TEAM LEARNING + DEVELOPMENT

Build a high-performing design team.

Customize an L&D experience for your team to help everyone from new designers to experienced managers. Take strides together with workshops and boost personal growth through coaching.

Team Workshops

Increase your team’s business impact without losing its creative soul. Design your own workshop series to sharpen business acumen, increase influence, and hone management skills—from running critique to scaling quality.

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Team Coaching

Give everyone more of the coaching they deserve. Whether it’s group coaching to integrate learnings from workshops or individual coaching for your managers, our experienced design coaches supplement the reach of your leadership.

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“I was really impressed by how well the virtual meeting format worked out. I felt like I was still able to connect with other creatives thanks to the breakout sessions. Also, the usual pain points of virtual meetings were practically non-existent — people weren’t talking over one another, there weren’t any issues of people being on mute, and the connection was great. ”

— Tiffany Mine, Creative Director at Philz Coffee, remote workshop participant

MOST POPULAR

Series

Choose one of our most in-demand pre-designed series, or design your own series from our catalog.

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DESIGN LEADERSHIP FOR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS

Conventional wisdom dictates that becoming a manager is an essential rung in the career ladder. But traditional paths aren’t the only way to leadership. This design leadership series helps senior creatives develop tools for collaborating effectively with cross-functional partners, influencing senior managers, and supporting other creatives in the delivery of great craft.

4 four-hour sessions

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DESIGN LEADERSHIP FUNDAMENTALS I

Our most popular workshop helps new managers leverage their design skills for leadership success, while providing insight into management fundamentals. You will identify your leadership profile, learn how to deliver effective feedback to foster team performance, explore how to structure your team, and much more.

3 five-hour sessions

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DESIGN LEADERSHIP FUNDAMENTALS II

Building on the basics in Design Leadership Fundamentals I, this workshop will expand your leadership awareness and provide new approaches to scale your impact and influence. We’ll explore important modes and mindsets for dynamic leadership, learn to lead through others, and master the art of delegation.

4 four-hour sessions

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DESIGNING BUSINESSES

As creatives, we believe in the value of design. But to amplify its visibility and impact, we need to integrate our creative practices with the objectives of the business.

This design leadership training helps creatives at all levels develop basic business acumen and perspectives that apply directly to their day-to-day responsibilities. It’s an extremely accessible workshop that helps participants understand common business terms and acronyms and make the connection between business and design.

4 four-hour sessions

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LEADING CHANGE

Graceful, courageous leadership through change can seem nearly impossible in uncertainty. However, it’s an inevitable challenge any leader in a rapidly changing industry or hyper growth company must face.

You will learn to manage through significant organizational and company shifts, show up authentically as a leader in challenging times, and how to build resilience for yourself and your team.

3-4 four-hour sessions

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DESIGNING DESIGN TEAMS

Great design leaders take into consideration the best practices across the industry, then adapt them to architect a design organization that fits the needs of their company.

This design leadership workshop helps managers create a personalized plan to recruit, structure, level, and develop a successful design team.

4 to 6 four-hour sessions

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“[Over two days] we covered topics that are not only relevant to all leadership roles but for design leadership specifically. That was the true value of the workshop—to be able to learn more about management and leadership methodologies that are design-focused.

It allowed our entire team to engage more deeply with one another and to identify specific practices to bring into our day-to-day roles and interactions. I would highly recommend that any design team looking to gain the knowledge that will make you a successful collaborator and leader to take a class with Design Dept.”

— Audrey Liu, VP of Design at Lyft

CUSTOMIZED LEARNING

Workshops

DESIGN LEADERSHIP PROFILES

The Design Leadership Profile focuses on the four primary areas of responsibility in creative leadership—self, vision, team and execution—and the critical skills design leaders must exhibit to successfully deliver within each area. Develop your personal leadership profile to inform personal growth, team development and future leadership career paths.

ENSURING DESIGN EXCELLENCE

High performance design teams are focused on solving the right problems with the right guardrails and processes in place to build quality experiences rapidly. In this session, we’ll focus on an overview of the fundamentals needed to ensure design excellence—from setting a vision to instilling quality execution across the organization.

DESIGNING PARTNERSHIPS

Being an excellent creative leader isn’t enough to guarantee impact. Shifting your mindset from reactive problem-solving to proactive relationship-building ensures that you effectively manage up, down, and across the organization.

CATALYZING PERFORMANCE

Building high performance teams begins with catalyzing individuals. Being a catalyst activates and maximizes your team’s potential. Through connection, real-time feedback, and coaching, you accelerate their progress and continued growth.

