Design Digest: Creative Leader, Productivity and Headset of Truth

The work of the creative leader

At some point, the best employees become managers. There are several reasons for this: loss of interest, the need to transfer experience or dissatisfaction with current management. The work of the head is different from the work of the employee, so the latter-day managers make typical mistakes. The author of the book " The Taming of Tigers " writes how to avoid them

The main mistake of the new managers is to do the work for the subordinates, instead of managing them. This does not allow employees to take the initiative in solving new problems, without which growth is impossible. Of course, a manager has more professional skills, so he can cope better with work - this is good in the short term, but if you look long, this strategy is wrong. If people do not grow up solving complex problems, the work ceases to inspire them, they lose motivation and think about finding a new job.

But, even if you don’t do the work for your employees, problems may arise in the team. This happens if you just give tasks, without explaining why they need to be done.
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Here is what the author writes:

“If employees repeatedly achieve the set results, but they do not have professional growth, then you teach them how to work, but don’t say why this or that technique is effective. Sooner or later, people get bored and they leave. ”

The way out of this situation is the following: a balance of restrictions and freedoms. To observe this balance can be formed the principles of work and giving the team complete freedom within these principles.

Henry Todd offers four questions that help shape his principles:

• What behavior of employees do you welcome, regardless of its consequences?
• How should employees behave while working on a project?
• How do you prioritize?
• How do you distinguish good work from bad?

Some creative people believe that they need complete freedom and any restrictions negatively affect the result, but without restrictions it is impossible to focus their skills in one direction and create something worthwhile.

You are not your idea

A frequent problem of many discussions is the struggle of the ego and authorities, and not the reasoned advocacy of ideas. Everything comes from a company culture. If people care about the common good, it is important for them to choose the best idea. If people only care about themselves, they need to defend theirs.

To avoid the latter, I try to adhere to the following rule.

Even being self-righteous, I admit that the idea of ​​a colleague is correct and I try to find a confirmation of this. Because the best way to confirm your idea is to try to find a rebuttal to her.

Headset of truth

The book “ Now you see it, ” tells about an interesting experiment, the purpose of which was to find out how fonts affect the perception of information.

The reader was asked to read two texts: about the probability of an asteroid colliding with the Earth and the safety of the modern world. Then the reader was asked to agree or disagree with the truth of the statements and indicate the level of confidence. By the result, it was possible to determine how many readers are optimists and how many are pessimists.

But it was a trick. In fact, it was not the text or reader type that was tested, but the effect of fonts on the perception of information.

The participants in the experiment read an excerpt from one of six headsets: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, and Trebuchet. Not surprisingly, the text written by Comic Sans was the least trusted by people. What about the most trusted headset? Yes, there is one. The result of the experiment showed that it is Baskerville.

After reading this essay, I remembered how the quality of the layout of the article changes the perception of information. It turned out that this is not a professional designer defect, but a feature of each person that can be used for different purposes.

Time or result

We are often advised to evaluate work by results - it’s not important what time a person comes to the office, the main thing is what he does. A sound idea, but the author of the book "The Taming of Tigers" looked at this question differently. Instead of evaluating employee productivity by results, Henry Todd recommends measuring it over time.

Initially, this thought seemed controversial to me (after all, the main thing is the result!), But a little later I realized that it corresponds to my productivity system, which looks like this:

1. Select 2 key tasks per day and 1-3 minor
2. For each task, determine the required number of 25-minute sprints. Usually 4-6 sprints for the main task, 2-3 for the secondary
3. During the sprint: the phone is removed, notifications are disabled

I lead tasks in google keep. It looks like this:

• Presentation to an exhibition (6)
• Post for Telegram channel (3)
• Read the book on freight (2)
• ...

As you can see, in this method there is nothing about the result. You only need to devote a certain amount of time to the tasks. And that's why it works.

When you just set a task, you may have two desires: postpone it later or deal with it as soon as possible. None of this leads to a quality job. And when the goal is to devote 25 minutes to the task, you can relax, knowing that with what speed you would not work, the length of your working day will not change. In other words, you give the brain the opportunity to focus on quality.

How would it work if it were easy?

I regularly ask myself this question. He helps me to distract from the existing templates and come up with a solution corresponding to the current task.

At the start of my career, I, like many, first of all ran to design resources in search of “inspiration” and tried to find a solution that can be applied to my task. Although in reality, I was not looking for inspiration, but only trying to strain my brain less.

Copying someone else's solution is tempting, but one should not forget that any pattern can work well in one case and absolutely not work in another. And who will you become only imitating someone else's work? After all, a good designer is always distinguished by the ability to think.

It is useful to learn from the experience of others, looking at concepts and working services, but when confronted with a new task, you should not forget to include your head, asking yourself the question:

How would it work if it were easy?

Even a good idea is easy to kill.

I remember how, at the beginning of my career, when presenting a design solution, I was easily embarrassed by asking a simple question, for example, why some element was exactly like that. Then I tried to reasonably answer the question because of what arose a meaningless dialogue that influenced the perception of all the work.

Only with experience, I realized that questions not related to the main topic should be ignored. For example, saying: "These are only details, so let's discuss the main things that affect the business, and in the end we will return to your question."

Oddly enough, this answer saves you from useless conversation and presents you as a professional who cares about the client’s business, not his ego.