Senior to Leader for organisations

Supporting designers as they move from practitioners into leaders

Making new leaders successful

In organisations, we want to develop and support our lead designers and new managers as they move from doing design into leading the practice.

These skills are very different to doing research, creating prototypes or supporting the product direction.

Designers need to learn how to thrive in the company, manage stakeholders, navigate politics and apply business value to every design decision.

This program focuses on building those skills.

Goals for the program

With each organisation, we sit down and understand the goals of the training. 

Common goals include:

  • A baseline of leadership skills - teaching the basics of people leadership, coaching and mentoring to new leaders

  • Retention of new leaders - ensuring that people are not just thrown into the role and helping them be successful

  • Shared experience for senior designers - bringing a cohort of designers together to give each other support after the course

Focus on design leadership

There are four aspects of design leadership:

  1. Practice contains Res and DesignOps, scoping and leading projects and design systems

  2. People splits into two interacting with people and managing people 

  3. Business talks about business value, financials, stakeholder management and speaking the language of your organisation

  4. Strategy covers product and service strategy, understanding digital strategy and design team strategy

Customised for each organisation

Over the past 2 years, with both the public Senior-to-Leader program and in-house programs, we have developed a menu of training that can be customised to the needs of each organisation.

For example, Consultancies ask for support in Client management and Balancing client and leadership work, while for Product Organisations Managing Up and Influencing skills are important.

Program overview

Each program combines training and peer-coaching over an 8-week period; remotely for teams across the world or in-person if based in Melbourne Australia.

To learn more about it, feel free to book 30 min with me.


What People Are Saying

 

“I need to thank Mags so much for supporting me through what felt like the toughest time in my career. The coaching group (S2L), the book (!) and guidance has had a huge impact on my confidence, capability and trajectory.”

— Julianne, Senior-to-Leader member

“Mags helped scope my first initial discovery project that led to a client setting a 3-month retainer to have me on hand for soliciting my input on many areas of their company/product. Mags filling in the gaps in my knowledge on how to consult as an individual helped me immensely!”

— Pam, Senior-to-Leader member