Team Leadership

Over the last 6 years I have developed my own leadership theories and style built upon encouraging the growth of my team members through education, work-life balance, and craft.

Leadership Development

Specifically while working with the AKQA Nike Studio I had the opportunity to develop my leadership skills through creating a team development plan. The following page outlines my thoughts behind my leadership theories and the initiatives I took in the studio to contribute to a creatively inspiring and inclusive team.

Goal Setting

In order to understand the team and create goals, I reviewed our processes and team interactions within the Nike Studio as well as the larger AKQA PDX office and spoke with several team members about pain points and objectives. I identified two overall goals that the studio could work towards.

Foster Creative Whole Humans

Increase Accountability and Ownership

Fostering creative whole humans

Based on Instrument’s Human Development model, I advocate to focus on the whole person rather than just who each employee is at work. This system relies on the balance between 1-1 guidance and mentorship, workshops (focused on creating a sense of connection, shared purpose and openness to discussions), and skill specific programs (teaching skills like leadership, presentation, and conflict negotiation). The ultimate goal is to help develop balanced employees that find joy and purpose in their work and workplace. It highlights the idea that each person is complex and requires a complex mixture of support.

Increase Accountability and Ownership

Accountability and ownership to our work as well as to each other and our teams are cornerstones in building a well functioning team. They raise the quality of our work as well as the morale of the team. As a leader I work to create a team in which each member feels valued and respected. I focus on four key goals to promote both accountability and ownership: define roles and responsibilities for each individual, actively work to be transparent with goals, results, and expectations, build trust through support and encouragement, and have a clear expectation of presentation and evaluation. Team members need to understand the roles they play and the value of their contribution to fully own their work and own part of the team. When employees are able to follow through by actually presenting work, there is a dynamic of ownership of the work from the beginning to conclusion. If employees are left out or kept ignorant of a part of the process, they feel disconnected from the work and the team.

Actions

To achieve these goals, I established six categories of objectives to inspire change. Each objective works towards a part of one of the established goals and requires participation from every level of the team.

Focus on Professional & Personal Growth

Create Creative Spaces

Be Transparent & Bold

Build Relationships & Mentorships

Establish On-Boarding

Document, Celebrate, and Elevate Work

Professional and Personal Growth Through Workshops

Develop workshop series and groups that focus on specific skillsets such as presenting work, providing feedback, leadership development, and more, while creating a sense of shared purpose and team.  These workshops address ownership (each workshop is lead by a different member of the team), offers alternative ways to be creative to foster the whole human, and builds relationships between team members.

Hands On Workshop Series

The Hands On workshop series was a series of monthly meet ups led by a different employee each month. The employee teaches the group any skill that somehow involved creativity. The only stipulation for "teachers" was that the lesson must involve everyone actually participating in the creation of something, in other words, it had to be hands-on learning.

Along with the concept I created the visual language behind the serious through branding and poster designs.

The workshops were broken down into two categories: a creative skillset open to the entire office (brush lettering, weaving, plant maintenance) and a specific professional skill targeted at a group within the team (Writing for designers, brand strategy for creatives, motion design for visual designers). An additional category for one-time yearly events was added for off-sites and internal creative events for the design team.

The Hands On Workshop Series was successful in several aspects. Those who participated in the workshops felt inspired, more informed, and a closer sense of community within the team. Presenters were grateful for the opportunity to teach their passion and craft and gave them an opportunity to develop their own communication and presentation skills. The workshops provided social situations that paired different employees together who may have not met under other circumstances and developed cross-team networks.

Check out the presenter guide here

Create Creative Spaces

Creative spaces inspire creativity and build relationships. There are two types of spaces we can affect: the physical space we work in and the conceptual space we are creating.

Physically, how can we create spaces that enable rapid idea generation and easy capture? Spaces that co-workers are compelled to personalize (individually or in groups). How can a space be designed to support our creative flow?

Conceptually, how can we dig into the idea that creative agencies are a hub of diversity and the creation of culture (a tie that my writer and I made to the Portland being literally created by a system of ports that brought in diversity from all around the world).

Walls of inspiration

One way to introduce new visual ideas involved creating “inspiration” walls in areas where people naturally congregate: the kitchen. Anyone could pin up whatever was currently inspiring them in an effort to spark a conversation or creative visual inspiration throughout the office. Other concepts for creative inspiration included creating an entire room that was devoted to a new technology, concept, or theme. Employees could sign up to create an installation in the room that showcased one of these three categories.

Be Bold and Transparent

Being transparent is hard. Being bold is scary. Both can lead to more understanding, increase confidence, and encourage solutions.

