX, service design, research, animation. All of these things together is what makes and gives products the possibility of becoming truly great, and it cannot happen just with one person. I mean, amazing things can be done by one designer, but the diversity of skills and the working in a team, bouncing ideas and having the continuous feedback, is incredibly important. So I truly believe that a good team with a diverse set of skills is the best way to achieve amazing products and company success.

Clear roles, clear goals, and OKRs

[00:14:47] You have to give them very clear structure and clarity. This I have seen so many times in so many companies. When you bring them, you put them together, it's clear that somebody is in charge of interaction design and someone is in charge of visual design and someone of research and whatnot. But if you don't make clear boundaries on these roles, and explain very well which one each one of them does, and what is the expectation and the process of fulfilling the expectations for those roles, people get lost. They don't know exactly where their job starts and finishes, where the next role starts.

[00:15:34] It doesn't only happen with the different skills and different roles within design, it happens also with product managers and engineering. And again, we have seen it many times where the role of the product manager and the product designer is not well defined and there is always that kind of blurred boundary where confusion gets created. So having extremely clear job roles and job descriptions and the process to fulfill the expectations of that role is very, very important.

[00:16:04] Then, have clear goals and OKRs. And I know that sounds to some people incredibly boring, and OKRs get difficult to make sometimes, but when you have company, function and team OKRs together with individual OKRs, and they are specific, it is almost impossible to fail. You know exactly how things need to develop.

[00:16:35] I don't mean this — when I'm saying this it sounds like very command and control. No. There has to be a communication between every individual in the team and the functions, to actually create these objectives together. As I said, you have the mission and the vision, so the only thing you have to put is the plan and the execution order of things to get to the mission and vision, but everybody participates in the creation of the OKRs. It's not a solo function to come and say, this is what we are doing, here are your job objectives. It's a communication.

[00:17:09] And that's why it's so important that you have regular one-to-ones and performance review processes, to know exactly if your part of the job and your part of the function is being done correctly, and make sure that you can give feedback, positive feedback, and both reinforce good ways of working and maybe stop miscommunications and problematic behavior before it even becomes a problem.

[00:17:41] And then those job descriptions and those boundaries around roles cannot stay there forever. Once a year, once every 18 months, is good to do a good retro with the whole team, going, okay, do you think that actually your job description and the boundaries[?] of your role are still clear, have they been blurred? Maybe we have added new elements into the team, or some of the responsibilities have been moved from one area to another, or the team has upskilled, which happens very often. You bring a group of researchers into a design team, they start actually upskilling the rest of the team on research, maybe they start doing their own — product designers and interaction designers might start doing their own testing, and suddenly the boundaries start blurring again and you need to recalibrate. And that's okay, and that's really important that it happens, and the whole team participates in that recalibration of roles and that recalibration of skills, to make sure that everybody knows what is the role and the part that they play.

Formation: the core, the team, and the young ones

[00:18:51] Because formation is incredibly important. How you actually form your team will affect incredibly what the quality of the end work is, and also how the balance of the team works. Very much like in a football team or a basketball team or any other kind of team, you need to have those levels and those parts of the formation. You need a strong core, you need the center of managers and leaders, and of course a captain. You need that leadership where everybody looks up to, to learn from the principles that they set, to learn from their behavior, to look forward to how to do things and how to move forward the whole team. You need that really strong core.

[00:19:47] And then you need the team in general, who is probably formed by very diverse people with a very diverse set of skills that need to work harmoniously. And a very important part also, like in every sports team as well, you need the young ones. You need that set of members that have just joined the team. They are full of energy, they have incredible passion, they're coming to learn and to push forward.

[00:20:19] And I have seen so many times that really good teams get incredibly much better when you insert a whole bunch of interns or juniors into the team. Both because everybody rallies towards kind of helping them with their learning and journey and with their understanding of design, and with crits and feedback and so on, and that kind of reinforces also learning. But because people really rally around the young ones, everybody wants to help them move forward. And things like mentoring, these relationships happen, and buddy groups and so on, and it's a beautiful thing. And you definitely need to have some young people in your team.

