That’s it. That’s the takeaway I’ve been trying to distill from my trip to Chicago last week. I was there for a Q4 onsite, working with and meeting new teammates from an additional product zone I’m now leading design for at Sprout Social.
As I’ve been onboarding into the team, it’s been tempting to apply all the same meetings and processes that are currently working well for design on my other product zone. At the same time, I’ve been reluctant to make any changes as that might imply I thought things were wrong or needed fixing. Instead, I had mostly been listening for the last month, feeling a little stuck.
Being there was a breakthrough. Jessie Bohannon and I facilitated a UX empathy activity together, I got to introduce a new group to the Spaghetti Marshmallow Challenge, and getting to know all the amazing engineers in the zone was a blast.
In the middle of the onsite week, my wife texted an article she found insightful titled, Why We Need To Shift From Righting To Guiding by Dr. Renee Lertzman. While the target audience of that short Substack read is changemakers in the environmental sustainability space, I highly recommend it as the lesson within is universally applicable.
What is righting? As Dr. Lertzman explains it:
This is when we focus on telling people, earnestly, what the problems are, and why it’s the “right” thing to do to change. It is also called the “righting reflex” … This well-intended yet often ineffective tendency only brings up resistance, as a natural response to being “told.”
As people leaders, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of righting instead of truly listening to and guiding positive change within our organizations. While I was in Chicago, I learned that Caitlin Grogan, the group product manager for our UI Foundations zone at Sprout Social was speaking at a Figma/AWS Meetup, which I quickly RSVPd for. I wasn’t expecting a reinforcement of the guiding vs. righting approach, but that was exactly what I walked away with from that event.
In her lightning talk, Caitlin explained how actively listening to the needs of our design system users—specifically engineering leaders and product managers—helped create unexpected efficiencies in growing and maturing our Seeds design system. While design systems teams at many organizations struggle with adoption and governance, Caitlin shared how the partnership and proactive conversations about systems at Sprout have led to cross-department shoutouts, component contributions, and enhancements from several product zones.
As I press forward in finding my rhythm and process for leading design within my new zone, I have a week’s worth of in-person observations, insights, and conversations to help me guide, instead of blindly righting, my way forward.