Design Leadership Coaching

It’s a bit of a conundrum: Companies that value design as a strategic function have been proven to achieve better business outcomes. Yet it is often difficult for design leaders to receive support for developing strong design practices. In fact, this is the most commonly shared challenge by design leaders regardless of discipline, company size, and industry.

Pracademic Coaching offers proven experience helping clients in design leadership raise their organizational design maturity.

The concept of organizational design maturity

This term refers to how thoroughly a company has committed to industry-recognized design practices, where design thinking is integrated and valued at the highest levels of the organization.

It was originally introduced in a 2018 InVision report called “The New Design Frontier” (no longer available online). The report explored how companies can create better business outcomes with design, and found that “companies with high design maturity see cost savings, revenue gains, and brand and market position improvements as a result of their design efforts.” This finding remained true regardless of industry, location, and company size.

In that same year, McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 public companies over a five-year period and published the results in an article called “The business value of design”. The report states there is a strong correlation between strong design practices and superior business performance. The results held true across companies producing physical goods, digital products, services, or some combination of these.

Making the case within your organization

In our work as design leadership coaches, we help clients make the case to invest in design as a strategic function. As every organization is different, there is no standard set of methods that will guarantee success as design leaders introduce this new way of thinking. It requires creativity, patience, and perseverance.

The most likely path to success involves combining multiple approaches such as:

Enlisting the support of an executive sponsor, ideally the CEO.
Introducing and discussing outside, reputable sources of information about effective design practices.
Establishing effective design standards that can be shown to improve the efficiency of projects.
Establishing and measuring KRs or KPIs that prove the effect of improving customer experience on revenue.

Progress in raising organizational maturity takes time, but is ultimately worthwhile for design leaders and the businesses they support.

Thinking ahead to act now

At Pracademic Coaching, all our design leadership coaching engagements incorporate some aspects of performance coaching. We work with design leaders to help them achieve their best performance while working to raise their organizational design maturity.

Our method of thinking ahead to act now is Pracademic Coaching’s unique strength. We combine psychology and practical design leadership expertise to help our clients envision the desired future state, and then use that vision to act with conviction in the present.

Envisioning your own peak performance is a potent source of motivation. Knowing where you’re headed gives you confidence in your decision-making and actions now, and the foresight to anticipate and overcome challenges along the way.