My Leadership Style

I seek understanding, think systemically, methodically, and about first principles. I discover what is universal and capitalize on it, rallying people toward a vision for a better future, cutting through differences, using stories and celebrating heroes, tapping into those very few needs we all share. This is very different than management. The style of my leadership is laissez-faire (non-autoritarian) based around vision and democracy:

I lead with vision to move people towards a new set of shared dreams and common understanding.

I lead with democracy drawing on people’s knowledge and skills, to create a group commitment to the resulting goals.

My Management Style

I consider a good manager one that gives clear directions and stays pretty hands-off, but is ready and available to jump in to offer guidance, expertise, and help when needed.

I consider a great manager one that turns one person’s particular talent into performance, identifying and deploying the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way. Practicing this has shown me many rewards because:

1. Identifying and capitalizing on each person’s uniqueness saves time. No employee, however talented, is perfectly well-rounded.
2. Capitalizing on uniqueness makes each person more accountable.
3. Capitalizing on what is unique about each person builds a stronger sense of team, because it creates inter-dependency and helps people appreciate one anothers’ particular skills and learn that their coworkers can fill in where they are lacking.
4. When capitalizing on what is unique about each person, a healthy degree of disruption is introduced, shuffling existing hierarchies and assumptions about who is allowed to do what, and existing beliefs about where the true expertise lies.

Managers must also adjust their styles according to the situation that they are presented with. Situational leadership depends on the amount of support and guidance needed and I practice adjusting to each situation:

• Telling: Works best when employees are neither willing nor able to do the job (high need of support and high need of guidance).
• Delegating: Works best when the employees are willing to do the job and know how to go about it (low need of support and low need of guidance).
• Participating: Works best when employees have the ability to do the job, but need a high amount of support (high need of support but low need of guidance).
• Selling: Works best when employees are willing to do the job, but don’t know how to do it (low need of support but high need of guidance).

My default position, when not flexing is:

Partecipative / Coaching / Permissive: I tend to enable subordinates to take part in decision making and also give them a considerable degree of autonomy and latitude in completing routine work activities and carrying out their work, as opposed to being autocratic and directive: making all decisions myself, unless we are in a situation where this is absolutely needed.

In doing so I tend to build teams that have a good mix of seniority that produces confident and autonomy and juniority that enables for growth. I go out of my way to make sure I know when my team needs help. I don’t hang around and wait to be called upon by my direct reports, I go to them. That means plenty of informal check-ins, both on the work they’re doing and on their general job satisfaction and mental well-being.  I focus on making the most of peoples strengths, triggering good performance and tailoring to a learning style, motivating people with autonomy, mastery and purpose.

 My Design Style, Principles & Philosophy

Everything I do is to improve the lives of end-users/customers, with focus on making technology easy to use. With me you can count on someone that:

• Thinks about the big picture, the brand, and most importantly, the end-users/customers.
• Has passion about creating experiences that are beautifully intuitive and motivating.
• Loves working with and leading a team on a mission, eager to collaborate with engineers and business colleagues to find elegant but practical solutions to design challenges.
• Likes creating rough prototypes to communicate concepts, narratives and experiences.
• Is deliberate about the design approach, and you rely on feedback from the team and customers to iterate.
• Has clear and articulate communications, and applies broad and functional knowledge to solve problems.
• Has great empathy for customers/end-users.
• Takes a minimalist and pragmatist approach to design.

I work by measured application of principles and coaching other to think and wok by principles. whether it be visual design, or interaction design, or information architecture, practicing, teaching and forming professionals on the User Centered Design, Creative Thinking and Services Design process.

I consider myself tool agnostic and will tent to use the best tool for the job. However some of the tools that I am most familiar with include:

• Axure for rapid and complete lifecycle protoyping and for developing standards and patterns.
• Adobe Creative Suite. With this I enjoyed using all tool and seeing how they have gotten way better over the years. I am particularly good in Photoshop and Premier, but I can kick the bucket on any platform.
• Jira for project management and process control.
• Google Drive as my document archive and crude collaboration platform.