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My Leadership Experience

This is the story how I realized the value of a strong manager. Your team’s well-being is utmost importance for a happy and productive work life.

The Beginning

2012, I was given an exciting opportunity to lead a design team at Gannett’s Design Center as a Digital Media Manager. I was considered 'young' to be placed in a management role, but I was fully committed to the challenge. During my time as a manager, I grew tremendously, continually adapting my leadership skills. I began to learn my passion was to lead a team to success, by fostering a creative culture and creating space for personal development.

I led a team of 12 to 20 employees, mostly designers along with training specialists and rich media support coordinators. Our team worked on designing and implementing 100-200 display and HTML5 advertisements daily for Gannett’s local markets and third-party clients.

Early on, I could sense that there was a problem with the work culture. There was a lack of passion for user experience with good design and little to no emphasis on personal growth. I worked hard to ignite this passion because passion often spreads by contagion.

My role was to manage day-to-day activities, but I made it a priority to provide the creative direction that was needed and focus on individual development.

The Start to Change

Designers would keep to themselves on the work floor, but expressed to me their desire to grow creatively. In meetings with the management team, I made sure to advocate for the designers’ concerns and propose ideas to help slowly but effectively shift toward a healthier culture. To start, we began to encourage open communication in the work room and do weekly group critiques.

Later, “Design Chats with Fancy Bird” was born. This was a monthly one-on-one review with each team member. I used the word “chat” and brought a fake “fancy” bird to make the review more relaxed and casual.

During the Design Chats, we talked about their design work, personal development or general feedback. I made sure to document what was said in order not to forget any discussions, and review them before the next meeting to keep important conversations going.

As the work culture continued to change, I introduced and coordinated more exercises and trainings. A few times each month, we would do fun group activities to improve design skills or promote team bonding. These ranged from pen tool exercises, discussing the latest design trends or building the tallest tower out of playing cards.

Creative Times

User experience became core to our design principles and more integrated in our process. We documented design alternatives to elements that could disrupt users and created standards and best practices to cater to target audiences. Showing visual examples and creating a wiki documentation site were two effective ways for the team to learn.

My favorite ritual was bringing the team together to talk about design trends and inspirations because of the great collaboration it encouraged. We always challenged the designs, asking what we liked or disliked about them and why. This helped the designers feel more connected to the design world and each other.

Designers loved redesigns – actual redesigns of requests from clients that could jeopardize the quality or success of their campaigns. The designers collaborated with me for design direction, and I communicated the issues and solutions to the client for an improved design.

Most of the time, clients were happy to hear their design is truly being cared for. When they are happy, this allows designers to exercise more creative freedom. We often received thank you emails from account executives saying how appreciative their clients were.

Challenges & Successes

The biggest challenge under the new culture was maintaining production rates and hitting deadlines, as we were still a business after all. The advertising industry never sleeps, and missing deadlines could be costly.

We implemented the idea of “working smart,” a method for designing efficiently and effectively in our industry. There were training sessions on technical fluency, quick design decision-making, and time management.

We had analytics to illustrate the success of our team:

Final Verdict

Overall the team collaborated more, designs improved and people were happier while hitting our production goals!

I learned managers are the key in creating a successful and positive work life. Managers must focus on the most important thing: their team. There are people in management positions that struggle or lack passion to lead a team and that ultimately hurts the business. I am so thankful I learned this at a young age. As I grow, I want to continue to better my leadership skills and continue to develop successful teams.