If your goal is to eventually become a design executive—and let me be clear no one should feel they have to become a design executive to have a successful career; you need to build a reputation based on impact. You need to show your abilities to get others to deliver your vision.

Every act of design is an act of transformation—whether is pen and paper or digital assets, every time you start to design you are manifesting a transformation. Design Leadership is transformation at the organizational level, as a leader of a design organization, you are accountable for the changes you are attempting manifest .

Designers are natural entrepreneurs, prove me wrong. Entrepreneurs commonly envision a better version of whatever they are working on. Entrepreneurs are persistent and detail oriented. Entrepreneurs create something from nothing. Entrepreneurs take something and “disrupt” it. Entrepreneurs ask fundamental questions about the nature of a thing, the problem it was meant to solve, its social impact, the environmental impact. Still think designers aren’t entrepreneurs?

Processes are not maps or recipes, at best allegories or parables. They are the stories we share to help others learn who we are, what we value, and how we work. Like the earliest pictographs, processes cross the barriers of having no shared language, encapsulating who we are and our activities into acceptable visualization.

However, Design Leadership is more; it is organizational transformation. Rather than focusing on putting a finite set of changes into action, Design Executives need to focus on a constellation of initiatives, programs, policies, each with unique cross-dependencies, intersecting multiple teams. Today’s Design Executives aren’t focused change, they are focused on reinvention.

UX was not invented in ~2005 by a consultant, which for some reason seems to be the popular narrative being pushed by bootcamps. If you happen to find yourself talking to one of these “forty-niner designers” and they are trying to tell you that design is the new kid on the block, or that UX design is an emerging field, here’s how you can call them out.

Declarative statements may make great content when you’re talking about recipes or hidden vacation spots, but in a professional community they read as entitlement. While anyone can call themselves a design leader, it falls to the reader to vet the source, to fact check the content and to ensure creditability at the source. Rather than allow an influencer to give you advice on how to run your design organization, seek out experienced design leaders,

To best support your team, it’s important to provide transparency and set clear expectations for not only the various competencies they need to master but also why those are important. Specifically focusing on the impact their work has for the user and the organization. How are you empowering your team?

You have the title but will you be successful?

While it is up to each CEO to define and evaluate their CDO but are you overseeing all aspects of design? do you have the necessary business knowledge and the authority to align strategies, resources, policies, to deliver the greatest value for customers? clients? business partners? Are you ready to make design is a core pillar of your company’s strategy and culture?

Chasing consistency is easy, it will get you support from your colleagues because its business centric. However it does very little to help your users—they aren’t looking for consistency, they are looking for something more elusive but far more powerful…