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Series contents​
Part 1 - The Mindset
Part 2 - Tactics for Enablement
Part 3 - The Emotional Challenge
Part 4 - Leadership Tools

Back in 2008, I was lucky to have a mentor, Luke Schreur — a software engineer and one of the sharpest, kindest thinkers I’ve known. He told me something that’s stuck ever since: organisations have a habit of taking their best craft practitioners and moving them into management, usually without giving them the training or support to succeed.

On paper, it looks like a win — a bigger salary, a new title, maybe even a nicer desk. But what the organisation actually gains is an underprepared manager, and what it loses is a talented craftsperson who was thriving in their element.

We can wireframe faster, tell a clearer story in a workshop, pull insight from messy research data, or polish a prototype until it feels alive in someone’s hands. That’s what gets noticed early in our careers. The doing is the proof of our value.

But here’s the catch: the higher you climb, the less sustainable that model becomes.

The work doesn’t get smaller; it multiplies. Organisations today are sprawling, multi-channel, and faster than ever.

Services cut across departments, jurisdictions, and even time zones. And yet, in many companies, the design team remains a handful of people. No matter how good you are at the craft, there’s simply no way to “own” every touchpoint, every customer interaction, every policy, every workflow.

This creates what feels like an impossible bind. On one side, senior management has read the articles about design’s incredible ROI.

They’ve seen the McKinsey slides that say design-led organisations outperform peers.

They want transformation.

On the other side, you’re looking at your actual capacity — a small team stretched across dozens or even hundreds of projects. It feels like trying to cover a football pitch with a single bedsheet: no matter where you pull, something else is left exposed.

That’s why the real work of leadership isn’t about doing more. It’s about rethinking what the job actually is.

From Practitioner to Multiplier

The shift is subtle but profound.

As a practitioner, your influence is direct: you shape the outputs you touch.

As a leader, your influence must become exponential: you create the conditions where others — designers, product managers, engineers, even frontline staff — can make better decisions themselves.

In other words, leadership is less about how much you deliver and more about how much you enable others to deliver.

This is the difference between being the bottleneck and being the multiplier.

A bottleneck team can never scale; every project slows down while waiting for your sign-off, your review, your spare hours.

A multiplier team shapes the culture and spreads the practice, so quality design emerges even in spaces you’ll never directly work on.

The Mental Reframing

Making this shift requires rewiring how you see yourself.

Many leaders wrestle with identity at this point.

If I’m not doing the research, am I still a “real” designer?

If I don’t touch the prototype, have I lost credibility? If I say no to a request, am I letting the organisation down?

The truth is the opposite.

By clinging to the role of implementor, you limit your impact. By stepping into the role of enabler, you magnify it.

It means moving from:

• Hands-on execution → Hands-off empowerment
• “I’ll fix this for you” → “I’ll show you how to approach this”
• Perfection in the few → Progress across the many

The uncomfortable reality is that not everything you enable will be as polished as if you had done it yourself.

The Emotional Cost of Letting Go

This shift doesn’t come without pain. When I was given my first Design Leadership role whilst at Myspace Australia at the age of 28, I froze. I struggled with absolutely everything.

For leaders who built their careers on their craft, stepping back can feel like a loss.

You’re no longer the person in Figma moving pixels, or the one running every research interview.

You may even feel deskilled or disconnected at first.

That’s normal.

Think of it like a seasoned chef moving from cooking every dish to running the kitchen.

The chef still knows the recipes, still cares deeply about quality, but their value now lies in orchestrating the whole — hiring, mentoring, designing the menu, setting the standards.

It’s no longer about the dish in front of them, but about the experience delivered to every diner.

Design leadership is much the same.

Your value lies in building the environment where others can succeed, not in cooking every meal yourself.

Why It Matters

Without this mindset shift, design leaders burn out.

They become the heroic doers who can’t say no, who try to deliver everything, and who ultimately end up delivering less. Worse still, the organisation remains dependent on them, never building its own design maturity.

With the shift, the opposite happens: you build capability across the organisation.

You stop being the single point of failure and start becoming the catalyst for systemic change.

And that’s where service design, in particular, has its greatest power — when it stops being the remit of a small team and starts becoming part of how the whole organisation thinks and acts.

In short: The mindset shift from doer to enabler is the foundation of design leadership. It’s uncomfortable, even disorienting, but it’s also liberating.

When you stop trying to carry design on your own shoulders and start spreading it into the culture, you move from impossible expectations to sustainable influence.

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Gerry Scullion​ Founder & Designer Connect with me on LinkedIn | Join our Directory | Write a podcast review for This is HCD Podcast​

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