The designers who make it to principal, director, and beyond rarely do it alone. I learned late in my career that I needed to actively demand more from leadership - not expect that someone is going to ladder me up. Because of this, I now hold myself to a far higher standard of being more proactive and hands on with my entire team - seniors included.
I used to think it was a good thing that people moved me from team to team because of how adaptable and autonomous I was. Over the last several years, I’ve been shifted to so many projects and reported to more interim managers than I care to count. In my last role, I was on my 7th manager in 18 months.
The risk that comes with this, of course, is that it’s difficult to gain upward momentum when you’re a pinch hitter. Subbing in and filling gaps doesn’t make for a compelling promotion defense, and at some point in one’s career, it’s just not how you want to spend your time.
Last year, after I turned 40, I sat with how much saying “it’s fine” to organizational chaos and staying in seat when there was no clear roadmap has cost me professionally, and got honest about what I want to do differently, both in how I evaluate the people above me, and how I show up for the people I lead.
Define Your Own Ceiling
The more capable you are, the easier it is to be overlooked. Strong senior designers are low-maintenance almost by necessity. They deliver, they adapt, they fill gaps without being asked. And managers, especially those who are stretched thin or cycling through on an interim basis, tend to direct their attention toward the people who are visibly struggling. The senior designer who’s navigating everything gets a thumbs up and not much else.
The problem is that “handling your work” and “growing your career” are two entirely different things. Getting to staff, principal, or director level requires active investment from someone above you: clarity on what’s being evaluated, who’s advocating for you, what the actual path looks like. Without it, high performers plateau. They keep doing good work at the same scope and slowly realize there’s no ladder in sight.
Senior designers are expected to own their own development, which sounds empowering until you realize it puts the entire burden of career architecture on someone who may never have been shown what’s possible. And when you’ve had a revolving door of managers, each one too new or too temporary to invest in you, even knowing what to ask for becomes hard.
I spent years being the person who said yes to everything, took on the vague stretch goals, worked without a clear job description or mandate, and tried to make myself indispensable. And I kept waiting for someone to take an active role and help me figure out where to take it. That’s not a knock on any one manager. It’s a systemic thing. But it’s also something I wish someone had named for me earlier.
What I Now Require From the Leaders Above Me
Having lived this, I’ve developed a short list of non-negotiables for evaluating leadership when I’m looking at a new role.
The first is a genuine, considered leadership philosophy. Not a mission statement or a list of values pulled from a workshop. I mean evidence that this person has actually thought about what it means to develop people. What do they believe about how teams grow? How do they handle the person who’s talented but stuck? A leader who can’t speak to this with some specificity either hasn’t thought about it, or doesn’t prioritize it.
The second is direct knowledge of the people on their team. I’ve worked in organizations where the design representative in leadership had never met some of the designers they were representing. That’s not leadership, that’s simply org-chart coverage. A bonafide leader has not only had at least a conversation with everyone on their team, but they also know what each person is working toward, not just what they’re working on.
The third is a real growth framework with actual vision behind it. Career ladders are a starting point and an information radiator, not the final answer. What I want to know is if a leader has thought how people will actually move through it. How does a staff designer become principal? How do seniors get prepared for staff or management tracks? How is a leader prepared to explain the leveling difference between “sometimes contributes to strategy” and “often contributes to strategy”? If a leader can’t clearly speak to this, that absence tells you a lot about the health of the whole org.
How I Try to Show Up For My Team
The same things I now screen for in leaders, I try to practice myself. Knowing what it feels like to be unmoored inside an organization has made me deliberate about making sure the people I work with don’t feel that way.
In practice, that looks less like managing and more like sponsoring. A few things that actually move the needle for senior and staff designers trying to level up:
Connect their work to organizational strategy. These folks need to think and communicate at a systems level. Give them the context, the access, and the vocabulary to do that before it’s a requirement.
Bring them into the room before they’ve earned the title. Exposure to cross-functional leadership, executive presentations, and strategic decision-making is how designers learn to operate at that altitude.
Actively broker relationships. Introduce them to the product leads, the researchers, the stakeholders they’d need to influence at the next level. Relationships don’t happen by accident at senior levels, and a good manager builds the bridge.
Make their impact legible to people above you. Designers often do work that’s invisible outside the design org. Name it upward. Attribute it specifically. Advocate for them in conversations they’re not part of.
Be honest about what’s actually blocking them. Sometimes the ceiling is a gap in skill. If there’s a ceiling, I’d rather name it than let someone sit in disorienting ambiguity, and there’s clearly a way to do this kindly and professionally. Other times, it’s politics, timing, or org structure. They deserve to know which one it is.
The Broader Pattern
This isn’t just my story—I have a lot of colleagues and friends who express similar feelings. The design industry has had enough instability, layoffs, and leadership churn that inconsistent management has become pretty normalized. And that normalization does real damage, especially to early-career or mid-career people who are ready to grow but don’t have the scaffold to do it.
The shift I’ve had to make, and that I think a lot of designers need to make, is getting specific about what you need from leadership and asking for it directly, rather than assuming a good manager will figure it out. And for those of us in leadership roles, it means taking the developmental side of the job as seriously as the output side.