URL: https://medium.com/shapingdesign/horrible-bosses-design-edition-5f59bf979be4
A thorough, helpful, and deep resource around leadership and negative design leader archetypes. The "how to address them" for each section are fantastic. Also, I really enjoy their way of mapping the skills and preferences around a sliding scale to make an octagonal "skill blob".
6 negative leader archetypes in design
Here are six negative design leader archetypes, along with suggestions on how to address them.
- Directive Disruptor
- Protective Parent
- Solo Solver
- Academic Purist
- Omnipresent Impressor
- Masked Manipulator
The skill blob uses the following ranges:
- Listening ↔ Speaking
- From front ↔ From back
- Hands-on ↔ Create space
- Emotional ↔ Rational
- Thinking ↔ Doing
- Stakeholders ↔ Your Team
- Stability ↔ Transformation
- Tasks ↔ Relationships
- People ↔ Products
Each of the skill blobs—or leadership dichotomies—map to specific leadership functions that could be useful in my own communication of skills as a leader:
- Advocacy: Promoting design team and offer to others
- Strategy: Creating clear vision and strategies for Team and/or Product
- External Community: Writing, speaking, attending events
- Team: Line management, culture, mentoring, coaching
- Quality: Strategic, craft and process quality
- Practice: Operations, processes, systems
- Collaboration: Working with peers, and stakeholders, outside of design
- Organization Capabilities: Training, mentoring to scale design thinking and practice beyond design team
I'm extracting each of the four summations of each archetype for easy reference (and for accessibility, as they're in the images but not written out):
- Directive Disruptor
- Fears: Irrelevance
- Manifests: Vision without listening
- Team Cost: Burnout, exodus, lack of psych safety
- Antidote: Facilitate, don't dictate
- Protective Parent
- Fears: Dis-connection
- Manifests: Over-nurtures, avoids tough decisions
- Team Cost: Role confusion, lack of focus, emotional fatigue, delayed growth
- Antidote: Build relationships outward, promote impact
- Solo Solver
- Fears: Rejection
- Manifests: Prioritizes self-image over team advocacy
- Team Cost: Team invisibility, low morale, missed recognition, trust erosion
- Antidote: Expand team platform, visibility
- Academic Purist
- Fears: Uncertainty
- Manifests: Rigidly applies theory without adapting context
- Team Cost: Frustrations, stuckness, resistance to change, strategic drift
- Antidote: Adapt to complexity, embrace experimentation
- Omnipresent Impressor
- Fears: Losing control
- Manifests: Micromanages, overextends
- Team Cost: Stress contagion, learned helplessness, decision bottlenecks
- Antidote: Delegate, empower, foster autonomy
- Masked Manipulator
- Fears: Irrelevance
- Manifests: Vision without listening
- Team Cost: Burnout, exodus, lack of psych safety
- Antidote: Facilitate, don't dictate
We are shaping culture, vision, and strategy. We must create the conditions for psychological safety, experimentation, learning, empowerment, and autonomy. Our biggest failure is not about making a bad decision; it is about building a team that does not trust us or fear us. A team that would think of us as a horrible boss. With Leadership comes power and responsibility. Power is never neutral, and we must use it with care.