Leading Design Teams: A Guide to Strengths-Based Management

Dian Wessels at UXDX Community: Leading Design Innovation: From Teams to Market Impact. Video: https://youtu.be/7ZLO1gOkYys

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.

Michael Jordan and the baseball detour

[00:00:00] My name is Dian Wessels. I lead the product design team at myTomorrows. myTomorrows is a health tech scale-up in Amsterdam, and we help patients and doctors discover and access treatment options. I'm dialing in from Rotterdam tonight, where I've been living with my wife for the past three years, but I'm originally from the Winelands in South Africa. Fun fact: I have more browser tabs open than there are countries in the world. More about that later. Today I'll be talking about leading design teams with a strengths-based approach.

[00:00:34] When I was a teenager I just loved basketball. Personally, I was never really good at sports; I was more of an academic guy. But when I discovered the NBA, something just clicked. My friends and I each had our own favorite NBA team, and we practiced our jump shots on netball courts, because basketball wasn't really a thing in South Africa in the 90s. Around that time the Chicago Bulls dominated the game, led by the iconic Michael Jordan. They won consecutive NBA championships in 91, 92 and 93. Jordan himself was awarded the MVP award three times. He was a living legend.

[00:01:16] So can you imagine the global shock when in October 93, at the height of his career, he announced his retirement from the sport? And not just to go sit and drink cocktails on a beach somewhere, but to chase a childhood dream of his, which was baseball. Yep, the undisputed king of basketball was putting down the ball and picking up the bat. In February 94 he signed a minor league contract with the Chicago White Sox, a move that defied expectations and launched a unique chapter in his sporting career.

[00:01:50] Michael Jordan was undeniably gifted, but there is a difference between exceptional athleticism and mastering an entirely new skill. Baseball is a highly technical sport, and it takes a long time to master. He hadn't played competitive baseball since high school, and his muscle memory was attuned to a completely different way of moving. So it came as no surprise that he kind of sucked. However, Jordan's story isn't about failure. It's about understanding your strengths. Baseball, despite his dedication, wasn't where his true potential lay.

[00:02:30] Thankfully, Jordan realized this. On March 18, 1995, Jordan announced his return to the NBA in a two-word press release: "I'm back." And guess what? It was phenomenal. He led the Chicago Bulls to three more NBA championships and was awarded season MVP twice more. Years later, in December 2022, the NBA renamed the MVP trophy the Michael Jordan Trophy, cementing his place as the NBA's greatest player of all time.

Know thyself: CliftonStrengths

[00:03:05] Okay, enough about sports for a second. What does this all have to do with design leadership? Well, it turns out that leading a team successfully has a lot to do with understanding the power of knowing your strengths, that is, understanding the individual strengths of the team members and applying it to the team's composition, dynamics and strategy. And as was the case for Michael Jordan, that means coming to terms with your own strengths and weaknesses first.

[00:03:36] Inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are the famous words "Know thyself." In just two words we see captured the essence of wisdom. By understanding your own nature, skills and limitations, you can contribute to society and achieve success, whether personally or professionally. Imagine for a second if you had no self-insight, no understanding of who you are, what you are able or not able to do, what you like or dislike. How would you choose a career, or a partner, or what to eat for lunch? You would just randomly hop from one thing to the next, trying to figure out what goes on in life. Who knows, maybe once in a while you'll stumble upon a good match, but you'll forever be at the mercy of fate.

[00:04:22] There is a smarter way of going about this. By getting to know yourself, discovering and applying your natural talents, you can learn to lead yourself first of all, and then your team. That begs the question: how do I discover these so-called talents and cultivate them into strengths? Well, there are several tools and frameworks out there. Some of you might have stumbled upon some of these personality and aptitude tests, like Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, et cetera. So you might be an INTP, or a strong D, or a Type Three Achiever, or a purple jungle hamster, or whatever. It can get quite confusing.

