Dalle-2 prompt: a group of colleagues sitting together in a collaborative space providing support and feedback on designs in the style of a cubist illustration using primary colors
After a period of organizational change, I took on an interim leadership role for the experience design talent community to focus on design operations and support the growth and development of the Northeast design team. I implemented a few initiatives such as the NEXD Bulletin Board, Office Hours, Quarterly Craft Club, and XD Role Expectations and Leveling Guide to create a sense of community, provide clarity on expectations, and foster psychological safety. Some key outcomes were improved employee satisfaction survey scores, expansion of the leveling guide initiative, and a renewed sense of community and togetherness among the team.
As interim Talent Community lead for the Northeast Experience Design Talent Community I was responsible for mentoring and coaching designers to foster skill development, growth, and a culture of continuous learning within the team. I provided team leadership by inspiring and mentoring the creative team, nurturing their professional growth, and encouraging creative excellence. I contributed to the establishment of performance indicators and standards to measure team performance and delivery quality.
Avanade’s primary organizational structure dimension is by geographic region. From there, our secondary dimension is talent community, otherwise understood as clusterings of roles by related skillsets and responsibilities. Some examples of these communities are Experience Design, Software Engineering, Business Technology and Integration, Security, and so on. As a consulting company, the management structure can get complicated as consultants move between projects and clients. To establish a degree of consistency for our teams, direct management is established with the assignment of “Career Advisers” from within the talent community for all employees that maintain a reporting structure regardless of project assignments. These career advisers then dotted line report in to a “Talent Community Lead” that is responsible for coordinating and leading the community, ensuring they say connected with the regional and wider business.
In the fall of 2022, the Avanade experience design team was experiencing a number of significant changes. Earlier that summer a massive reorganization was launched and we saw a number of departures and changes to the workforce that resulted in a vacuum of mid to senior level design leadership on the XD team. Outside of internal transitions and changes, the technology consulting industry was experiencing some turbulence as the market slowed down following the boom in demand for digital transformation services during the pandemic. Our team, now consisting of primarily junior to mid-level folks, found itself with a vacant talent community lead position for 3 months and a floundering sense of community, trust, and structure.
Beginning to see the effects of the leadership vacuum on our team, yet not having the business in a position to hire for the role, a few of our business leaders trusted me with the opportunity to take on the talent community lead role for our team of 13. In January of 2023 I began as the interim Talent Community Lead for Experience Design in the Northeast.
Many on the team felt disconnected from one another, isolated on their project islands, and lacking a support network they could reach out to to connect with or ask for help. To complicate the situation further, business conditions continued to worsen and a few weeks after I took on the role, the organization decided to take workforce actions, leaving many to feel insecure and fearful of losing their role. Following the 6 months of uncertainty and lacking communication, the top priorities I set for our team were:
In order to do this I experimented with a number of approaches for bringing the team together to share, collaborate, and spark creativity. This resulted in 4 key initiatives:
Every six months our organization runs an employee feedback survey to assess satisfaction and sentiment, and to guide employee experience initiatives. Just after I began the TC Leadership role the experience design team had the lowest survey scores across the Northeast region (during record low ratings as the survey followed org wide workforce actions). 6 months later following the fall iteration of the survey, it was found the experience design team was the only team to see score improvements from the previous survey. While very proud of this accomplishment, it was small in the grand scheme of things and can really only be considered a positive signal we were trending in the right direction with a ton of work left to do.
The XD leveling guide initiative gained traction across North America as I found it was a similar need across the regions. Thanks to partnerships with some incredible design leaders from across NA (Sarah, Ant, Petar, Anja, and more) the leveling guide expanded from high-level role descriptions to full blown leveling guidance and a competency matrix that is being rolled out across NA this month.
Above all, what I consider the most important outcome were the personal accounts the team had shared with me as I transitioned out of the interim role following the completion of our re-org roll-out this fall. When I started at Avanade as a recent grad there was a culture of community and feeling of inclusion that was so important to me as I began my career. I felt comfortable reaching out to any one of the design leads for advice and feedback, and was proud of the team I was a part of. To hear from my team they had started feeling a renewed sense of community and togetherness meant the world.
Beginning my role as TC lead, the first action I took was to set up a 1:1 series with each member of our team to get to know them more personally and understand where they were in their careers. I used this time for informal conversation to learn about their interests and give them space to share as much or as little as they wanted to about how they were doing. Above all else, I prioritized building trust through sharing some of my own vulnerabilities and asking for each person’s feedback on my ideas for the team. It was important to me that whatever direction we chose to take the team, was a direction that each designer felt represented them and their needs.
I also began regularly connecting with design leaders from across the other NA regions. I was lucky to have access to an incredible support system that had extensive experience doing a lot of this work and provided not just recommendations and advice, but often templates and approaches I could borrow from, and collaborate with as I figured out what would work for our team (thank you Mande, Michelle, Ant, Brian, Rolf, Jesse!).
The resulting initiatives I chose to prioritize were: