Nurturing Designer Career Growth

When they aren’t thinking about the work in front of them, your reports will likely be interested in their long-term career path and professional growth. Nurturing this development is one of the most important aspects of design management. Unfortunately, many managers gloss over this critical responsibility, which can lead to reports feeling unsupported and unfulfilled in their roles.

The career convo

One of the key tactics I’ve employed is setting aside time for a recurring career-specific conversation with each report. This meeting allows us to go deep on topics that may not come up during a weekly 1:1, including discussing long-term goals, addressing skill gaps, and setting milestones for growth.

The career convo should happen on a longer cadence (typically every 4-8 weeks depending on experience level) to provide you both adequate time to track progress between sessions. True growth doesn’t happen overnight. As opposed to the 1:1, I do recommend setting an agenda for these discussions and share it with each report ahead of time. The goal for each discussion should be to cover two high-level areas: how is this person currently doing and what should they start/stop/continue doing in the future.

How you approach these conversations is up to you and your report, but here are a few suggestions:

• Ask about their long-term professional goals (i.e. “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”)
• Ask how they’re feeling about their work in context of these goals
• Ask them to evaluate themselves based on expectations for their role
• Provide your perspective about their performance — both good and bad
• Ask how you might best be able to support their goals as their manager
• Consider what’s going on in the business and share any potential opportunities that may support these goals
• Reference the career pathway for this role, including responsibilities and level information
• Take notes in each session to track action items and progress over time
• Give yourselves enough time (at least 45 min) to go deep

After holding many of these career convos over the years, one important thing to note: expect these discussions to evolve. This is an important distinction from a typical 1:1, which is often limited to the topic of the day — the purpose of career convos is to make progress.

For example, if you and a report only recently started working together, you probably want your first career convo to be more of a kick-off to align on their goals and how they currently evaluate themselves. On the flip-side, as you and your report continue to hold career convos, the goals and areas of opportunity should (ideally) evolve over time as they improve and develop their capabilities.

360-degree feedback

Maintaining relationships with your reports’ collaborators can be valuable when providing day-to-day coaching, but they can also be a key resource in supporting professional growth. As a manager, your perspective will be limited to what you observe or what your report shares with you. If you rely on this alone, you may be leaving out many important perspectives about their true, holistic performance.

The best way to broaden your sources of feedback — ask for it! Tap into those relationships with those cross-functional collaborators and peers in product management, engineering, design, research, etc. and ask directly for feedback about your report. The default response for most folks will probably be something positive (i.e. “They’re doing great!”), so be prepared to dig further. Ask if they have suggestions for ways the report can improve. Inquire about potential opportunities or projects that they might take on.

Be sure to document this feedback so that you can pass these along to your report. However, be aware that some feedback can be sensitive in nature and may be best shared from the source directly — always ask for permission and anonymize the feedback whenever it makes sense.

Additional notes about supporting ongoing development

Feedback is only effective when it’s on time. If you’ve participated in a performance review cycle, this notion comes up quite a bit — no report should ever hear about something they’re doing wrong for the first time in their performance review. For critical feedback, you don’t need to wait until a career convo (or even a 1:1) to share it with a report. Their success, or the success of a project, may depend on it — and if you hold off, it could be too little, too late.

There will be many variables that can affect the time, energy, and resources you put into to supporting the professional growth of your reports, including: individual skill levels/personalities, overall team needs, company priorities, organizational maturity, and more. Because of this, there may be times when professional development may take a backseat to other priorities.

But this presents some long-term risks, including unhappy employees and risk of turnover. If you want your reports to be motivated and excited to continue working with you, supporting their professional development is a necessity.

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