slides mx 2008 margaret stewart

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TheManageras TailorA User-Centered Guide toManaging Creative teams

Margaret Gould StewartUser Experience Manager, Google Inc

What makes a great manager?

Bring out best in teamsProduce great workAdmired and trusted

Always thought that treating people equally was key

I’ve learned it’s not that simple

Has to be balanced with a very individualized approach to management

Insert photos of great managers, leaders, quotes of what great managers do

I want to talk to you today about some things I’ve learned over the years about whatmakes a great manager. Not surprisingly, it turns out it’s not one thing, but manypossible things a leader can bring to a team to make them more effective, moreproductive, happier.

Throughout my career, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and livingthrough some interesting case studies of the challenges that go along with teammanagement and leadership.

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Margaret Gould Stewart - The Manager as Tailor - Adaptive Path’s Managing Experience - April 21, 2008

Consider the tailor…• Custom fits suit to needs

& specifications of client• Assumes one size doesn’t

fit all• Multiple fittings to get it

right• Works to accentuate your

best features• Works tirelessly to make

others look good

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It’s just a dress, right?

When I got married, I wanted to get something different. So I went thevintage route; a store in NYC that no longer exists called Opal White.They only sold vintage dresses in their original state. You had toenvision how these dresses could be cleaned and altered to be THEdress for you.They had an expert seamstress who would cut it up and remake it foryou, to your specifications and based on what she thought would workfor you, your body type, and your style.This REALLY stressed my mom out. She couldn’t believe I didn’t wantto just get something off the rack. It was SO much safer andpredictable.And I even didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like. There wasdefinitely a leap of faith involved.In the end, I had a dress that was dense with history through the otherunknown brides who wore it. Even better, it was made expressly for me;it fit me like a glove, and it is the only dress like it in the world. It can’teven be reproduced because of the vintage lace and silk.I think back to that seamstress, and how satisfying it must have beenfor her to concoct completely unique dresses for each and every clientout of these amazing materials for what will be for many the mostimportant day of your life. . What a cool job.Someday I’m going to get a custom made pair of cowboy boots.

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How does this transfer to a teamenvironment?

“I’m with you. I knowexactly how you’reworking.”

- Sam Mendes

I find this really inspiring.How is he able to do this?How well must he know each actor in order to do this? How well mustthe actors know themselves?How can we aspire to this level of custom tailored management andcoaching?

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What we’ll discuss today

• What’s universal, what’s unique to specificpeople/teams/companies?

• How to take a custom approach to management• Tools for gaining self-awareness for yourself and

your team• Tools for assessing needs of your team• How to distribute leadership across the team

How many of you currently or have previously had people reporting toyou?

Why talk about management theory at MX?Creative people can be a challengeMutli-disciplinary teamsUX often not well understood by organizations

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Most people want….

• To be recognized• To get feedback regularly• To get coaching• To feel ownership over their work• To feel their manager is available to them• To feel their manager is advocating for them

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It’s a new cocktail every time…

+ +

+

You plus the people you work with and for, plus the unique culture andexpectations and needs of the company you are a part of, at a specifictime in that company’s evolution

You can’t just come in and impose a model of management withoutserious consideration of needs; what worked like gangbusters someplace else may very well bomb in your new role

And you can’t impose you and your communication and workstylepreferences on others

What people needWhat people wantHow they work and communicate bestWhat skills and strengths you bring as their managerThe specific environment/company you are in, at this time inthat company’s evolution

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Tripod: Peer to Manager

• Employee # 12• Rose in the ranks to manage former peers• No management experience or training• Grew team from 1 to 95• Team very young and

inexperienced• Very early days of the

internet; no best practicesto emulate

Team very young and inexperiencedVery early in days of internet; no best practices to emulate

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Wachovia: Hired Gun

• Hired from the outside to run Usability Group• UX not the core business; evangelism was key• Conservative, traditional management style• 100,000 employees• 7 team members; experienced and used to

having a manager• Needed to scale UX practice to

increasingly critical onlinechannel

Needed to scale UX practice to increasingly critical online channelEvangelism a big part of the role

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Google: It’s about the data, stupid

• Engineering-driven, crazy-smart colleagues• Highly decentralized• Healthy skepticism for managers AND for “Design”• Huge teams• Data driven• Bottom up vs

On Day 1, I had 27 people reporting to me in three offices; no oneblinked an eyeCame after a period of enormous growth in UXHire a bunch of new managers from the outsideI came from the outside, tooLots of uncertainty Lots of young people: their first job, firstmanager; they didn’t know what to expect, what was fair to expect, whatthey needed, and how to ask for what they needed

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Where it really began…

You can’t grow up as the youngest of nine kids and NOT end up withfairly effective negotiation and interpersonal skillsLook how worried I amMaybe I was empathizing with my big sister Susan, who is so visiblymiserable about having to be included in this with glasses AND braces

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A custom, tailored approach

• What are your strengths?• What does your team really need, as

individuals and as a whole?• What do you wish you could provide to your

team?• What are your greatest challenges?• What unique challenges face your

organization here and now?

