Tips for growing and improving as a design team

Photo by Redd F on Unsplash

Whoever is a design team manager, should always ask their team this question.

“How can the company help you reach your career goal and enhance your learning curve?”

Why should we ask this?

Because the employees should not think that their work is only meant for deliverables. It is toxic for the company and your team. Instead, your approach must be different.

Give space to your team to make mistakes. Let them make mistakes and learn from them. To pace the progress, you can guide them to overcome obstacles. Allow your team members to take ownership and make some crucial decisions. Those decisions will make them feel responsible and complete the work.

After accomplishing each goal, recognize their achievement, and reward them. Rewards are a great tool to keep your team hungry to get more. These things will make team happy and bring outcomes as well.

Here are a few things, my team and I constantly try to do to grow and improve our work output together and individually :

These are a few things that I’m doing for my team —

1. Show them the big picture

2. Give them space to make decisions

3. Support, empathy, trust, and ownership — key values

4. Make team members feel important and valued

5. Habituate celebrating and appreciating everyone’s victories

These will help you to create a high-performing and happy design team.

One of my core beliefs is that take care of people, and they will take care of the results.

And these are a few practices of my Kissflow creative team —

1. Be an outcome player, not an output player
2. Consistently create great work that works. Great work is all about high-quality brand work which tickles creativity in the eyes of the viewer. That works in the eyes of the customer and we hit the bullseye.
3. Taking small brain vacations.

• Playing brain-tickling games with the whole team is a way to intrigue healthy competition while at play.
• Learning is also amplified by watching documentaries, TED talks, and book reading sessions. They give us a new perspective on the way we work.

4. Experiment, fail, learn, share, repeat.

• Implement smart working — we created a templatized way of working for the teams and being more independent.
• Unlearn — fail fast, learn from mistakes, and make space for new learning.

I hope you find these tips useful and that they help you grow and flourish as a design team.