Employee Development

Communication

Integrity

Employee Empowerment

Knowledge

Authenticity

Comment

Olga Norwood is a skilled visual designer and artist and has a positive charismatic personality. Unfortunately, her pleasant manner hides an insecure and controlling approach towards managing people that is based on notions of command-and-control. Despite her senior manager title, Olga is actually quite inexperienced with (and insecure about) with the core competencies of user experience design, such as: design strategy, content strategy, information architecture, and user research. She is the opposite of an analytical thinker, and she feels most comfortable in situations that have low complexity and a small scope. She approaches every feature design project as if she were an art director at an advertising agency, which means she micromanages designers who report to her, and makes all the key decisions herself based on her instincts and perceptions, rather than through following a UX discovery process. Her reports are expected to act as “design secretaries,” implementing the tedious details of her vision, and thus, she promotes a very arbitrary, hierarchical, and old-fashioned way of working. When Olga does receive a person onto her team with strengths in strategy, research, and/or content, she second-guesses their recommendations and appeals to people outside the team to tell her whether her direct report has a good idea or not. She does not trust herself to discern anything non-visual-design-related and she does not trust anyone junior to herself in the hierarchy. This has meant that talented designers have consistently left her team, over the 5+ years I observed her. She characterized one person as “arrogant” who asked for more responsibility and agency to do more strategy and research, and also complained that one of her designers listened more to another leader’s feedback more than to hers. She must have felt quite hurt by that, because she eventually pushed that person out, through a fake coaching plan, rather than allow them to change to another team, when they had offers to move. That was pretty mean-spirited and unnecessary since the person could have simply gone to another team instead, but she blocked it. She is completely incapable of teaching or growing anyone’s career, in part, because she does not have the UX skills herself, and also because she is very bad at seeing different peoples’ strengths and interests and supporting them. Quite ambitious, her main focus is on advancing herself rather than empowering others. She pushes her reports to make her look good to her supervisor, even if it conflicts with others’ interests, whether her team or her client. Olga views herself as a supporter of diversity and inclusion, so it’s pretty ironic that she is only really comfortable with people who are similar to her in terms of thinking style or skills and she is completely unconscious of how she actually undermines her stated position with her behavior. In summary, Olga is a good short-term manager for someone who is a new visual designer (and is not very interested in user experience design). She expects anyone who works for her to be submissive and agreeable and do ask she commands. She can help you improve your design skills, but anyone who works for her will outgrow her very quickly, so plan ahead to change teams sooner rather than later.