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A User’s Guide to Tailoring

self-awareness needs analysis leadership plan

shared vocabulary

open communication

You plus the people you work with and for, plus the unique culture andexpectations and needs of the company you are a part of, at a specifictime in that company’s evolution

You can’t just come in and impose a model of management withoutserious consideration of needs; what worked like gangbusters someplace else may very well bomb in your new role

And you can’t impose you and your communication and workstylepreferences on others

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Building self-awareness

• For yourself as a manager/leader• For the individuals on your team• For your team as a whole• A real benefit to doing it together• Strengths Finder• Also: Workplace Big Five, Myers-Briggs


Greatest gift you can give yourself and those you work withUnderstanding what your strengths are and a vocabulary to talk aboutconflict

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How we used the data

• Voluntarily put data in spreadsheet• Also plotted results across whole team• People paired up based on difference or

similarity for mentoring, cross-training• Some developing “User’s Guide to Me”


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Individuals shared their findings


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MargaretIzabel

DeniseDavid

Jorge

Jed Lisa

Kei

Lin

Lars

Ching-HuaSasha

Lucas

Susan

Seonghee

Damian

Arnold

Mapping our strengths


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“User’s Guide to Me”


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Understanding needs of the individual

• Gathered insights through these various workexperiences and assessments

• Articulated some of the top needed and wantedcharacteristics of managers

• Not exhaustive; meant as a dialogue tool


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Tools: The Cards


You can assess if you are doing the things that matter most to eachmember of your team

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Tools: The Cards

• Which three are your strengths?• Which three do you think your team most

wants/needs from you?• Which three do you wish people would use to

describe you?• Which are trouble areas for you?• Which three do you want from your

manager?• Any traits you’d add to the pack?


Are there any that you said your team need from you that you think aretrouble areas for yourself? Remember these, and I’ll come back to it injust a few minutes

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Tools: The Checklist


You can assess if you are doing the things that matter most to eachmember of your team

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Infinite customization?

YIKES!


You need to offer different things to each member of your team, basedon their unique needsPlus be a different person to each primary stakeholder, and even toyour own bossYou can’t be all things to all people, and even worse, you can’t alwaysprovide everyone’s top needs

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You can’t meet everyone’s needs…


It doesn’t always go well. Even after 15 years, I muck it up on a fairlyregular basis.

These was a usability engineer that I once managed not so long ago;he was really bright but very quiet. I guess you could say he wasintroverted. Now, one of the things I try to do regularly for my team is toprovide them with recognition and rewards when they’ve done a greatjob on something. This usability engineer has just completed a reallytough study, slogged through data with impressive speed, and cameout with some really impressive and high impact findings that theproject team heard and responded to. Awesome. So I thought, I’ll dosomething special for him. At the next staff meeting, I decided that Iwould acknowledge his great work by calling him up in front of theteam, which was nearly 80 people, and providing him with thanks and alittle gift certificate. I mean, heck, that’s what I’d want MY boss to do forme. I love public praise. Everyone does, right? So I did. He didn’t looksuper excited, but I thought, well, he’s shy, but deep inside, I know heappreciates that I am giving him the recognition he wants.

Later in the day, he pulled me aside, and he thanked me foracknowledging him. He said, ‘I know you meant well, and I do like beingrecognized. But when you called me up in front of that crowd, I thought Iwas going to throw up. I mean I literally though I was going to bephysically ill. Please don’t even do that again to me.”

Awesome. Just the affect I was after. Great managers make their bestand brightest nauseous. They make them hurl in public forums. Iwonder what I should do the next time he astounds me. Tar andfeathering?

As you can imagine, even telling you this story makes me a littlequeasy. There’s this thing called intent v impact. My intent was all good.My impact, not so much. I can’t say I’ve never stepped in it with anintroverted team member since then, but I have to say, this experiencemade a BIG impression on me. I am now careful to ask how peopleliked to be recognized/rewarded, and if they don’t like public accolades,I send them emails, or even write handwritten thank you notes. It has tobe customized to who they are to send the message: “I know you; Icare about how you want to work; I’m adjusting my behavior to yourneeds.”

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You can’t meet everyone’s needs…


There are some silver linings in this story, though. First of all, he toldme about the impact that I had on him. I am SO grateful to him for that.While I felt, and still feel awful about what happened, it was anincredible learning experience for him. I thanked him at the time, and tryto do so any time someone gives me feedback like this. It takes a lot ofguts to tell you boss that he or she is not doing something the way theyshould. And as the boss, it’s hard not to get defensive. I’d like to thinkthat he came to be about it because I had consistently sent thefollowing messages:

•I’m not good at everything; no one is•I want to understand what works best for you and then wheneverpossible I want to do those things•I want to hear from you when things work and when they don’t

Something I’ve been dealing with more recently at Google has to dowith what what the Strength Finder assessment calls my “Positivity”.

