Weeknote 5: on singing behind the beat

I had two classic ‘behind the beat‘ moments this week. The first involved taking the reigns in relation to a runaway situation. The second involved seeing something happen and letting it happen (temporarily).

My two Deputy Directors were on leave at the same time for a few days so that temporarily exposed me and other Heads of to the complexities of their work and removed some of the direction we’d normally be given. This is not usually a problem but something escalated and we spent some time working through what we could do as a team. This doesn’t normally happen as we co-work with DDs in real time most days. It felt like we time traveled to pre-pandemic times where you had time between video calls and could reflect and regroup about something multiple times. We spent quite a few hours co-working and mulling over a leadership response. I’m happy with what we came up with as a group because we got to really work something out deeply. A rare treat. I feel like I know (and appreciate) Dan and James even more because of that time spent together, talking about hard things and finding a possible solution.

The second thing happened on Friday afternoon. Someone showed me something that I don’t think is of a particularly high quality but the repercussions of that piece of work on the user experience could make or break the upcoming test. My overactive saviour complex (every designer has one) went into an absolute frenzy and I cracked open Illustrator to try to fix the problem. It was 19:30 by the time I looked up, realised this was a pointless, closed the file, not saving any of what I’d just spent almost two hours doing. I’ll talk to someone about my thoughts tomorrow. I’m not paid to fix something directly anymore, I’m paid to shape the conditions so that someone else is able to take the time to fix it.

So it was a full on week, but it reminded me that design leadership is about being either on or slightly behind the beat. Not ahead of it.