Leadership Studio 02 - Course overview
Moving into a design leadership role is not just about taking on new responsibilities at a senior level. It’s a fundamental re-weaving of your professional identity that will challenge your self-confidence and require new tactical and relationship skills.
Who this course is for:
Established design leaders who want to further advance their leadership journey.
Mid-career and executive design leaders ready to strengthen their leadership presence and personal impact.
Choose your course time slot
Tailored to your individual needs, select the perfect time slot for you and book the course.
Protect your time through boundaries and prioritization
Identify what energizes and drains you
Recognize and prevent burnout
Apply your design skills to leadership challenges
Navigate relationships: manage up, down, and across
Understand and work through conflict
Craft narratives that resonate with stakeholders
Take ownership of your role while enabling others to thrive
Kickoff session
We start the course with a live kick-off session to get to know each other and set you up for success.
Week 1: Lead yourself
Discover what energizes, depletes, motivates and frustrates you. You’ll develop a clearer picture of your needs, along with practical tools to set boundaries and carve out space for focused work and reflection.
Week 2: Develop your personal manifesto and value proposition
Clarify what you stand for and the unique value you bring. You’ll translate this into a concise value proposition and personal manifesto - tools to guide your decisions, focus your energy, and articulate your leadership stance.
Week 3: Apply the Design lens to leadership
Learn to view leadership as slow-motion facilitation, applying design thinking, critique, and iteration to team dynamics and organizational progress. You'll walk away knowing how to apply your unique skills to leadership with renewed confidence.
Week 4: Understand relationships and conflict
Learn to manage upwards, downwards and sideways and develop a deeper understanding and empathy for colleagues. You’ll walk away with techniques to resolve conflict and power struggles.
Week 5: Become an enabler versus a leader
Learn how to step into your power in a leadership role and shift from top-down leader to enabler. You’ll walk away with a renewed perspective on your role and a transformed view on leadership.
Closing session
We end our course with a live session to celebrate your achievements and onboard you to the iF DESIGN ACADEMY alumni community.
Want more details? Get your personal consultation session!
Andy Polaine is a design leadership coach, educator, speaker and writer who helps clients transform their organizations and themselves. For several years he worked at Fjord as Group Design Director of Client Evolution.
Andy is co-author of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation. Andy has three decades of experience in design and innovation with clients across a broad range of industries. He teaches on the MA Service Design at the Hochschule Luzern, writes a popular newsletter called Doctor’s Note and hosts the podcast Power of Ten.
Guest Lecturers
Marzia Aricò is a strategic design leader, organisational consultant, executive coach keynote speaker and author of Design Leadership Chronicles.
After 20 years in the world of Design and Innovation consulting, Jason now runs his own coaching and design firm, Resonant Futures.
Tanarra is the founder of Rebel 75 Design, where she helps organizations build bold, human-centered cultures through leadership facilitation and culture design.
Shen is the founder of Circle and former Director for BMW Group Designworks in Shanghai, where she championed team growth and global strategic partnering.