<insert descritption>

Now, I’ve always been a fairly peppy person. My dad kept all of myreport cards from when I was a kid, and almost without exception, theyall say something like this:

“Margaret is a very happy, sunny child. She’s friendly to everyone andsensitive to others’ feelings. However, she tends to talk a little too muchin class.”

Well, at Google, as I’ve said, it’s tough to be a designer. Remember wetalked about how the context of where you are working impacts yourmanagement style? One of the things I’ve found has become morepronounced is this positivity. Everything is awesome, my team is great,the work is great, etc. In reflecting on why this is, I’ve concluded thatsince they receive a lot of criticism and push back from the variousstakeholders in our world, I just want to be supportive. I don’t want toadd to the pile of “This is what you’re doing wrong.”

I was meeting with one of my team members, going through theworksheet I showed you earlier about traits of managers and whichones were most important to him and how I could be more helpful tohim. When we got to the part about “Positive” He said, “Margaret, Ireally appreciate all the support and encouragement. But the 24/7cheerleading thing, well, it can be a bit much sometimes.” In hindsight,this makes a lot of sense. Great people want to always improve theirwork, and the talented team that works for me at Google is noexception. I needed to understand that it’s OK to be positive, but theyalso REALLY wanted constructive feedback. And sometimes, he justwanted me to admit when things didn’t have a silver lining. In turn, I wasable to talk to him about my

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The “Super Friends” model of leadership


We’re all good at different things, and no one of us is good ateverythingWe try to rely on each other to help in areas where we aren’t as strongI brought Bob in to a discussion with Bill about how much codingdesigners should have to doI brought Walter into a meeting where we were discussing variousapproaches to prioritizationWhat you “lack” can be found in other people - on your team or yourpeers - leadership opportunities that add value to the team; filling aneed you can’tWhen you admit you can’t do it all, you allow others to as wellA huge sense of relief to people to stop the charade that they are goodat everythingDoesn’t mean you don’t have to work to address areas fordevelopment, especially if they are critical to the jobIf you need to find out the truth, you’re gonna go to Wonder woman, notAqua man, am I right?

I once had a women take a leadership role on my team. She’s was sotalented, but she had a hard time dealing with confrontation. It causedchallenges in building her credibility with stakeholders she deals withand her ability to advocate for the team. Sometimes, you need to getscrappy to get things done. We talked about different ways in which shemight be able to build up this ability, which did not come naturally toher. After going through a strength assessment exercise, we had thewords to talk about this. She had all these amazing strengths. She wasable to listen and absorb and process vast amounts of information andsynthesize them in ways that made sense. She excelled at leadingcollaborative efforts within the team. But she wasn’t strong in“Authoritative”. And she wasn’t likely to miraculously develop it, either.

At one point, a new designer joined out team. This guy was just astalented, but in different ways. He had the ability to speak truth topower. He wasn’t intimidated by powerful people. And something reallygreat happened. These two found that they worked REALLY welltogether. They could use the words from the Strength Assessment totalk about it explicitly, without judgement. You’re good at this, I’m goodat this. Both these things are critical for success. Let’s work together,regularly. It was a HUGE relief to the first designer that he couldeffectively play bad cop when needed. And she continued to build hercredibility through her analysis skills. As their manager, I didn’t careWHO got scrappy, but just that we ended up where we needed to be.And I felt MUCH better knowing that she wasn’t being asked to play arole she felt ill-suited to. A really good outcome due to self awareness,shared vocabulary, and open communication.

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Why doesn’t everyone do it?

• It’s hard work; easier to take a one size fits allapproach

• Teams often lack shared vocabulary to talk aboutthese things

• It’s time consuming to know people well enoughto do this well

• Takes continual focus not to project your ownneeds and ways of working on other people

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Benefits of tailoring

• Doesn’t just tolerate difference; explicitlyvalues it

• Allows individuals to express their uniqueneeds/wants from their manager

• Allows everyone to be transparent about theirstrengths and things they can’t easily provide

• Draws on strengths of whole team, not justmanager

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Resources and tools…

• Self awareness tools:– Strengthsfinder– Big Five Workplace– Myers Briggs

• Needs analysis tools for managers/leaders:– The cards– The worksheet

We had a professional facilitator come and help the team work throughindividual and team analysis, but the book also provides really goodideas and specific guides for managing people with the various strengthareas

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Thank you!

Margaret Gould [email protected]

slides mx 2008 margaret stewart

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