The Leadership Canvas: Sustainable Practices For Design Leaders
In our recent Management Design Party, we explored crucial challenges facing design leaders in 2025: building positive team cultures during organizational change, finding purpose beyond promotion, navigating career transitions, and balancing AI adoption with team wellbeing. Leaders shared candid insights about maintaining resilience while driving innovation. RSVP on ADP List for next month’s free event. Read below how today's design peers are creating sustainable, human-centered leadership practices.
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Themes Of 2025
Key questions this article explores:
How do design leaders maintain a team culture through organizational changes?
What does authentic leadership look like when working with vulnerable populations?
What is missing for design leaders to navigate career transitions with clarity?
How do we balance AI adoption with our wellbeing and constraints of time?
Sustainable Team Cultures
A key thread of fostering trust and safety continues to be key for managers in environment of labor contraction, fear and automation. Investment into care and mental health is growing to be a team effort of building a culture of positivity and support, not just one person's responsibility. This distributed approach to cultural stewardship has proven especially valuable during organizational transitions. We bring the attitude of "wellbeing" to all teams and model that for all ranks in the organization.
The conversations revealed a shift from hierarchical leadership to more distributed models where team members share responsibility for culture, decision-making, and innovation.
This approach builds more resilient teams capable of weathering organizational changes that quickly orient in a supportive community and do with what is available. Equally this can burn people out, if we store more stress than our body can handle at our growth and position, we burn-out. To be a resilient department, we need to be resilient managers. How do we learn to build that into our practice?
Energy Pulse Check: How are you currently balancing your personal energy reserves with your team's culture-building needs? What one practice could help you maintain resilience during organizational changes?
“I am having to pay more attention to how I allocate energy because as a leader I need reserve resilience to show up in the face of constant change for my teams. On a personal level, I might have to do less physical work, to leave mental space for coaching a new person or take someone for a coffee who needs support. On an organizational level, I need to be ready to shift to a new division or face a big pivot. ”
Authentic Vulnerability
Working with vulnerable populations highlighted a crucial evolution in design leadership: the need to balance expertise with humility. Our discussion emphasized a leadership style that combines transparency about unknowns with the confidence to make progress—allowing design leaders to maintain both effectiveness and authenticity while tackling complex social challenges.
Several leaders referenced Trauma-Informed Design resources that provide specialized frameworks for preventing re-traumatization through thoughtful research and implementation practices. These approaches are particularly valuable when working with sensitive populations but offer broader lessons about considerate, human-centered leadership.
The conversation revealed how leaders across various contexts are finding strength in transparent communication about uncertainties and challenges. This authenticity helps build trust within teams and creates space for collective problem-solving rather than putting pressure on leaders to have all the answers.
Vulnerability Compass: In which situations do you find it most challenging to balance showing vulnerability with maintaining confidence? How might strategically revealing uncertainty actually strengthen your leadership?
Navigating Career Transitions
The experience of transitioning after a long tenure revealed systemic challenges in design leadership careers and clarity in design ladders. The industry lacks clear frameworks for presenting leadership work, especially for showcasing multi-year initiatives that don't fit traditional portfolio formats. This gap presents an opportunity for the design community to develop better approaches to evaluating and celebrating leadership impact. We shared the value of peer groups like Never Search Alone or self-assembled groups from meet-ups or virtual design events to provide safe spaces for synthesis and collaboration.
Some managers reflected questioning their purpose and mission. We discussed how this question deserves to first be discovered at a personal level and then be reflected out into our work life since before being design leaders we are people first. Vision Boarding can be a great framework for any person to tap into your aspirations, to reconnect with your authentic self. It allows your body and your heart to lead you in to new areas and ventures that your mind might fear. Traditional career paths are being questioned as leaders seek ways to measure and demonstrate impact beyond conventional metrics and case-studies.
We touched that collecting circular feedback from direct and non-direct leaders in our organizations can be inspiring as it allows people we respect to reflect on what they see in us and in that path suggest new horizons through personal touch points that we would have not seen on our own. This is also helpful if you don’t have a clear level framework in the organization for design, you can interview others about their opinions on seniority and how people move up. Occasionally opportunistic promotions can open up. It might be less work for a manager to promote and train you, than the speed of going outside. This is where trust, accountability and soft skills can matter more than craft. And don’t forget, you can always move to a smaller organization with a larger title.
Portfolio Puzzle: What aspects of your leadership experience have been most difficult to capture in traditional portfolio formats? How might you begin documenting your impact in ways that better showcase your unique leadership contribution?
Ease Into Innovation
Insights about AI adoption in design teams highlighted a crucial balance: staying current with technological innovations while maintaining team wellbeing. Treating AI exploration like "a child in a playground discovering new toys" offers a healthier framework for technology adoption in design leadership. This approach encourages curiosity rather than fear-driven adoption.