The temple: platform foundation and embedded designers

[00:21:08] This is something I have been practicing for a very long time. I call it the temple, but it is the formation I use for all of my teams, at least for the last six or seven years. It has worked wonders for me and for the way that I manage teams. You have to have a very strong design platform foundation, with tools and frameworks and centralized practices that can support the rest of the team. And then you will have, for sure, a whole bunch of product designers, probably embedded into different squads and teams, that do touch point kind of work to very narrow parts of your business, or of your product, or of your service. But then they need to be supported by all these other practices, and this type of formation is fantastic to actually allow for growth.

[00:22:07] This way, if you actually have a good platform foundation with all the tools and the frameworks, and you have leaders in research, information architecture, service design, content design, design systems and operations — and sometimes you might have less, or you might have more, depending on the type of company you work in or which type of products you might have, the practices might be different — but they are usually a very small amount of individuals that hold the tools and the frameworks for each one of these types of practices and help product designers to actually do their everyday work.

[00:22:48] So it's not that you need to have a researcher, a content designer, a product designer, a UI designer and an ops person in every single team. Growth will be impossible, plus learning, when it's so much distribution of knowledge, is a lot more difficult to keep with quality levels. So this has worked amazingly for me and I will keep on practicing it.

Skills matrices and hiring for the gaps

[00:23:17] Another important part is when you are doing this, and we were talking about the different practices and the different skills and how sometimes job roles actually change because you have an upskilled team. This is what I mean. When you're hiring people and you're assessing them for their skills, you need to actually take careful note of what skills you are hiring. Let's say that you just got a new product designer that has been working for years very close with a team of user research and testing and service designers, and they actually have quite a big knowledge of both service design and UXR. Take note of that. Make a matrix page for each one of your team members, and then overlap them to see where your team has gaps of knowledge.

[00:24:10] And if you have to hire, or when you have to hire next time, or when your next headcount comes on board, make sure that you write your JDs for that set of skills that is missing on your team. You don't want everyone in your team to have the same set of skills, because it will mean that they are all really shallow. What you want is a variety of people with very different matrices, with very different sets of skills, but also with very different cultural backgrounds and very different experience levels.

[00:24:39] As I said, it's very important to have really young designers, but it's also important to have people that have years and years of experience — sometimes shallow and long, with a lot of width, sometimes incredibly deep. There are certain practices, for example content design or design systems, that are very, very specific, and the deeper and narrower you get those specialists is usually better. Product design is a really T-shaped type of role, where individuals will have a much more spread matrix and will have a little bit of a level of each one of those skills across the whole world of skills. So you have to mix both of them: find your product designers, which are T-shaped, and then have your specialist leaders for your practices.

Designer chess

[00:25:38] And once you have this, you have to organize them and get them into both types of organization: value creation organization, where each designer goes according to the organization of your team, and how they get managed. But also — and this is something, again, I have done for many years — every six months or so you probably need to do something that I commonly call designer chess. Which is taking into consideration all of your team: where they are, how the growth has been, where the promotion levels are, what the upskilling of the skills is that has happened during the last six months, and where they started and where they go in the organization.

[00:26:26] And start moving them around to see if that position where you have put them originally is still allowing them for growth, is still challenging them, is still taking the best of them. Or they are quite bored of the area, they have learned enough, now they are just cruising, so they're not being challenged at all. Actually the type of work is not enough for their level, and it's a new time for them to be moved to another area where that challenge happens. And then maybe put one of the young ones, or one of the experienced ones, because maybe that area is going into a profound discovery phase and you need to have there a really senior service designer, for example.

[00:27:13] So it's an exercise that is required to be done, usually with the core of your team, so those managers and leaders — better in a room, better with a big chunk of post-its and serious discussions into how everybody is doing, what is the health of the team, what the challenges of the goals of the company and the product are for the next six months. And then recalibrate and relocate everybody into the best spaces. Thinking that you have people in a team and you're putting them in a place and you're going to have them there forever, it's just a recipe for disaster. Teams are a living organism, like companies are, like challenges are, like products are, so you need to change them according to that.

