Stop Leading Teams And Start Designing Experiences

Experience Design Leadership invites leaders to re-cast themselves as experience designers. When you do this an entirely new psychology opens up, changing perceptions of who leaders are and what leaders do. The result is that success is redefined for you and your team.

Experience Design Leaders use the psychology of team cognition to set the socioemotional stage for experiences where people can invest personal meaning in their jobs and thrive at work.

Here’s a skill-teaser of what this kind of team leadership looks like:

Create a Vision: Establish clear and elevating goals that people can believe in and personally own.

Promote Mutuality: Express the idea that we are all different but we are all interdependent. Our culture and our experiences together are what we make of them. This is the opposite of being mutually competitive but does not negate challenging each other.

Share Control: Distribute power and responsibility. This does not mean abdicating your leadership responsibilities. To the contrary, it is a form of team leadership that demands a developmental approach as opposed to the blunt instrument of command-and-control styles of leadership.

Use Participatory Design: Whenever possible, invite team members to contribute to the shaping of their experiences together, a component of both “communities of practice” and “team leadership theory.” This means collaboration in many forms and the expectation of co-creative and mutually supportive action from group members.

Advance the Team Identity Narrative: Attend to the launch and evolution of the team identity narrative as opportunities emerge, events occur, and membership changes. This includes framing successes and failures toward the growth of the team’s collective identity.