Team Charters, One-on-Ones, and Design Critiques. Book Review: Liftoff! (Part 4)
In this article, I will reflect on chapters 8 to 10 of the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You”. If you’re looking for a shorter and condensed review you can check out my TL;DR review. Are you interested in getting the book? Buy it via Rosenfeld Media’s website.
Chapter 8: Unifying the Team Culture with Charters
Why should you care about team charters? Put simply, they describe your team’s reason for existing in your organization. They can also be extended further to explain what type of work you’ll be doing, what values unite your team’s members, and what type of activities you will avoid.
Chapter 8 was truly a highlight to me. Team Charters weren’t just well explained, including rationale and all, but there was even a useful exa,üöe workshop shared on how to collaboratively create one as a team. I personally found most of the guidance to match what Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett have shared in their two-part podcast about charters. Since I’ve worked on Design Principles that weren’t really used heavily, I have to imagine that the creation is the easy part. Living and honoring your charter day-to-day is truly the bigger challenge for any team and leader.
The only two question marks I had after completing the chapter were about potential troublemakers and the location of the charter workshop. I’m not sure about you, dear reader, but I believe most design teams are inherited and not built from scratch. This means that you’ll probably have a standard team of a few top performers, a few bottom performers, and most people somewhere in between. I’d be curious to hear about how to handle bottom performers or notorious troublemakers, like the common “I hate all workshops” character.
On the topic of location, I‘d strongly recommend to do this workshop off-site. Interestingly, this wasn’t mentioned in the book at all. Any sort of long-term strategy, vision, or purpose defining activities that may spread over multiple hours should probably not be completed in the office. In my opinion, the risk of distraction is too large and the team members’ minds and hearts are too close to their usual 9–5 working space. This might sound a bit cheesy, but if you ever decide to invest in an off-site, this should be it.
Chapter 9: Designing the One-on-One
Oh boy: One-on-Ones aka 1:1s aka O3s. These are an absolute management staple and have been my biggest “competitive advantage” since I was promoted to my first managerial role. I take these seemingly “relaxed weekly update” meetings very seriously, so serious in fact, that I have never missed a weekly One-on-One with any of my direct reports since I started doing them at the beginning of 2018. For me, the only valid reason to “skip a 1:1” is if someone is sick or on vacation for an entire week, otherwise this is the one meeting I will never miss. You read that right: If you’re on vacation from Monday to Thursday, I will reschedule our 1:1 to Friday to not miss a week.
That out of the way I have to admit that I learned most of the things I know about 1:1s (or O3s) from Manager Tools. I’ve listened to their podcasts, read Horstman’s book “The Effective Manager” and also attended one of their “conferences”, which are really more like small group trainings of around 20 folks. Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne from Manager Tools don’t mess around when it comes to One-on-Ones, and I didn’t understand at first why. What’s so good about meeting every week with all direct reports and talking to them for 30 minutes? Little did I know, just how important these meetings are.
“Okay, but what about the book, Daniel?”
Well, the authors offer some useful guidance, but in my opinion don’t mention some of the fundamentals when it comes to 1:1s. Maybe comparing this chapter to all the Manager Tool guidance I’ve consumed isn’t fair, but there are a few points which shouldn’t be missing even in the most basic of introductions to O3s.
First, to me, the main purpose of One-on-Ones isn’t to “learn how people are doing”, “hear about work status” or even “learn what they are experiencing”. The biggest reason why you should do O3s is to build an effective relationship with each of your direct reports. That’s literally it. Why does this distinction matter? Without an effective relationship, there can’t be any trust or open communication. You might have heard that this meeting can also be used to give and receive feedback. How candid will your directs’ feedback be, if they don’t trust you? Can you build trust simply by talking about status updates for 30 minutes every week? I’d say no. So this is where Liftoff fails and The Effective Manager shines. They don’t just tell you the complete picture on why and how to do it, they even talk about possible objections from team members. You will hear about how to roll this meeting out to your team, why a weekly cadence is better than bi-weekly and much better than monthly.
Another point I’d say matters is who sets the agenda. This meeting isn’t primarily for the manager, but for your directs. Following this logic, it is up to them to set the points they want to talk about. I certainly wouldn’t request an upfront agenda, although I personally do it for my O3s with my boss. This is also called “pre-wiring a meeting”. I’d be excited if my directs prepare an agenda up front so I have more time to prepare for the topics, but I wouldn’t expect it. Too many constraints and processes can also harm the primary purpose of the meeting, which is to make room for your directs to talk about things that matter to them. Some managers like to work on a google doc with their directs, but I personally like to keep it as low-tech as possible. I still only rely on a pen and paper to take notes for the directs, while I pay them my full attention (now mostly via a video call).
The authors of Liftoff say that the manager should go first until the direct takes over “later”, but Manager Tools has demonstrated why this isn’t always a good idea. The direct report should always go first. When managers went first, they measured the average time that the directs were talking and it resulted in a whopping average of 1–2 minutes out of the scheduled 30. Only when they switched this the true benefits of O3s were unlocked.
There’s good guidance offered in the book in terms of feedback and coaching, which should be integrated into your half of the 1:1. This will allow you to get some good growth development done without always having to make tons of follow-up meetings every week you’d like to talk about your directs’ performance.
Later, the book addresses skip-level 1:1s, so meetings with your direct reports’ direct reports aka skips. I found this guidance to be a bit murky, because it didn’t really cover basic points about frequency or the participants of such meetings. I believe novice directors could easily misinterpret this guidance and try to implement weekly or bi-weekly 1:1s with their skips. I’ve found this to be neither manageable nor effective in building trusting relationships, as it often destroys trust with your own direct reports (“why is he meeting so frequently with my team?”).
To summarize, I always recommend following one basic principle: Nothing may hurt the primary purpose of One-on-Ones. Building effective relationships is your highest goal and everything you try to change about these 1:1 meetings must be in alignment with this objective. O3s certainly aren’t a status update meeting first and it’s naturally inefficient to announce anything several times as opposed to doing it once in your staff meeting.
I honestly was hoping to read about specific guidance on holding One-on-Ones with designers, but didn’t find anything in this regard. Therefore, I’d recommend anybody to simply listen to the Manager Tools podcasts or read The Effective Manager which deserves all the praise and positive reviews it gets.
Chapter 10: Leading Continuous Critique
The tenth chapter is dedicated to design critiques. It’s a decent introduction for everyone who isn’t familiar with this topic, and it also doesn’t cover a lot of ground. Luckily the authors included resources for further reading, which I can recommend as well. The book everyone suggests on design critiques is called “Discussing Design” and covers the different types of feedback: reactive, directive, and critique. You will most likely find everything you want to know about critiques and more in here.
Another crucial resource I’ve personally used to define critiques for my organization was the elaborate article “Design Critiques at Figma” by Noah Levin. I feel that this one was shorter, but more actionable, helpful, and inspiring than the chapter in Liftoff. This isn’t to discredit the authors in any way, it’s more due to the fact that Levin’s article is just that good.
This article is part of a series, where I review the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You” in detail:
- TL;DR review
- Chapters 1–3: Design leadership definitions, diversity & inclusion, and designing the hiring process
- Chapters 4–7: Hiring designers from job descriptions, to screening, interviewing, and onboarding
- Chapters 8–10: Team Charters, One-on-Ones, and Design Critiques
- Chapters 11–13: Presenting work, saying no, and growing your designers
- Chapters 14–16: Scaling design, influencing your organization, and escaping velocity
- BONUS: Collection of books, articles, and other resources for leading design teams.
