Design Team Growth Workshop
What does it mean to be a member of a design team? How do you ensure a team is set up for success? As I’ve grown as a designer, I’ve realized that a great team doesn’t just happen; it develops intentionally. Here’s an example of a team workshop I led in 2020, prior to becoming a manager.
As with many companies, Granular experienced a seismic shift in the days and months following George Floyd’s murder. In an effort to better understand what it means to be inclusive, I developed a design team workshop to help us better understand ourselves and our biases. By doing so, we identified where we have room to grow to be as inclusive as possible.
Our workshop consisted of 2 parts:
Goofs at the end of a daylong workshop
Part 1: Understanding ourselves with DiSC.
Identifying our individual personality types through DiSC assessments, and how our individual types plot across our team. This allowed us to see where we have gaps in our communication styles, decision making abilities, and work style preferences.
For the record, I am a proud Dove/Owl/Parrot (or S style), which is to say I value listening, consistency, reason, and enthusiasm in the workspace.
Part 2: Building toward the future.
Brainstorming on ways to continue strengthening our team as we grow and change to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
Our ultimate goal from the workshop was to figure out ways in which we could all interact socially, remotely, and safely. We realized we were feeling lonely and distant from one another—not a good culture for inclusivity.
This led to a number of initiatives that felt simple yet effective: weekly photo prompts to engage curiosity and encourage conversation, easy social interactions before team All Hands meetings, and Working With Me documents to outline working and personality styles.