Hello Reader,

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

The most effective leaders I’ve seen don’t try to spread themselves across every project.

Instead, they pick their battles, focus on leverage points, and leave behind resources that scale their influence.

Four practical tactics tend to make the biggest difference that I've consolidated from my 23 years as a design professional:

1. Targeted Services

You don’t need to be involved in everything.

In fact, you can’t be.

Instead of trying to run every piece of research or design every flow, choose the moments where your presence has the greatest impact.

That might mean leading the discovery phase of a flagship initiative, where early framing will influence everything that follows, or shaping a service blueprint that connects teams across silos.

By being intentional about where you step in, you ensure that your time is spent on high-leverage work rather than firefighting.

2. Coaching and Mentoring

One of the fastest ways to scale your impact is by investing in others.

Establish simple rituals: weekly office hours where colleagues can drop in for advice, quick “UX clinics” for product teams, or structured 1:1s with emerging leaders.

These touchpoints are less about giving answers and more about building confidence and capability.

Done consistently, they shift the culture: instead of seeing design as something “owned” by a specialist team, people start to internalise it in their daily decision-making.

3. Reusable Assets and Resources

Part of enablement is about leaving behind things that continue working when you’re not in the room.

A well-maintained design system, a shared research repository, or a set of simple templates for journey mapping and service blueprinting are all ways of embedding design thinking into the fabric of the organisation.

These aren’t glamorous artefacts, but they multiply your reach.

A team you’ve never met can still benefit from your leadership if they’re drawing on resources you’ve shaped.

4. Standards and Principles

Finally, clarity matters.

Without shared principles, every team reinvents the wheel, and design quality becomes inconsistent. Without these in place, you're rudderless and toothless.

Establish a small set of guiding principles tied to the organisation’s values and user needs.

Keep them visible, memorable, and practical — not lofty slogans that gather dust. Ensure they are actionable and understood by all.

Pair these principles with lightweight governance, such as mid-project design reviews, so that teams feel supported and aligned rather than policed.

None of these tactics work if you’re still clinging to the mindset of “I’ll fix it myself.”

They only take root if you embrace the shift from Part 1: from bottleneck to multiplier.

Enablement is as much about restraint as it is about action.

The moment you redirect a request with “I can’t do this for you, but I can show you how” is the moment you start to build a culture of capability.

In practice, these tactics don’t just free up your own capacity.

They also raise the organisation’s design maturity over time, making it less dependent on you and more resilient in the long run.

That’s the real marker of effective design leadership: not the quality of the work you touch directly, but the quality of the work that happens without you.

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So feel free to say hi!
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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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