[00:28:00] And I know that some voices will say, yes, but you know, these designers are specialized in this particular area of the business, and that designer is particularly in that area of the business, and so on and so forth. The main definition of a designer is problem solver. That's what they teach us when they teach us to design, that's what we learn when we learn the design methodologies and frameworks: we learned to problem solve. And sometimes the problems in front of us we know them so well that we have blinkers on. We have been solving this problem for so long that we don't see the problem anymore. If you don't see the problem, you cannot solve it. So sometimes you need to move designers around. If there is trust and there is psychological safety, you can move people around in a team without causing harm — all the opposite, just creating more adventure and more excitement.

[00:28:58] Also, you need to know your team members and your team very well. And if you cannot move them, or you shouldn't be moving them because they are working fantastically, or they are accelerating in that area, they are still learning, they're still being challenged, then don't. Obviously I'm not advocating for actually reshuffling the whole team every six months, obviously. But change is a good thing, so don't be scared of it and don't be afraid of it.

Training, as a team and as individuals

[00:29:23] Training. So this part is also quite important. The same way that you shouldn't think that your team, once it's formed and once you have all your frameworks and everything is perfect, you keep it like this forever — it happens the same with training. And training, like in a sports team: if people do not constantly learn, if they don't constantly flex their design muscles, if they don't constantly train, they will become obsolete and not very, very good in performance.

[00:29:57] So both types of training have to be put in place. Team training, as I said: you need to create the environment so there is that playfulness and that place for collaboration and that place for working together and teaching each other and pushing each other and so on. But also, you have to encourage the individual learning. You have to create an environment where it's okay to take time to do courses, to go to meetups, to go to conferences, to learn individually on their own time and on their own pace, and on the things that they like the most, they are most interested in.

[00:30:37] But also in things that you might encourage them to learn, that you might actually want them to move to next. Or, as I was talking about on the skills matrix, areas of your business where you just don't have those skills and maybe you cannot hire in that particular moment. It could be anything, it could be research, service design, design systems or whatever. And you might direct a whole team or a group of people in that team and say, hey, here it is, this amazing course on, I don't know, mobile UX, or accessibility for the elderly, or whatever it is.

[00:31:19] Make sure that your team members never stop learning, and as individuals and as designers, never stop learning. You will never be an amazing team player, and you will start becoming a weak link in your team, if you actually don't put the effort to know the new stuff and learn more methods and the newest frameworks and so on and so forth. Constant learning is important, and training.

Psychological safety

[00:31:51] Also this one. This one I have said it several times during the time I have been speaking: psychological safety. For me, at this point in my career, having worked with so many teams, the only way that you can take anything from ordinary to high performance to elite team is by creating that psychological safety for them. People need to feel safe to do the work.

[00:32:20] We are incredibly reluctant as humans to engage in behaviors that might be perceived negatively. We judge ourselves harder than we judge anybody else, and we are always second guessing ourselves and our bravery. Shall I say that? What are they going to think if I do that? Or maybe I shouldn't be so bold in my design, or maybe I shouldn't go that step that far. If I said that, what are they going to think of me, and so on and so forth. We all have it inside of us all the time.

[00:32:52] So creating that space where people start to think, or stop thinking that way, and say, you know what, I'm just going to go the full nine yards on this, I'm just going to design what I feel is the right thing, I'm just going to show what I think is the top design and I'm going to go for it. And that feeling when you start seeing your designers, your researchers, your team coming with these incredible ideas that probably are one key[?] and probably are two years down the line, or impossible to test, or whatever — but they are there, the thinking is there, and that bold, brave thinking will power the rest of the team.

[00:33:41] Maybe you have to phase it, maybe you have to go, okay, that's amazing, but we need to do XYZ before. Okay, bring it back, cut it in pieces, make a plan for it, but encourage it. Encourage the brave thinking. And as I said, the only way to do that is by creating psychological safety. There are thousands of books written on this and tons of articles, and it's probably one of my favorite things to study and try to understand, and to see what different exercises and behaviors from my part and the rest of leadership encourage or help with that psychological safety.