[00:05:07] There are many more out there, some of which are more useful than others, but the one I found to be most useful, and the one I've been using with my design teams since 2010, is CliftonStrengths by the Gallup organization. Back in the day it was known as StrengthsFinder, and it was developed by renowned psychologist Don Clifton while he was the chairman of Gallup. The main idea behind CliftonStrengths is that individuals can achieve greater success and satisfaction, or fulfillment, by understanding and leveraging their inherent talents rather than trying to fix their weaknesses.

[00:05:47] CliftonStrengths' formula for building strength, then, is talent, which is a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving, times investment, the time spent developing your skills, practicing and building your knowledge, equals strength, which is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance. If you're anything like me, the last bit sounds a bit scary. Near-perfect performance sounds like a lot of pressure. But the idea is actually that that is the outcome you can expect without even trying too hard, because you are reaping the rewards of something you're naturally good at, enhanced through time spent refining it to become a true strength.

[00:06:30] At this point it might be good to mention that I'm not affiliated with Gallup or CliftonStrengths in any way. I'm just sharing my own experience of a tool and framework that has helped me and my teams over the years to collaborate more efficiently and with more satisfaction. Based on 40 years of research into human strengths, Gallup created a language of the 34 most common talents, or themes, and divided them into four domains. They developed this assessment that you can take online, which helps people discover their own unique combination of strengths.

[00:07:07] Here you can see all 34 themes in the four domains. It's important to note that there is tremendous diversity in CliftonStrengths profiles and in how people express their strengths. The chance of two people sharing the same top five themes in the same order is an astonishing one in 53 million. And even then, how these themes are expressed in your personality is unique to you. Your challenge therefore is to learn how to unlock your unique combination of skills and experience, kind of like finding the code to a combination lock, and this is where the various resources Gallup makes available online and elsewhere really help.

My own strengths, and leading yourself first

[00:07:50] As of 2022, more than 26 million people had taken the CliftonStrengths assessment. I took mine back in 2010 and then again a few years later, but the general advice is that once is enough. I still refer to my original test as my actual strengths. So let's take a look at that. Here are my results from the assessment. As you can see from my top 10, I just love thinking. Of the eight strategic thinking themes, I have six in my top 10. I also like some relationship building, as you can see there in the five-to-seven area, and just one executing strength: Restorative, which means I like improving things and fixing problems.

[00:08:37] So if you want to get me to do something, to take action, it's best to frame it as a problem. That immediately activates my thinking strengths, which can be an issue, for example, when my wife actually wants me to listen first and leave the solutions for much later in the conversation. While I do have influencing themes, they are all clustered beyond my top 10, in the "navigate" section, and I love how they put that: these are themes I have to navigate, to manage, not focus and spend lots of time and resources on. It's best for me to hone my thinking and relationship-building strengths, because I can really excel at those.

[00:09:15] The danger for me, however, is to spend too much time in my head. I can overthink, which leads to inaction. My challenge therefore is to balance my love of thinking with my desire to improve things, so that I can take action. Combined with my Adaptability theme, it puts me in a great position to be in a team where I'm confronted with hard problems, things that can be improved, and constantly changing priorities. Sound familiar? Welcome to product design at a tech scale-up.

[00:09:47] So principle one of leading design teams with a strengths-based approach: team leadership starts with self-leadership. As I discover and develop my own talents into strengths, and I'm learning to capitalize on what I'm naturally good at while still managing what I'm not so good at, I'm learning to direct my own career path towards opportunities that maximize what I have to offer, to the benefit of my team and my company. Don says it best: "What leaders have in common is that each really knows their strengths, has developed their strengths, and can call on the right strengths at the right time." Thanks, Don.

