WORKSHOP SERIES

Designing Design Teams

Build with intention

Successful design teams don’t just happen—they are structured with intention from the very beginning. They are aligned with the purpose of your organization and with your own leadership skills. In this design leadership workshop, you will learn how to create a personalized plan to build your team. You’ll explore the best ways to recruit, structure, level, and develop a design team from the bottom up.

Session details

Recruiting creatives

What roles do you need to successfully deliver on key business needs? This session helps you break down what you really need in the areas of skill, knowledge, and mindset. Instead of relying on titles that mean everything and nothing across the industry, you’ll craft a story that tells creatives about the role, focuses on problems that need solving, and creates alignment for effective evaluation.

Architecting organizations

As a leader, you must consider the whole system and how it's intended to be structured and how the different parts of the system cooperate. In this session, you will explore the elements of the system beyond roles and titles. You’ll also identify the unique challenges and growth opportunities for your team so you can structure your team to meet the needs of your particular organization.

Designing career paths

Levels are a structure to help teams clarify what they value across disciplines and growth trajectories. In this session, we’ll talk about how to design career paths in a way that helps you manage performance but also gives your creatives clarity about what “good” looks like and inspires them to grow.

Cultivating culture

Culture emerges from interactions within an organization, not from what we say it should be or think it should be. You can’t directly design culture, but you do have the power to design the system that fosters it. In this design leadership course, you’ll learn how to design experiments that leverage different elements of the system—your org—to enable a good culture to emerge.

Catalyzing performance

Managing performance is one of the biggest challenges for all people leaders. Often as a manager, you’re evaluated on your team’s performance, so if you’re not helping them excel, it reflects directly back on you. Through connection, real-time feedback, and coaching, you can accelerate a person’s progress and continued growth. In this creative management course, learn how catalyzing individual team members can activate and maximize the potential of the entire team.

Ensuring excellence

How do you make sure your team is solving the right problem, using the right processes, on a tight deadline, without compromising one iota of quality? This session provides an overview of the fundamentals you need to ensure excellent output from your team—like how to set a vision and how to instill quality execution across the organization.

Remote Management

Leading distributed teams can be challenging, even in the best of times. And when you’re juggling multiple time zones and asynchronous inputs, it can be challenging to figure out if things are actually going well. In this session, we’ll touch on four key areas of focus for remote managers: communication, performance, critique, and culture.