https://www.designbetter.co/conversations/bill-burnett
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As the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford, and author of the bestseller Designing Your Life*, Bill Burnett has a lot of experience helping students become leaders and take charge of their careers. We chat about leadership, bringing people into the design process, and more.*
Eli Woolery: Hi Bill, and welcome to Conversations on DesignBetter.Co! Today, I wanted to start with emerging leadership in design students and how we foster that. You and I taught Implementation in Stanford’s undergraduate design program for a number of years. We have students that come out of that program, and end up at startups or bigger companies. It feels like some of the time you can identify natural leaders amongst a group of students, but I’m also curious about how we foster leadership in the students that may want that type of role eventually but are currently stymied from doing so in some way.
Bill Burnett: I think it’s an important topic, because if you want people to go out and be change agents in their company culture, if you want them to introduce design thinking as the innovation method, and that’s not the way the company works. They’re essentially gonna have to lead those changes or certainly lead design teams to be the process leaders so that they get good outcomes.
Bill Burnett in his office at Stanford’s d.school building
We approach this differently for the graduate students and the undergrads. Let me talk about the graduate students first. The graduates are coming in with at least a year or two or sometimes three years or more professional work experience. So, they’ve already been on teams most of them. In our interviews, we’re looking for people who’ve been on teams, taken a leadership role, either a project management role or program management role, or just the design lead on a project. So, we look for that experience. In the interview process, we make them tell us stories about how did they do that, and that give you a good sense of what their leadership style might be.
Then we run them through a class. In fact, they’re all taking a class right now with David Kelly and a couple of senior designers from IDEO on leading design teams. Yeah, some people have natural sort of leadership style. They tend to be the person who integrates the opinion on the team. They tend to be the person who likes to go to the whiteboard and make sure that the meetings have some structure, and that the project is moving along. But you can teach a lot of the leadership skills that you need to be an effective design leader.
In the High Resolution podcast, Bobby Ghoshal and Jared Erondu discuss the two paths of design leaders with Kate Aronowitz of Wealthfront. View the full episode on Youtube.
Kate Aronowitz from Wealthfront talks the two paths for design leadership in this interview from the Design Leadership Handbook. Read more about Managing a Design Team.
In the Design Leadership Class that David’s teaching this quarter, they’ll run through a series of simulations where they’re put on a team and told “You’re the leader. You’re the follower. You’re the project manager.” And then experience what it’s like to be in each of those three roles, and then have a lot of sort of 360-feedback on how did they do as a project manager, were they organized, how’d they do as a leader, which is different than the manager. Did you set a clear vision, did you motivate people, do they understand where you’re going? And then they all get a chance to play a team member just to see how they responded to the different leadership and management styles.
We’ll run those simulations and then they’ll take on a project where they’re coaching a design team in leadership, and I think by the end of the quarter they’re much more comfortable getting up in front of a group talking about what the objectives or project or a program are, and providing the kind of basic structure so that programs from projects can be done successfully.
Google has what they call a People Ops Team, and they’ve studied what makes effective projects. There are some projects that do really, really well. They meet their schedules, they exceed their deliverables, they’re on time, on budget, better than we expected, and other projects that kinda fail, that don’t actually get anything done. Being Google, they like data and so they were sure it had something to do with IQ, or where you went to school, or how many projects you’ve been on, and on and on and on. They’ve actually published their data. None of those things correlated to project success.
The two top things were: 1. That team knew each other well socially, and that made them high performance, and 2. They had clear objectives from the start, and management didn’t change the objectives.
Let’s take the 1st thing as an example. I know that you have a young son, and you know that I have an aging mom, and you know about my kids’ little league tournament, and I know about your wife’s new business baking cakes. When people knew about each other’s lives socially outside of Google, they tended to have each other’s back, and they tended to work better as a team and so there’s less friction. And there was more open communication. The number one thing, and we’ll talk about it when we talk about our undergrads, is people don’t know how to communicate. So, they don’t know how to resolve problems when they come up or disagreements or misunderstandings.