{"id":3055,"date":"2024-10-14T22:19:10","date_gmt":"2024-10-14T22:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=3055"},"modified":"2024-10-14T22:22:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T22:22:03","slug":"a-year-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/a-year-in\/","title":{"rendered":"A year in"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I joined <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tpximpact.com\/\">TPXimpact<\/a> a year ago this week which means I should probably look back and think about what I&#8217;ve learnt so far.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Working with a hybrid team slows everything down because it slows down how you build trust.<\/strong> I made sure to visit all our various offices at least every few months to try to compensate for working with a pretty big team (over 100) who prefer to work from home. It means that it takes a long time before people trust me with information, a conversation or a question. A designer asked me to coffee last week and we walked around the office to talk about a pretty average client situation. I was really happy to have graduated to being someone to have conversations with.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Never match other people&#8217;s vibe<\/strong>. I&#8217;m an escalation point most of the time which means people come to me as a kind of &#8216;supplier of last resort&#8217;. And at that stage, they&#8217;re usually pretty agitated. And it could be problems of any scale. I have to be the person who doesn&#8217;t <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aom.org\/doi\/10.5465\/amd.2016.0025.summary\">stress cry<\/a> back at them. I respect their anxiety deeply and don&#8217;t judge them, I just can&#8217;t ever get as emotional. I can&#8217;t afford to say &#8216;don&#8217;t be silly, that&#8217;s inconsequential&#8217; either just because of the conversation I just had with someone else an hour ago. I have to be the calmest person on the call and try to provide clarity as fast as I can. And sometimes it means working with HR or calling someone else. But I can&#8217;t meet them where they are exactly. I have to create some emotional distance so action is possible.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Be good at having the conversations noone wants to have. <\/strong>As designers, we like to please and seek to solve problems to please. This role has been a useful antidote to this as I get to give people constructive feedback or think about how to have difficult conversations all the time. This is also where I think that people can process what they hear from a North American accent in a slightly different way. I don&#8217;t sound like their mother, so it&#8217;s ok. I also try very much to be very precise but not unkind with any feedback. It&#8217;s hard enough hearing something difficult, might as well make it as clear as I can. Again, work in progress.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>None of this would be possible without working daily with my boss <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/beholliday\/\">Ben<\/a> and my colleagues <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/vicky-brown-a3a3098b\/\">Vicky<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/imehakpan\/\">Imeh<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/jaskiran-kang-50b59336\/\">Jas<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/charles-reynolds-talbot\/\">Charles<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/libertybelle\/\">Liberty<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/laurabillings\/\">Laura<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/tashwillcocks\/\">Tash<\/a>. I&#8217;m lucky to get to learn from them, every working day, from 10-6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I joined TPXimpact a year ago this week which means I should probably look back and think about what I&#8217;ve learnt so far. Working with a hybrid team slows everything down because it slows down how you build trust. I made sure to visit all our various offices at least every few months to try&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/a-year-in\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A year in<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-of-things","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Nh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3055"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3058,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055\/revisions\/3058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}