I am a recent college graduate that has been trusted with running the design team at a startup. I've been hired as a full-time UX designer and am currently leading a team of three design interns. I have no real experience running a design team, and am wondering how I should best proceed in managing the team. Things have been pretty disorganized, and we recently had a meeting in which most of our time was spent in pretty unproductive disagreement. As the person who is more or less running the design team I feel totally responsible for this, and would like to know how I could best run meetings and assign tasks in order to generate lots of ideas, while making sure discussion stays productive come decision making time. I'd also appreciate any tips on how to facilitate healthy discussion when discussing differences in opinions. I'm really new to all of this and a bit out of my element, but I really want to do my best and would appreciate any advice.
Check out the first two parts of this book (look it up on LibGen and purchase it if you like it). The first two parts address the more practical aspects of design in general (even things freelance work I believe) and the rest is geared toward web design as the title suggests. But it’s something to thumb through to get you prepared quickly if you’re interested.
I imagine since you’re a new graduate and they’re interns that you’re all roughly around the same age. You haven’t divulged the details of your prior meetings but I can imagine that some pushback may be due to the fact that they are as aware as you are that you’re new to leading a team.
Truth is that you’ve probably led something before. Tap into that psychologically. I mean this just like the time you ran the back of the house when you worked at that Greek spot Junior year, right? Right.
It would probably help to have an informal meeting, addressing the fact that you’re new, they’re interns, you all likely have a limited amount of time to work together at this job at all. We’re young. This can either suck for us and discourage us as professionals, or we can work together and have fun while we do it and reminisce over this when we’re 35 and working on legacy node monoliths.
I would start with the thin book of trust. Next I would read extreme ownership.
After reading these two books you will see that the main currency managers work in is trust, and that no matter what happens, you, as a manager, must take personal responsibility for the outcome and never use blame. Taking responsibility for the outcome means that you are the primary force of changes of outcome (as opposed to depending on someone else you can't control and blaming them if things don't go the right way).
Nonviolent communication is an incredibly important skill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication). Anytime you start pulling out the "you's" or direct contradictions you create defensiveness which then creates an impassible barrier to compromise. No one can be told they are wrong, they can only be asked questions that they can't reconcile with their current beliefs.
Feedback, troubleshooting, stress management, marketing, recruiting/sourcing, and shit shielding are other important functions.
Not giving feedback to a person is probably the most cruel thing a manager can do.
Troubleshooting problems rather than just assuming you know what is wrong based on pattern recognition etc is a learned skill, but super important.
Stress is like fuel for your car. You exert your stress budget to get features in the same way you exert gasoline to get forward motion for a car. As a manager you must be very cognizant of the levels of stress of those you manage.
Marketing is a primary function of a manager. Marketing what higher ups want to your team, marketing to new hires how awesome your work is, marketing to team members that they are awesome and did good work. Getting promotions for those on your team is an act of marketing your team members to higher ups.
Recruiting and sourcing is a major important function often given to managers. Knowing how to ask for more resources and acquire them is important.
Lastly, people outside of your team will want things from your team. You must protect your team from external shit, you must be the shit shield to filter what is important vs what isn't.
Concerning books, this one is pretty good and short: https://pragprog.com/titles/rdbcd/behind-closed-doors/