Dear Dave,
Early in my career, I strove to be bullish. I thought that leadership meant defending your view rigorously. I ran user tests until my designs seemed unimpeachable. (You’re welcome, usertestingdotcom.)
This was a good instinct: developing strong opinions builds your perspective. But coming to crit equipped with an uninterrupted soliloquy on Why I’m Right is not a great way to elicit honest feedback from your peers.
Later, as a people manager, I strove for bullish clarity. I thought that leadership looked like sharing crystal-clear context with your team with impeccable timing.
Again, this was a good instinct, but it often meant my team found out the latest news after everyone else, while I was busy perfecting the wording of my version of events. Even UXers hate polish sometimes.
In both cases, I heard the tech-industry chorus sing one of its favourite songs: “Celebrate your failures! Share them with the class!” But I wanted to project the image that I had everything figured out. Isn’t that what we all want?
Of course, we all get things wrong, and we all often don’t know what we’re doing. That’s the very premise of this newsletter: all the times where you turn to your work bestie for just this.
But how often do we actually fail? Perhaps controversially, I’d say that, in small ways, often, but in big meaningful ways, not often — a few times that will make for great stories, and you won’t necessarily know it while it’s happening.
So sharing your failures may lead to not much sharing at all, and messaging around failure can fall flat or feel unrelatable (the age-old question: what constitutes a failure, versus a whoopsie?).
Instead, these days, I share my process of figuring things out, and the misses along the way.
Amid Constant Change™️, teams crave transparency. As leaders, there’s a balance to be struck between pixel-perfect messaging and distracting daily updates speculating on the possible movement of priorities.
We can’t always share everything. But we can share what we’re learning and how we’re figuring things out as we go.
For example, our design leadership group, like everyone, is grappling with what AI means for our team. We’re developing a perspective together iteratively and sharing it in bits (starting with Matt!), knowing full well that it will change, while giving the team a lens into where our heads are at today.
Figuring things out sounds like, “Here’s what I’m thinking now, but that will change.” A recent piece of feedback I was proud to receive from a peer was, “I love how you don’t rush to answers.” What this teaches my team over time, I hope, is to both nurture a strong perspective while being unashamed to get it wrong a few times and change it along the way — a great way to cultivate future gardeners, by the way!
There’s another tech chorus hymn: “strong opinions, loosely held.” It’s a phrase often strongly stated, loosely abided by. So I’ll add one more piece to it: “strong opinions, loosely held, openly revised.” When your strong opinion changes — and I hope it does often — share that: your view is stronger for it.
From being wrong about some things, right about others,
Danielle
Thanks for sharing this, Danielle. Your point about "not rushing to answers" deeply resonates with me. In my first few years as a people manager, I saw timely responses as a strength, but I realize now it also set the wrong expectations about what leaders should provide and inadvertently encouraged my designers to prioritize speed over thoughtfulness in their own work. That experience taught me that "leading by example" matters most during vulnerable and difficult moments.