Fast Company magazine ran a brilliant interview with David Kelley, the founder of IDEO and the world-famous design school at Stanford. As I was reading it, it became clear to me that the principles that make effective leaders in creative businesses are the same as in progressive schools.
I’m going to try something new here. I’ll leave the interview in plain text and I’ll reflect on how it applies to progressive schooling in italics. Here goes:
Kermit Pattison: How has the design thinking model influenced your approach to leading people?
David Kelley: The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you’re trying to design for.
The main tenet for progressive schools is empathy for the people you’re trying to teach.
Leadership is exactly the same thing—building empathy for the people that you’re entrusted to help. Once you understand what they really value, it’s easy because you can mostly give it to them. You can give them the freedom or direction that they want. By getting down into the messy part of really getting to know them and having transparent discussions, you can get out of the way and let them go.
By finding out what kids actually want to learn, you can get out of the way and let them go.
The way I would measure leadership is this: of the people that are working with me, how many wake up in the morning thinking that the company is theirs?
How many kids wake up in the morning thinking that the school is theirs?
Empathy is not always talked about as a leadership quality. Why is it so important?
For me, it’s all important. If you want the people you work with to do extraordinary things, you really have to understand what they value. I’m trying to get people to remain confident in their creative ability. In order for them to have that kind of creativity, you have to be very transparent.
If you want the people you teach to do extraordinary things, you have to treat them with dignity and respect. You have to relate to them as a human being first, not as actors playing the role of “teacher” and “student.”
Understand them and involve them in the decisions being made. Even if the decision goes the wrong way, they still were there and saw how we decided to do this and so they’re behind it. The worst thing you can do to a creative person is have commands come down from the top so they don’t see their role and don’t see the trade offs. If they see the trade offs, they’ll get behind it and just use that as constraints for doing their job.
The worst thing you can do to a student is have requirements come down from the top so they don’t see their role and the trade-offs. If they see the reason behind a requirement, they’ll get behind it.
What happens when the leader has to crack the whip? In the world you describe, how does the boss exercise authority and deal with someone who’s underperforming?
I always found that if you handle a problem in a benevolent way and a transparent way and involve other people, so it’s just not your personal opinion, that people get to the other side of these difficult conversations being more enthusiastic. You have more of a friendship than you do with the ones where you don’t deal with it. In design school, I had to learn this a long time ago when my students present something and I’m supposed to critique it. You can critique it in a harsh way and they might get it. But you also can critique it in a benevolent way so in the end the student realizes the reason I’m spending the time telling you this is that it’s a form of caring. It’s a form of respect, not trying to put you down.
Teachers do not need grades in order to give students feedback. They only need honest, authentic relationships based on mutual respect.
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I could go on, but you get the point. If you’d like to read the rest of the interview (it’s really good), click here. Before I close, let me just say this again: the principles that make effective leaders in creative businesses are the same as in progressive schools.
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