Sharing the Vision
The Visionary's Hardest Skill: Getting Out of the Way
It’s a slightly perverse fact of being a visionary that the more serious you are about succeeding, the more you will have to share creative power.
I say slightly perverse, because taking control of the vision likely got you through the first part of the process. Having a single-minded goal, ignoring inevitable naysayers and nurturing a deep and slightly unhinged passion for solving your problem are often the first steps toward building something meaningful. And about when you’re getting comfortable with your own value as a visionary, you have to start to peel a bit of that off and give it to others.
That’s right, your mind may have sparked the idea, but building a product is just too big of a project to be fed by the creative power of one person. I have experienced this myself. For many of our nearly 20 years in business, I was the primary designer of the products we built. I loved it. I thought I was pretty good at it, and I still do think that from time to time.
As our client base grew, we hired many talented designers over the years who did beautiful work. But we got infinitely better when we turned design into a collaborative process between UX, product, QA and development. We ask each other questions. We poke holes in things. We occasionally talk ourselves in circles. Often if one person’s been looking at something too long, another can come in and bring fresh eyes. We’re stronger together.
When sharing the mantle isn’t easy
Years ago, when I first thought about turning over design to someone else, it felt impossible. Who will care as much as I do? I thought. The answer is many people—as long as they are allowed to put their fingerprints on it.
And there’s the rub. Because putting their fingerprints on it means that sometimes they will do something that came from their unique brain and would not have come from yours. These deviations from your vision fall into three main categories:
Different, in a not good way.
Different, in a neutral way.
Different, in a better way.
Objectively (and let’s be honest, this is easier to see when we’re talking about someone else’s product) we can agree that it’s in the best interests of the mission to maximize the occurrence of #3 as much as possible. The more ‘better’ ideas that are hatched and executed, the better the end result. Of course, there are some nuances here around roadmapping and timeline and budget management but let’s assume you’ve got that under control. More ‘better’ is, well, better.
And when other talented, driven people get to see their own ideas take root and flourish, when they get to look at a particular special flourish and say “I did that”, their ownership increases even more. They can see the impact of their work in action, and there are few things more satisfying than that. It’s the difference between a team member who goes through the motions and one who leads.
All of this is lovely and how it would work in an ideal world, and yet visionaries do not always nurture the vision of others around them, because of one Achilles’ heel: ego.
You can identify it when ‘better’, crafted by someone else, makes you defensive instead of happy. For some visionaries (often those who never saw themselves as the creative engine or the architect, but as a champion) this may never come up. But if it does, don’t be too hard on yourself. You likely spent a lot of energy trying to make this thing the best it could be. Your ego wants to defend your relevance. It’s scared that if it accepts someone else’s better, it means you don’t matter. Relax. Some of the best leaders contribute very few new ideas, but they ruthlessly cultivate the overall vision. That’s a great place to be. By celebrating it when your team achieves ‘better’, you create a culture that is more willing to try something new—even if it differs from your vision.
There’s another way ego can sneak up on a visionary, and that’s by demanding immediate perfection. The fact is, you won’t get any 3s without some 1s and 2s. In fact, proportionally you will probably end up with more 1s and 2s than 3s. That’s the nature of challenging work. The trick as I have found it is to be honest and not pander. Honesty is respect, and you’ve got to respect your team enough to believe they can handle feedback. But if you’re angry about a 1 or a 2, take a breath before giving that feedback. Your fear of not being good enough is driving the bus. It’s normal to have some clunkers, some okay ideas and a few dazzlers. It’s just a process to work through. Have confidence that you’ll get there. Leaders who take it in stride when ideas don’t land make these micro-failures routine for the team, as they should be. People who aren’t afraid of getting their hands slapped for an idea that didn’t work produce more innovation.
Put simply: by staying clear, respectful and confident when ideas differ from your own, you give the team the support they need to carry the mantle.
The particular torture of chasing legacy in tech
There are many careers where work stands the test of time for decades. Architects, civil engineers, scientists, artists, writers, teachers—a great many careers allow a person to do something that’s still special 20 years later.
Tech is not one of these careers.
Sure, people may remember that you were the first to do something, or that you made a major contribution to something, but the actual product you create? It’ll be reinvented many times over, and that’s assuming it achieves enough adoption to live for a decade or more. That feature you worked so hard on is transient at best. Everything we work on is fleeting.
And so is a given person’s role in a team. I’ve been doing this long enough to have taken over many projects from other teams, and to have graduated many of our projects to in-house or occasionally outside teams. In each of those interactions, there’s a crucial pass of the baton that has to occur for things to work out. The new team has to truly take ownership—not just assume the role of a proxy.
That’s right, everything we said about people needing to put their fingerprints on something applies even if you’re no longer involved. In fact, it may be even more important in that situation. The new leader or team needs to get invested quickly, and to do that, they need to see their impact. Give them space to do that, and cheer for their wins. And try to stay out of their way.
If you’re the one taking over, you get to execute a more nuanced dance. Every time we take a project over from another team, we have an internal conversation where we work through each recommendation to make sure we’re suggesting it because it’s truly in the best interest of the client, not just because someone did something differently than we would have. And we try to make sure we are speaking respectfully of the previous team, because inevitably the work they did laid the groundwork for us to suggest the fun new stuff.
The fact is that being driven and passionate is important, but it’s not particularly special. Many people have the capacity to contribute wondrous, meaningful ideas that make your product better. But they will do that only if there’s room for them to put their fingerprints on it. May we all have the privilege of working with those who know that their contributions matter.