Fostering Healthy Design Teams
Being a strong manager is not only about the individual relationships you build with your reports. Another major aspect of leading others is fostering an environment that is psychologically safe and welcoming for the entire team.
Designers need healthy collaboration
As designers, our best work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. An iterative design process requires designers to be able to effectively share work and give/receive feedback. But when unhealthy team dynamics get in the way of this collaboration, people are unhappy and the work suffers.
Design critiques
The most obvious starting place for fostering a healthy team dynamic is a design critique meeting. While the specifics of a design critique will vary based on team size, maturity, etc., at its core, this is a meeting where members of the design team come together to share work-in-progress and gather constructive feedback. The end goal for anyone presenting in critique is to obtain input that helps make the product better.
Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, critiques can very easily go awry, leading to unhealthy team environments where designers no longer feel willing or comfortable sharing their work. There are lots of reasons behind this, but here are a few top bad habits to look out for:
👎 Design critique bad habits
- Directive (not suggestive) feedback: Opinionated feedback that mandates the presenter to explore alternative solution(s). Example: “You should design a version of this with cards instead of list items.”
- Irrelevant feedback:
- Personal feedback: Feedback that feels targeted toward the presenter, as opposed to their work. Example: “You didn’t do a good job with this flow’s entry point.”
- Superficial feedback: Surface-level comments that aren’t directly tied to the goals of the design (“I love this!”)