CULTIVATING CULTURE

Culture is an observable set of behaviors that rise organically from interactions in a system or organization. While leaders can’t control culture, they do have power to shape the system and its elements. This session focuses on the parts of the system that you can actually design, to create the opportunity for a good culture to emerge.

LEADERSHIP AS A CREATIVE PRACTICE

A common roadblock to making the leap into design management is the fear of losing connection with creativity and making. During this session, we’ll explore leadership as a creative role, and how to leverage your design skill set in new and evolving responsibilities.

CHANGE AND THE BRAIN

Change is inevitable for all of us. Explore change through the lense of neuroscience and design to bring more intentionality to how you and your team experience change.

DESIGNING TRANSITIONS

Change is an inevitable challenge any leader in a rapidly changing industry or hyper growth company must face. Learn to look at change from the human perspective, and design transitions that support your team’s growth and engagement.

BUILDING RESILIENCE

Resilience is being able to bounce back from setbacks to stay effective in the face of tough demands and adversity—as an individual and a team. While we all have a baseline of resilience formed at a young age, we can also build our resilience through shared purpose, a growth mindset, regular connection, and supportive practices.

DYNAMIC LEADERSHIP

Leadership is a multi-dimensional, creative practice. Today’s leaders embrace models and mindsets as diverse as the challenges they face, and are flexible and responsive in how they lead. This introduction to modes of leadership gives participants opportunities to explore models and mindsets that are critical to developing a dynamic leadership style.

HELLO INNER CRITIC

Inner conflict is a daily part of being human, and a daily struggle for creatives. We’re so used to finding problems to solve, that sometimes our inner dialogue can be really loud. We’ll discuss how to recognize these parts and learn to work with them so that you have the freedom to lead as your boldest, bravest self.

LEADING BY INFLUENCE

Leading by influence isn’t based on hierarchy or title. It is based on trust. Influence is increasingly important as you work with purpose-driven people on multi-disciplinary teams. In this environment, leaders must elicit desire and conviction (vs. use power or coercion) towards shared goals.

DESIGNING YOUR TIME

It’s a classic challenge: the urgent winning out over the important. After two days of deep learning, designers have even more “important” to consider. Designing your time teaches a framework for evaluating impact and effort to determine what to prioritize, delegate, or dump—so you leave Fundamentals with a clear path for moving forward.

DEFINING CAREER LADDERS

Successful design teams are structured with intention. Great design leaders take into consideration best practices across the industry, and adapt them to architect a design organization specific to their company and their needs. We’ll craft a draft ladder for your organization that looks at both what folks create and how they create.

LEADING AUTHENTICALLY

What gives you energy? What drains you? These questions are at the heart of leading authentically. Many people accept feeling drained as the nature of work, but they are doing themselves—and their teams—a disservice. Together, we’ll tune into your values, assess your behaviors, and design how you can live your values more fully—in service of being your most inspired, creative and resilient self.

BUSINESS BASICS

Design creates experiences for people, but that is only possible by building a sustainable business. This module provides creatives with an easy-to-understand overview of common business models and financial tools that help build a foundation for framing the value of design.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

Illustrating the value of design begins with aligning with the business strategy. Together we’ll explore different business strategies and approaches, clarifying your organizational strengths and risks, and evaluate the way design can impact them.

PRODUCT DYNAMICS

Building on business basics, this module provides creatives with an overview of how to think about creating impact and exploring tradeoffs through the product life cycle. Deep dive into common business metrics like CAC, MAUs, and LTV, and learn to estimate the ROI of design investments.

CRAFTING DEBATES

Critical interactions with executives and leadership team members can often feel like debates. Develop tools for crafting and facilitating logic-driven and business-centric narratives to help foster trust and understanding with peers and leadership.

REMOTE MANAGEMENT

Leading distributed teams can be challenging, even when it’s not in the middle of a pandemic. From multiple time zones to less inputs on how things are going, it can be challenging to figure out if things are going well. In this workshop, we’ll touch on four key areas of focus for remote managers: communication, performance, critique, and culture.

“The career development workshop with Design Dept was a huge milestone for our team in paying attention to ourselves as leaders and investing in the teams continued growth and development. Mia gracefully spoke to multiple experience levels of leaders and upcoming leaders across a wide variety of topics and really catered her advice and wisdom to what was needed during a time of great change. The feedback from the team was overwhelmingly positive and filled with introspection, growth and aspirations. An absolutely magical experience.”

— Alison Beattie, Director of Product Design & Research, major retailer