Design Leadership Mastery: Elevate Teams and Drive Impact

Packt via Coursera

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Paid Certificate Available
Duration & workload

17 hours 11 minutes
Sessions

On-Demand
Subtitles

English

Found in

Overview

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Design leadership is an increasingly vital skill in today’s professional world, where creative teams drive innovation and shape business strategy. This course provides a practical framework to help design leaders elevate themselves, their teams, and their organizations, ensuring long-term impact. Through structured lessons, you will learn how to manage people with confidence, create equitable hiring processes, and foster inclusive team cultures. The course will help you refine your ability to scale design influence, strengthen collaboration, and build resilient systems that align with organizational goals. What makes this course stand out is its balance of proven leadership theory and actionable tools. From critique sessions to structured delegation models, it emphasizes practical techniques that you can apply immediately in your workplace to drive measurable results. This course is ideal for new and aspiring design leaders, managers, and team builders. Individual contributors preparing for leadership roles or those working on hiring, team health, and organizational influence will also benefit. No prior leadership experience is required, but a basic understanding of design principles is recommended. Copyright @ 2020 Russ Unger and Chris Avore. All rights reserved. Originally published by Rosenfeld Media, LLC. This course edition is published by Packt Publishing under license from Rosenfeld Media LLC. No part of this material may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author or the publisher.

Syllabus

Surprise! You're in Charge of People Now!

In this section, we explore design management versus design leadership, examine essential leadership traits, and confront challenges unique to directing creative teams, equipping you to manage, mentor, and inspire designers.

Designing Diversity and Inclusion in Your Teams

In this section, we explore blind spots in uniform teams, build recruitment and retention plans for diverse talent, and back inclusive language and employee resource groups to spark better innovation.

Designing Your Hiring Process

In this section, we design a structured hiring pipeline, apply standardized interview scorecards, and partner with HR to source design talent, ensuring objective decisions and a superb candidate experience.

Performance Profiles and Interview Guides

In this section, we contrast traditional job descriptions with outcome-based performance profiles, then build structured interview guides aligned to those profiles to evaluate candidates against clear, measurable success criteria.

Screening Designers

In this section, we reduce bias through blind r\u00e9sum\u00e9 screening, evaluate portfolios for insight, and craft structured phone interviews with scoring rubrics, enhancing fairness and predictive accuracy when selecting designers.

Interviewing Potential Team Members

In this section, we build a structured interview pipeline, standardize portfolio reviews, and assess design exercises to produce evidence-based hiring decisions while protecting candidate fairness and avoiding unpaid speculative work.

Offers, Negotiations, and Onboarding

In this section, we learn to run structured reference checks, build fair offers, and partner with human resources (HR) to design onboarding that boosts new-hire productivity and long-term engagement.

Unifying the Team Culture with Charters

In this section, we learn to run a charter workshop, refine team purpose and scope, and document responsible, accountable, consulted, informed roles and norms to strengthen cohesion and delivery.

Designing the One-on-Ones

In this section, we design a repeatable one-on-one agenda that aligns OKRs with teammate SMART goals, surface blockers, and evaluate skip-level and office-hour pitfalls to maintain continuous feedback.

Leading Continuous Critique

In this section, we implement a structured continuous critique framework, assign rotating roles, set feedback cadence, and analyze benefits versus challenges to keep teams improving through timely, constructive evaluation.

Presenting Work

In this section, we learn to run design presentations as productive meetings: build clear agendas, prepare sharp walkthroughs, manage critique and guide question and answer sessions for actionable next steps.

Saying No

In this section, we dissect workplace power dynamics affecting refusal and apply a step-by-step framework to say no while forecasting consequences, preserving workload boundaries, and sustaining professional relationships.

Developing Designers

In this section, we define role-based career ladders and the Role-Goal-Reason framework, then design autonomy-centric delegation, continuous feedback, mentoring and coaching loops that align designer growth with organisational impact.

Scaling Design

In this section, we discover scaling pitfalls, apply Design Operations (DesignOps) to streamline workflows, and secure leadership buy-in for design systems that uphold quality, consistency, and culture.

Designing Influence

In this section, we connect user experience (UX) outcomes to key performance indicators (KPIs), weave data informed stories, and guide North Star, backcasting, and critique sessions to amplify design influence.

Escape Velocity

In this section, we analyze escape velocity in complex systems, apply systems thinking to design resilient architectures, and assess adaptive strategies that preserve capability amid evolving requirements.