Embracing your team's individual strengths

[00:10:26] Now let's talk about the team. You've now discovered your strengths, you realize baseball is not the best use of your talents, and you're ready to make a difference on the court. So how do you harness this approach with the rest of your team? Well, you help them to discover their own strengths, of course. You can do this through conversation, listening carefully to what excites them, observing their work, et cetera. All of these tactics are valuable, but a fast track to revealing what your team is naturally good at is simply to let them take the assessment as well. That's what I've been doing since I started managing design teams in 2010. I found that just focusing on the top five makes a huge difference in leading the team towards better performance and higher engagement. It helps me better understand what motivates each person and how I can set them up for success.

[00:11:20] Let me give you some examples from my own experience. Names have been changed to protect their privacy, and images are AI generated. Here we have Lucy. She's responsible for our design system. Her number one talent is Responsibility, which is fantastic for keeping all the components and variants up to date. Great. She also has two strategic thinking strengths. She's easy to work with because she has Relator, and get this, she has Discipline, which is one of the least common strengths. Great, right? Yes, but I've learned that if I give Lucy too many projects to focus on, she'll overcommit herself and work herself into burnout. It's because of that powerful Responsibility and Discipline combination, which drives her to work, work, work. So I have to help her put limits in place.

[00:12:19] Let's look at another example. Here's Johnny. Johnny is a senior product designer, great guy, fun to hang out with. His number one theme is Relator, so he values close friendships, and he has strong thinking skills. But you'll remember I don't have influencing strengths in my top five. He has two of them, and so Johnny and I butted heads sometimes. His Activator strength drives him to get started quickly on design work, and his Command gives him a just-do-it kind of attitude, and both of these made me a little nervous.

[00:12:52] As UX lead in this team, I would sometimes watch work that I'd never seen before being demoed in big company meetings, and with my Restorative strength wanting to improve things, it would drive me nuts when I saw UI elements that I would have wanted to tweak before putting them in front of an audience. How we learned to embrace this, though, was through compromise. I would encourage him to iterate quickly and come up with lots of ideas, and he would present those ideas in the team for feedback before sharing them with a wider audience. This increased the team's sense of co-creation, leading to greater team morale and performance.

[00:13:30] As a manager or leader, you can have a significant impact on individual engagement. Gallup's research found that if your manager primarily focuses on your weaknesses, the chances of you being actively disengaged are over 20%, and nearly double that if they ignore you. But, and herein lies the beauty, if your manager primarily focuses on your strengths, the chances go down to almost zero, just 1%. So imagine if I had decided to ignore Lucy's signs of stress, or give Johnny a hard time whenever he showed unfinished work in the demo. We'd have ended up with a less engaged, lower-performing team with higher turnover intent.

[00:14:07] So if you find that someone in your team is disengaged, or acts out, or sabotages the team in some way, ask yourself this question: to what extent have I been focusing on their weaknesses, challenging them on certain behaviors, as opposed to helping them discover where their potential lies, which natural talents could be developed into strengths, thereby helping them feel more satisfied and engaged at work?

[00:14:36] So principle two of leading design teams with a strengths-based approach is: embrace your team's individual strengths to enhance team performance. Even the ones that seem difficult at first can become an asset if you take time to dig deeper and understand how each individual strength expresses itself in that person. There's a beautiful improv concept called "Everything is an offer." If you can apply this kind of thinking to those attributes that frustrate you in certain people, if you simply have to make it work, you'll be surprised to find how easy it becomes to see opportunities everywhere. You even start to relish those moments where previously you'd go, "Oh, here we go again, here comes the drama," and now it's, "Ah, okay, here we go, another chance for me to turn this difficult emotion into something useful." Those frustrations are filled with energy. You can either waste it or you can use it, and the choice is yours.

Mind the shadow side

[00:15:35] Right, now it's time to go to the dark side. In the Mr. Bean movie, he works as a security guard at the National Gallery in London, and he's put in charge of watching over the famous painting of Whistler's Mother before it's transferred to another gallery. At a given moment he admires the painting closely and then accidentally sneezes on it. Massive drama ensues. He tries to wipe away the droplets with a handkerchief, but it turns out his pen has leaked ink onto it. Then he tries to remove the ink with a strong solvent, dissolving the face of poor Whistler's Mother. After this he tries to redraw the face, and we end up with this abomination.

