It’s a rare opportunity to join a team as a junior and, with the support and encouragement of managers and mentors, eventually grow into a team lead yourself. Knowing what I know now, there are a few aspects of each position that I’m all the more appreciative of.
As a junior designer, I was there to learn. I had the freedom to ask questions and get a better understanding of how it all worked – beyond the actual designing. I’m grateful to the other designers who humoured me in that regard. I appreciate the freedom I had to play. The relatively unglamorous nature of the work created opportunities for experimentation – meaning people were much more willing to try things out. There was a set of brand guidelines (mostly limited to color, typography, and logo placement) but it left us designers a lot of room to push the visuals.
A lot of time was spent updating sell-sheets, product stamps, things that only a handful of people would see. I still understood the value of the work (after all, someone needs to make all the collateral that accompanies the product). As I got better at it, I ended up having more time to explore more creatively (something I think benefited me greatly down the road).
During my mid-level roles, the focus was on production and getting things done without the need for constant oversight. The big “front-facing” projects were still with the senior designer, but I was able to focus on a lot of back-end designs (you know, the designs that support the other designs). About a year or so after I joined, COVID hit. Thankfully the marketing team was already set up for remote work so that transition was much smoother for me than most. I still needed to go into the office to do product photos but the lack of people on site gave me an opportunity to start experimenting with photography. The way I saw it, if the workflow wasn’t affected, I could play around with new techniques, styles, and ideas, without the interruption of the classic “hallway requests” that happen all too frequently.
As the team grew and shifted, so did the opportunities to work on more complex projects. One of the first “big-for-me-at-the-time” projects I got to work on was the initial assets for the Hand Safety Program. It involved equal amounts of liberty and constraint (as well as a lesson in dealing with constantly changing scope and information). It was one of the first projects that really brought me up to speed with InDesign - a powerhouse of a tool. Up until then, most of the product sheets had been handled in Illustrator (that was what the other designers there had been using). These mid-level positions gave me plenty of opportunities to dive deeper into tools.
Moving into a senior-level position set my priorities towards handling the more “creative” front-facing materials. At this point I had a lot of creative freedom (something which could be attributed to a healthy mix of circumstance and trust). One of the big ones at the time was looking at refreshing the brand guidelines in conjunction with the new website. It was a fantastic time – getting to pitch a lot of the stuff I had been messing around with in the years prior – tidying up our colours, typography, developing new photo standards, and introducing icon and illustration guidelines. This work compounded into redesigning our catalogs, trade show booth, sample boxes – a whole myriad of things.
When I became a team lead, my role shifted more towards planning and enabling others to succeed. To be honest, I had a rough start – I had been so immersed in the inner workings and processes it was not hard to “just fix things”. This usually played out when giving feedback. I would explain what and how it needed to be fixed instead of giving the designer an opportunity to come up with a solution. Arguably, this bad habit was done in the name of “keeping production moving forward” but looking back there were definitely more opportunities to allow them to develop their own solutions. Rather than offering advice on “how to fix it”, I needed to adjust my approach to feedback – doing my best to get to the “what wasn’t working” and most importantly “why”.
Another new thing I needed to figure out was the new dynamic with the other designers. After all, only weeks prior I was in the same boat, rowing alongside. All of a sudden, suggestions became directives. I had to think about the way I phrased things because my words now carried more weight. Of course, it wasn’t an immediate shift, but I started to notice a trend early on that I had lost my ability to just bounce ideas around and essentially, play. I’ll note that the transition can feel incredibly isolating at times. Thankfully, I wasn’t without support.
I'm grateful to my manager for their guidance, a more experienced coworker who had previously held the position for their support, and the other designers for their patience as I adjusted to managing the team. Not everything was trial by fire, but taking leadership classes, reading books on how to lead people only gets you so far.
To anyone looking at making the leap from designer to management, you should know that some of the things that worked really well for you up until this point are likely going to be the things that hold you back as a leader.
Jumping in to “save the day” and trying to have an answer or solution for everything often just limits your team’s growth in ways that you won’t notice until the consequences demand attention. Your goal and focus should be enabling them to do what your job was – and please, understand, they won't necessarily work as quickly as you could, or arrive at the same solutions you would. That's part of their learning. They’ll need room and opportunities to grow and figure things out on their own. Offer guidance where you can and take responsibility for the team’s output – have those hard conversations (and do your best to come from an angle of support).
If you’re a habitual people pleaser like me, this will be difficult (and frankly something I still need to be on the lookout for – but better to be aware of your flaws and account for them than pretend they don’t exist). If you notice that everyone is coming to you for questions and decisions can’t be made without you, you’re the bottleneck. I’m not saying don’t be helpful. Pay attention to what happens while you’re away (best to just communicate with your team beforehand so they know what needs to wait vs what can move forward).
For all the learning curves I experienced, I don’t regret making the switch. I discovered that one of my favourite aspects of the position was the opportunity to coach and support my team’s development. Our one-on-one feedback sessions were always something I looked forward to. Seeing them grow through their own hard work was incredibly rewarding – independently tackling large, complex projects and navigating all the twists and turns. All I could do was try and do my best to give them the support and opportunities to make it happen.
On the off-chance any of them ever read this, I hope they know how much I appreciated the show-and-tells we had each week during our design meetings (and I hope that’s something they bring into their other teams)
If you’ve made it this far, you have my thanks. Hopefully the above meandering offers some insight into the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I’ll leave you with this; there isn’t one way to go about things and every situation is going to be a little different. Take what works for you and leave everything else behind.
Stay curious.