Senior to Leader for Individuals

Support for designers as they move from practitioners to leaders

A program designed to make new leaders successful. Continuous learning and coaching for mid-career design professionals ready (or looking forward) to move into a leadership role.

Leading and managing a design team requires very different skills from conducting research, creating prototypes or supporting the product direction - being a designer/practitioner. 

Moving from design to leading the practice requires new skills, new thinking and a new focus. 

Designers need to learn how to thrive in an organisation, manage stakeholders, navigate politics and apply business value to every design decision. That’s how you become a great design leader.

This program - Senior to Leader -  focuses on building these skills.

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.

— UX Design Manager, Senior to Leader participant

Goals for the program

For each designer, we sit down and work out the goals of the training but some common goals include:

Building a baseline of leadership skills - teaching the basics of people leadership, coaching and mentoring to new and emerging leaders

Retention of new leaders - ensuring that designers 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 during and after the program

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!”

Senior to Leader member

Focus on design leadership

 

To ensure design leadership that is successful and sustainable, Senior to Leader contains four crucial aspects:

  1. PRACTICE - containing Res and DesignOps, scoping and leading projects and design systems

  2. PEOPLE - split into two distinct areas - interacting with people and managing people

  3. BUSINESS - let’s talk about business value, financials, stakeholder management and speaking the language of your organisation

  4. STRATEGY - covering off product and service strategy, understanding digital strategy and design team strategy

Customised for each emerging leader

This program gets personal…

Over the last 2 years, running both public and in-house Senior to Leader programs, we have developed a menu of training, easily customised to the needs of each emerging leader. 

Work in a consultancy? Senior to Leader can provide support in Client Management and Balancing Client and Leadership work. 

Leading a team in a product organisation? Managing Up and Influencing Skills are of more importance. 

Two women talking
 

Program overview

The Senior to Leader program combines training and peer coaching. Every quarter we focus on a different leadership topic. It is offered remotely to practitioners and teams around the world.

Got questions? Want to learn more? Feel free to book 30 min with Mags.

Coaching

Once a month, I run group coaching where the members of the community can discuss a challenge they are having in their workplace. Together we will provide support and guidance to help solve the problems.

Also included are 2 x30 min coaching sessions per month with Mags.

Learning

Twice a month there is an online tutorial

Each quarter we focus on a different topic, a combination of lecture and workshop. Previous topics include Influencing in your organisation and Design Strategy.

Community

The community of practitioners support each other in their development. A closed Slack group is used for the group to communicate and support each other.

Who is Senior to Leader for?

 

Designers who answer YES to any (or all) of these questions:

  • Are you a UX professional with 5-10 years of industry experience?

  • Do you need more support and skills to grow your practice? 

  • Are you not sure in which direction your career should go?

  • Are you a designer or researcher and want to become a more complete UX professional?

  • Are you not sure if you should follow a specialist principal route or become a people manager?

Fortunately, the Senior to Leader program has been specifically created to help mid-career UX professionals, designers and researchers to answer all of these questions (and many more).

So, instead of attending one UX conference per year and trying to soak up as much information as possible, Senior to Leader provides continuous opportunities to develop, practice and hone your skills. 

Combined with one-to-one coaching every month, the Senior to Leader is a perfect solution for designers to grow their practice and career.

Led by Mags Hanley, a highly experienced UX Manager, Coach and Mentor, the focus of this hands-on, customisable program is to grow and support UX practitioners as they move on from mid-weight generalists to positions where they lead projects and teams. 

Got questions? Want to learn more? Feel free to book 30 min with Mags.