Before jumping to try a new tool or saving a list of links to test, check in with your body's response! Ask your body if it’s for you and be ready to pass if it’s not. Follow your energy. If it feels good and light, do it but if it feels like a burden and comes with resistance maybe that’s a clue.
The pressure to adopt every new AI tool or methodology is giving way to more intentional approaches that prioritize team wellbeing and sustainable growth. If you get overwhelmed, start feeling yucky or behind the whole world on everything take a 5-minute break in the sun to get present and reset.
Tech Intuition Tuner: What criteria do you currently use to evaluate which new tools are worth your team's time and energy? How might incorporating a "body check" or energy assessment improve your technology adoption decisions?
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Hot Takes
Truth bombs & wisdom worth stealing:
The Adaptation Burnout Trap: A lot of organizational change is asking design managers to quickly adapt to new teams and stakeholders when they at times put several years investing in the company or people there prior. We see leaders that need a second to take a breath to be ready to do it yet again. There is a sense of disruption we can observe, as after training and education, they feel intuitively a lack of a break and fruit from their labor. The constant cycle of investing deeply, then being uprooted, creates a unique form of leadership exhaustion that requires intentional recovery practices.
The Invisible Coordination Tax: When leaders in design and product are eliminated, we can observe the burden of managing multiple product managers to synchronize their vision as an additional tax on early managers having to do their job as well as support design staff. This invisible coordination work rarely appears in job descriptions but can consume 30-40% of a design leader's bandwidth during organizational shifts. Recognizing and setting boundaries around this hidden work becomes crucial for sustainable leadership.
The Reciprocity Principle: When we help others through support and mentoring, we feel more deserving of help ourselves. It's a healing cycle of giving and receiving that builds both confidence and community. If there's something you need help with, it can be a very specific request—ask around in your community who could offer that expertise or volunteer some time to train you. By creating this virtuous cycle of exchange, you not only solve immediate challenges but strengthen the entire design leadership ecosystem.
Design Toolkit
Energy Reserve Framework: Create a personal energy mapping system to track what activities deplete versus restore your leadership energy. Identify specific actions for quick energy restoration during high-stress periods, creating an "emergency fund" of resilience practices you can draw on during organizational changes.
Vision Boarding Practice: Dedicate time during winter months to create a visual representation of your aspirations beyond work identity and professional goals. Use images, colors, and words that resonate emotionally with your authentic self, allowing your unconscious desires to emerge. This practice helps reconnect with personal purpose before translating it to professional mission, ensuring leadership flows from genuine values rather than external expectations.
Vulnerability Decision Tree: Develop a simple framework for determining when transparency about uncertainty benefits your team versus when confidence is needed. This can include questions like "Will sharing this uncertainty provide context that improves decision-making?" and "Does withholding this create an authenticity gap?"
Leadership Impact Documentation: Implement a consistent practice of capturing your leadership impact beyond metrics and deliverables. Document instances of team culture improvement, conflict resolution, strategic shifts, and mentoring outcomes with specific stories and stakeholder feedback.
Circular Feedback Template: Create a structured method for gathering perspective on your leadership from both direct reports and cross-functional peers. Design a set of 3-5 questions that elicit specific feedback about your unique strengths and growth areas rather than generic performance measures.
Technology Adoption Filter: Design a personal decision framework for evaluating new tools and technologies, incorporating both practical assessment (time investment, learning curve, team impact) and intuitive evaluation (energy response, alignment with values, genuine interest level).
As design leadership continues to evolve, the focus is shifting from individual achievement to collective resilience. Success increasingly depends on building sustainable practices that balance innovation with wellbeing, and technical expertise with emotional intelligence.
We're building a community of practice around authentic design leadership. Have insights or experiences that might help others? Email us at hello@venusvale.com with: - A specific career challenge you faced - How you approached it - What you learned in the process - One piece of advice for other design leaders. Selected stories will be featured in the future (anonymously if preferred).
Upcoming Events
Each Design Party opens with celebrating what makes us happy and the many things that we get better at each day.
Three unique spaces to connect & grow based on your level in the design industry. Hosted on the last Friday of the month, the virtual events are participant driven and interactive based on 3-4 case studies of questions we explore and examine together.
Pick the circle that matches your experience level. Together, we grow stronger. Through celebration, we get better!
8am PST | Management Design Party | 55 mins
For design leaders (Manager → VP)
Lead with confidence across cultures
Build & retain high-performing teams
Navigate complex stakeholder dynamics
Foster innovation at scale
9am PST | Mid-Career Design Party | 55 mins
For Sr/Lead/Principal designers (5-10 years)
Progress your career & compensation
Navigate cross-cultural design challenges
Build influence & strategic thinking
Expand your leadership toolkit
10am PST | Early Career Design Party | 55 mins
For designers (1-5 years)
Grow your craft & confidence
Learn from peer experiences
Navigate team dynamics
Build your career roadmap
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