Mike Gallagher

I know that a lot of people hate personal development plans. The process can feel artificial, forced, like a distraction. When there is always so much “real” work to do, having to periodically review some arbitrary goals you set nine months ago is no one’s priority. When modern admin systems (e.g. Jira) already involve so much pro forma data entry, filling out yet another document that no one is going to read seems like a waste of energy. When the organisation you work for is in a state of flux and people don’t know if they will have a job next year, the endeavour can feel pointless. What a drag.

It isn’t surprising to me that people feel this way. Viewed through a cynical lens, a personal development plan can seem like tick-box exercise forced on everyone by HR because it is what we’re supposed to do, for some reason. I know at least two people who prefer to work as contractors specifically because they don’t want to be bothered with this aspect of having a permanent job. The name alone makes it sound like something that belongs in a wonky Word template that will be filed away in Sharepoint, never to be seen again. And yet, this idea is a common feature of most organisations. There must be something underneath the forms and frameworks and annual review cycle that has value, right?

I think there is a better, simpler way to think about the underlying concept. It goes like this:

It is important to distinguish between the work and your work.

In this formulation*, the work is the thing you deliver for your client or your organisation: the research summary you share with your team, the design proposal you review with stakeholders, the code you commit to Github. Your work is the set of things you are learning while doing all of that: the experiments in design methodology you are testing, the unfamiliar programming language you are playing with, the new approach you are taking to engaging with peers. The work can be on fire, but so long as you are learning, things will be ok. The distinction is thus between what you deliver and what you are learning.

To a degree, this approach is baked into an agile (or just plainly iterative) approach to design and development. The work is always more complicated than we initially imagined and things don’t always go perfectly. The important part is to learn from the ways in which things didn’t go perfectly last time. We have team retrospectives for this precise reason. This concept, of the vs your work, extends the approach to cover what you as an individual want out of a career.

One of the things I love about the field of design is that there is seemingly no end to what you can learn. It is a vast space and it keeps changing. That can be daunting, but it can also be an opportunity to try new stuff. There are always new methods to try, and every method you are familiar with can be done better as well. That should be exciting (“infinity in the palm of your hand”, etc.), and I think this is what all those personal development plans that HR makes you complete are about – making space to grow beyond what the work requires; making sure your growth is seen as “real” work too. It should be a central element of my work (as a manager) to make sure that your work gets as much attention as the work.

* I didn’t invent this formulation, but I can’t remember where I got it from. My best guess is that I learned it from either Martin Wright or Lily Dart.

I’ve been covering for one of our design managers* who has been out of work for a little while. It adds to my workload, but it also lets me get closer to the day-to-day activity happening within several teams. Suddenly I find myself digging into project planning and research analysis and (heaven forfend!) actually designing stuff. This is extra work and thus it puts a strain on the operations and programme-level management work I normally do. It also means that various side-of-desk projects are really suffering. But whatever, so be it, I love this part. I am now thinking about how and to what extent I might reorient the way I engage with teams.

This is part of the normal dance of the lead designer, mode shifting between manager and strategist and principal doer. I know that. What I am noticing is that in the moments where I am afforded the chance to really dig in to a specific problem my limbic system whirs to life in a more substantial way than when I am only skating across the surface of tens of projects. Clearly I miss doing the doing. I don’t think this kind of work is more important that team coordination or wider strategic activity, but it is certainly more fun.

Some examples:

• 15 minutes in a pub discussing where one project is getting stuck with Danila and Simon, spitballing ways to reorient the work. I was so disappointed that we couldn't just go back to the office right then and there to figure out a new plan because this was the most exciting moment of the week and I wanted to keep going.
• Multiple discussions with Tosin about how to set up a new discovery related to our design system and tech stack. It helped that the first round of this was in person, but subsequent conversations were equally engaging. Normally, I become less involved with projects once the brief is written. It was refreshing to be able to go further and begin working through an implementation plan.
• A day long workshop in which I had a stop-start multi-hour conversation with a receptionist from a GP practice. The structured workshop activities were good, but being able to riff on a few topics was incredibly helpful for developing a deeper understanding of the texture of her work.

What all of this highlights to me is that I’m a bit starved of the pleasures of doing hands-on design work. Getting fully into the details of the work provides a feeling akin to some long-absent hormone being suddenly reintroduced into my bloodstream. In fact, that might actually be what’s happening (dopamine, endorphins, I dunno). I enjoy the meta-work of setting up the conditions for teams to be able to do a good job, but I love doing the work myself. Maybe this is what growing up feels like (lol), but I’m not sure that I’m doing the team any favours by not getting deeply involved. The question I am now asking myself is how might I engage at this level more regularly without burning out?

* For context, our current team shape involves clusters of multi-disciplinary teams, each of which has a dedicated design manager, who report in to the discipline leads that sit at the senior leadership level (I’m one of those latter people).