Talking about issues that affect us all like gender, race, compensation, equality, and processes can be difficult but will lead to a more inclusive and diverse work environment that values trust and confidence.  Giving and receiving feedback is also integral to the development of creatives. A company that encourages and gives employees the space to learn these skill sets is invaluable to the growth of employees.

Bi-weekly Get Togethers - Start, stop, continue

It was important to set up specific times and places for people to talk openly about feedback, issues, and pain points and also give the space to encourage and support each other. I lead an activity called Start, Stop, Continue that gave my team the opportunity to discuss things we were doing well and things we could work on. The team had 5 minutes to write on sticky notes thoughts from each of the categories (ie. Start actively working with writers before we design, Stop waiting till last minute to get approvals, Continue to support each other through informal check ins at the end of the day). As a team we would choose one idea from each category and spend the next 30 minutes discussing what that means to our team and actions we could take to make them a reality (while writing down the other suggestions for the next meeting).

Often times this sparked conversations that influenced how we interacted with each other and the processes that we developed for our work. It also lead to off-site lunches where the conversations continued into the afternoon (and resulted in a fun team lunch).

Post-mortem reviews

The idea to be bold and transparent with our work also lead to making post-mortem reviews after each project (lead by an impartial person not on our immediate team) part of our workflow process. .

Build Relationships & Mentorships

Relationships and mentorships are a great way to share ideas, collaborate and make great ideas even better.  Mentorships are also integral to the growth of employees, to building trust in the company, and to encouraging accountability. These relationships create a formal and informal network that employees can rely on to develop their skills throughout their entire careers. Some ideas around this included randomized and targeted coffee meet-ups that, a voluntary mentorship program that fosters bonds between junior or mid-level employees with senior and leadership in areas that each person is interested learning more about, and career coaching from leadership that helps employees identify strengths and career options.

AKQA Connect

As a way to share cultures, ideas, and work, I initiated an entire project around the initiative to connect the international studios of AKQA. Check it out here.

On-boarding

Intentional on-boarding sets employees up for success from the beginning by clarifying expectations, introducing them to the team on a practical and cultural level, and providing them with the knowledge they will need to begin to work. On-boarding builds stronger teams by encouraging a sense of belonging which translates to accountability and ownership on the team and makes the new hire feel like a valued member of the team.  It also introduces new hires to our work, processes, team structure, and company values which can lead to less confusion and more efficiency later on.

On-boarding schedule

I set up a one week schedule for on-boarding that balanced understanding our work and process as well as socially meeting the team. Each element was designed to build connections or gain knowledge of our work in a structured format.
‍

Day 1: Set up computer, all programs and systems. Walk through AKQA introductions.  
Quick informal welcome meeting in the morning with the team and lunch with team members.
‍
Day 2: Work on practice Projects including an app project, email, and .com project
Coffee with another designer
‍
Day 3: Work on first real project with assistance from your 'buddy'
Coffee with a designer from another team in the studio
‍
Day 4: Continue on project without your 'buddy'
Coffee with a writer
‍
Day 5: Review finished or in progress project with your 'buddy'
Coffee with a non-writer or designer within the studio

On-boarding Packet

The work we did on the Nike Studio team fell into three categories. Therefore, to introduce the new employee to our work, I created a digital packet that included one practice project for each category that they could work through and ask questions about before they worked on a client-facing project.

Document, Evaluate, and Celebrate Work

Documenting, evaluating, and celebrating our work encourages ownership and excitement about the work we create. Evaluating our work allows creatives to asses our successes and areas for improvement and see if we are meeting goals. And finally, celebrating work acknowledges hard work and commitment which inspires others and encourages ownership.

Ideas for this objective included
- establishing a “Creative of the month/Moment of the month”, shout outs and periodic acknowledgments from other team members
- document what we (the Nike studio team) do and present work to the company, create case studies on a regular basis with best-of examples
- report analytics and metrics to keep track of how we as a team positively affect the Nike brand and understand what works and what doesn’t to improve future work
- create direct and open communication about goals and how we are meeting those goals.

Several of these ideas were implemented and acted upon through various meetings and process updates on the team.

Learnings

I am passionate about inspiring others through mindful leadership. Although all of these objectives were created specifically for my previous team, they have heavily influenced my own theories behind leadership and has helped me to create a tool belt of practices to bring into current and future positions.

More Work

Nike Track and Field      AKQA Connect      Vagabond      The Look of Nike  

Nike Track and Field
‍AKQA Connect
‍Vagabond
‍The Look of Nike  

Let's Connect

Email      Instagram      LinkedIn

©KiraHodgson