[00:16:19] This story, while fictional and very funny, is very close to home for me. I can't tell you how many times I've turned a small stain on a shirt or a carpet or whatever into something disproportionately worse. It's at a point now where I don't even try; I immediately ask my wife to intervene. This is the shadow of the Restorative strength: the urge to fix things that are best left alone. If Mr. Bean had just let the sneeze droplets dry, all would be right as rain. If I didn't grab a dirty rag and start rubbing each time I see a tiny speck, I'd have a lot more wearable clothes in the cupboard.

[00:17:00] So here are my top five strengths again. As you can see, each one has a shadow. For Input, if I don't curate all the new information and things I collect, I hoard masses of useless objects, for example hundreds of browser tabs. Not balancing Learner with application can lead to stagnation. Thinking can lead to overthinking. Restorative can lead to destruction. And Adaptability can manifest as distraction.

[00:17:30] The same thing applies to the individual strengths of your team. When I managed Lucy, I made sure the workload was manageable. With Johnny, I had to remind him from time to time to share his work in progress. With each individual, I try to learn how the shadow side manifests and help them come up with strategies and tactics to keep it in check. So our third and final principle for today is: mind the shadow to maintain momentum. If you can learn to avoid the pitfalls of each strength, being mindful of the ways in which you and your team members operate too much in a particular theme, you can keep moving in the right direction towards your goals. Losing momentum can be costly, so keep that streak alive by managing the dark side of your strengths.

Three bonus tips

[00:18:16] I'm running out of time, but I have three bonus tips for you, and then I'm going to wrap it up. Number one: beware of pigeonholing. Remember that this is just a framework. It's not a full description of a whole, complex human being. So try not to stereotype and shame people for specific strengths, like, "Oh, there goes Susan again with her Competition, always turning everything into a competition." Also watch that you don't limit someone's exposure to certain roles or tasks because of perceived talents. This is where growth conversations really help, to come up with a plan together.

[00:18:54] Second: pair complementary strengths. Once you get to know all the various themes, you can start pairing them for greater impact, and note that this doesn't always mean making up for weaknesses. I've found personally that my best collaborators are people who also have mainly strategic thinking strengths. In terms of team composition, though, it can help to look at the distribution of the various domains to make sure things are balanced.

[00:19:20] And finally: make the rebels your allies. The people who go against the grain, or who grind your gears, are motivated by something. Try to find out what that is, what makes them tick. Try to see things from their perspective. Ask their opinion. Everybody wants to feel important and respected, so utilize that. You can collaborate on some smaller tasks, get some easy wins, and then gradually win them over and turn them into allies. Then difficult people and situations become way less intimidating, and they're just another opportunity for you to be curious and learn how to work with, instead of against, their unique talents.

[00:19:57] That's it for today. My hope is that managing your design team will feel like a championship-winning slam dunk with a strengths-based approach. If you want to connect with me, you can visit my website; all my social links are there. Thank you once again to UXDX for the opportunity.

Q&A

[00:20:17] Host: Excellent, thank you very much, Dian. That was really interesting. I've actually never come across that particular personality or skills-based assessment before, so thank you for sharing. Whitney has just commented saying thank you so much as well. I'm going to ask a question, but if you're watching, please feel free to ask questions as well on whichever platform you're watching on, and I'll put those questions through to Dian. My question is: you mentioned at the start, I think the statistics were, if I'm not mistaken, 22% are disengaged if you focus on weaknesses versus 1% if you focus on strengths. But there is still quite a bit of focusing on the weakness, because your examples were about showing things ahead of time or getting overworked. Is it just about positioning, where you say, "Okay, I'm going to position this as a strength," even though what you really want them to work on is not showing those things before they've been reviewed by the team?