[00:34:15] What is important also to know is that you always have to be working towards it. You can never stop. It's not one of those things that you go, oh, I have already created a safe environment, now I don't have to carry on thinking about it or worrying about it. That's not how it goes. It's something that you have to be measuring and checking on all the time — sometimes called team health[?]. And sometimes you don't even measure it in words, but it is there. We all know it's there. You know when you enter a team where you feel safe and you can speak your truth and be yourself and really push the boundaries. And when you enter a team where you're just expected to follow the gray lines that everybody's following: not to think too far, not to think too much, just to execute, just do this wireframe, nobody asks you to go any further outside of the lines or the box that I have given you. We've all been there. That's not what you want for an elite team. That would never be an elite team ever, because you need that bravery, you need that boldness to move. I can talk about this forever, by the way, but I'm sure that we need to carry on with this talk.

Following the careers of your star players

[00:35:44] Another thing that is quite important, and I do very often, and I know it sounds probably slightly creepy and a bit stalky, but elite team managers also do it, which is follow the careers of your star players. I've been asked so many times by recruiters, because sometimes I come to them when we need to fill a role with particular names, or a list of names, or a name of people that I have been following their careers for maybe just a few months or maybe a few years. People that I might have heard in conference talks or in meetups, I have met them in meetups, or I have read an article in LinkedIn or in Medium or wherever, and I thought, I'm going to put this person in my list because it seems really interesting, check on them later. Maybe I don't have a role for that person, maybe I wouldn't have a role for the person in that company, and maybe three companies down the line suddenly a role appears and that person comes to mind.

[00:36:53] So it is quite important that you know who is out there in the field, who the best players in design, research, service design, information architecture, whatever, are out there. So when roles open in your elite team you hire the best. So it's one of those practices: to have that list, that file, visit them regularly, see what they are doing, where they are working, what their latest advances are, and their new laurels and so on. And keep contact with them. Sometimes they might need a mentor, sometimes you might want to learn some skill from them. So network, and start meeting those potential future members of your elite team.

Leaders and managers

[00:37:47] As well, I was talking before about the core of the team. You need that strong core in every team, that kind of keeps the team together. That's the spine of your team, that is the strong center of your team, and these are your leaders and your managers. And there is a common mistake that people think that leaders and managers are the same thing. They aren't, the same way that we need to differentiate people that manage people from individual contributors, and have a strong career platform in your organization for both. You need both.

[00:38:20] Sometimes you get the manager that is a great leader and they are very good at differentiating both parts of the role. But usually you get one or the other thing, and not both, and can interchange the mindset from being a manager to being a leader. Leaders are very specific on their vision of the future. They don't live in the everyday thing, they don't live in the tactical world of how to do things. They are the people that are looking at the future, that are looking at where the investment is going to come, where the corporate reputation is going, where the team reputation is going. They look at the big picture and move the team towards that direction, sometimes in solitude, but are the first ones to step towards a direction, and the rest of the team, because of those leadership qualities, start looking towards them and moving in that direction naturally.

[00:39:22] Managers are different. Managers are the ones that actually see where that leadership is going and make a plan to make it happen on the day-to-day. As I say, it's great to have great leaders that are also managers, but I think it just works better, or it just works, for leadership for the elite teams, if you have them as separate. It's very difficult to have your head in the clouds and your head in the weeds at the same time. You need two types of people to do that, but they need to work together as one in your team.

Final thought

[00:40:01] And this is it. An elite team needs incredible commitment to the whole and to every individual for it to succeed, and it is definitely not an easy task. This is my final thought I want to tell you: managing teams, any kind of team, is incredibly hard. High performing teams are harder. But elite teams are a continuous task that you need to put effort every day on, actually challenging them and making them better. So please go out there, try to practice some of the things that I talked about, and send me a message if you have any questions. Thank you very much, guys.