[00:21:25] Dian: Those statistics have to do with disengagement of team members. The worst thing you can do is to ignore people. Then the chances are around 40% for them to be actively disengaged in their work. If you focus on weaknesses, that goes down to around 20%, and if you focus on strengths it's negligible, 1% or so. An important point about the weaknesses is that we don't ignore them; we learn to navigate them. It is good to know the weaknesses of your teammates and come up with strategies to help them navigate that. But you get far more out of your team in terms of engagement, work satisfaction and performance if you focus on the natural themes they are good at. And as I said, those can also have a shadow side. So when I talk about managing the team members, it's more about the shadow side of the strengths, to really make sure we are collaborating as best we can as a team. The main takeaway is: take the themes that come naturally to you, work on them, and they will eventually become strengths that can benefit yourself and your team.

[00:22:54] Host: Excellent, some great advice there. We're actually getting a few questions in from one of our audience members, Randy. His first question is: when building a team and hiring, how do you apply this to new hires, or do you?

[00:23:10] Dian: That's an excellent question. It's obviously something you can't enforce. I've never asked someone to give me their top five strengths as part of an interview process. I don't think we're that far yet with the thinking worldwide, although I do think it can be useful. I know what the expectations are of each role I'm hiring for. If it's a UX researcher, I'm looking for strong empathy skills. If it's someone who's going to take care of the design system, themes like Consistency and Discipline are great. But as I also said, we should be really careful not to pigeonhole people. Also, if you only do the assessment that gives you your top five, you don't see the rest. It actually costs more to see the full 34 in order, but I find it's useful to look beyond the five and see the 10. For myself, my influencing strengths, which I know I have, are not in my top five; they're in my top 10. So what I do, once I've actually appointed someone, is ask them to do the assessment so that I can get to know them, and then I try to work out a plan with them on how we can apply those themes in their specific role. But no, unfortunately it's not something I ask for before or during the interview process.

[00:24:42] Host: There's another question from Randy, a brilliant one, I think. I always think these are great tools, but if you're managing a team of, let's just say, eight people, how do you keep track in your head of the strengths of each person and how to go about nurturing them? Are there any tips or techniques you use to keep track of everything?

[00:25:10] Dian: I actually found, in my research for the talk, an online tool, and I've forgotten the name now. It's a company that uses the CliftonStrengths approach, and they developed a spreadsheet for bigger teams where you can plot out all the people in the bigger team or department, and it allows you to map out the various domains. You can then see, "In this department we're very heavy on strategic thinking and we're lacking relationship building." In other teams, where that might be more important, like HR, you could see, "We're missing some influencing strengths here," and then you can maybe start making some changes to team composition. So there are tools out there for bigger teams. My own experience is much more in a smaller setup, where I can have individual conversations. But it can get overwhelming, I think, if you have a massive team or a whole company to think of.

[00:26:17] Host: Excellent. That tool sounds great, but is there a risk, to your point about pigeonholing, of saying, "Oh, it's not in the top five, but it's number six for a couple of people, and that's good enough"?

[00:26:29] Dian: Exactly, and that's why I would recommend getting a certified strengths coach. Gallup has these, to help the company, team or department make sense of what they're seeing. The risk really is that you look at those and you think, "Ah, okay, this person is like this," so you start treating them in a specific way, and that is dangerous. But I found that as I read more of the material and the books they have to offer, I understood more that this is only one expression or framework of very complicated human beings. Even if your top five are the same as mine, it doesn't mean they express themselves in the same way. So I've learned to use it more as a guideline than as a strict way to put people in specific categories. I do find that professional guidance in that sense will help.

[00:27:33] Host: Perfect. Well, that actually brings us to time. Thank you very much, Dian, for sharing. I hope everybody enjoyed it as much as I did. Thank you once again.