One of the best techniques for driving up quality while taking advantage of the power of a centralized UX team is the design (or for that matter the research) critique. Creativity comes from a cycle of exploration and convergence. The richest exploration comes with a diversity of perspectives collaborating and uncovering areas to explore. Design may begin with a charrette focused on the design problem, but the exploration continues and is refined through a series of critiques. The critique is a gathering of those diverse design and research skills to focus on early ideas and to explore them, and eventually to refine them.

My Tablet team gathered each Monday in a team room we created from an old conference room. We arranged comfortable chairs in a semicircle around a projection screen we had set up at one end of the room, and the walls were covered with floor to ceiling whiteboards. Standing by the projector was one of my designers who had been sketching alternative approaches to represent the passing of time as a digital pen was pressed against a screen. Gathered in the room and in various states of comfort around the chairs were my designers and my researchers as well as the project manager and a couple of the developers who were working on the feature. The designer presented each idea and we discussed how it worked as a design. We talked through what users needed and how they think about time. We brainstormed other alternatives and variations, and sketched on the whiteboard. We compared the ideas based on how well they delivered on the needs identified. Over time, as one Monday passed to the next, and as more and more lattes were consumed, we moved from the traditional metaphor of the hourglass to something that looked like a clock to a more abstract design like a bar sweeping in a circle. To enable targeting, we decided to remove the center, and something that looked more like a donut emerged with a moving comet of light passing around the circular path; it entered the vocabulary of Windows design and from there has propagated through the industry. The process began with a very functional need to show as a pen pressed to a Tablet that time was passing and the user needed to be induced to wait until a menu became available. The critique resulted in an even more flexible indicator that could be applied to many situations and carried an aesthetic that fit within the design language that had been developed for the operating system.

In addition to the obvious benefits for improving the innovation, quality, and effectiveness of the design, there were other benefits as well. The process of bringing the team together for charrettes and critiques drove more consistency across the team’s design, and grounded it in common user assumptions. It helped unite the team in how it thought about all of our designs. It bonded the team as a team, and reinforced the values that were common to the team. It also educated stakeholders by exposing the design process to them, and indeed giving them experience in being a part of the process and exercising their own design-thinking skills. It made the design a creative collaboration.

You have several tools as a manager or lead that you can use to raise the level of individual performance and to grow performance and impact growing careers. Much of the year you are working with individuals one-on-one, or as part of a team to motivate, guide, and support them. You have the portfolio of recognition tools available in your organization and that you have created. You have career discussions and various feedback tools that can be used to refine performance. And of course you have formal and informal performance reviews that build on the other interactions. Together they are all aspects of the coaching function of leadership — the growing of the individual talent on your team that results in growing your overall team.

There are studies that suggest an estimated 20% of a manager’s time is spent resolving interpersonal conflicts. I do not think it is quite that much of my time (meetings and e-mails are another matter), but it is true that people in conflict do take up a tremendous amount of energy and time. Conflict can get in the way of delivering the great experiences we want to deliver, and the clashes between people can cause all kinds of personal cost in emotional well-being and psychological (and physical) health. That being said, conflict is probably inherent in the people gathered by external forces (a hiring process) and placed together and told to get a job done, especially creative, right-brained people who have to function in the middle of a left-brained engineering culture. Bringing smart, assertive, and confident people together to solve problems that have more than one solution or path to solution is virtually guaranteed to cause conflict. Indeed, the conflict can be the seed for creative solutions and can drive innovation, almost as easily as it can hurt projects or even cause them to fail. Being a manager, therefore, is not so much about avoiding conflict as it is about managing it. Being a user experience manager should in part be about managing conflict to advance the user experience agenda and vision within the organization.

I remember one time as a new manager at Bell Labs when I was sitting happily in my office going over budget numbers or another administrative task, trying my best to pay attention to the mundane while a part of my head was working on a project problem. Suddenly the door of my office slammed open and another manager stormed in with a “What the hell do you think you are doing? How could you let this happen?” If anyone had been walking by and looked into my office at that moment they would have seen the notorious deer in the headlights look. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. The first thing I needed to do was calm her down so we could talk. I got her to sit down, and started through the process talking a little slower and soothingly to get her to do the same while projecting a concerned and problem-solving attitude. Inside, of course, both flight and fight reactions were going on. I knew that if I actually expressed either the situation would escalate.

I once took an interesting variation on the Myers-Briggs questionnaire. It assessed interpersonal style under normal situations, and then profiled one’s style in conflict situations. While normally I have more of an analytical style (which goes with being a conceptualizer) and lean toward introversion, in conflict situations I have more of an assertive style. While I prefer to deal with problem solving analytically, I also recognize that internally I am hypersensitive emotionally to conflict situations. I tend to project what, in the Northwest culture I grew up in, is seen as a stereotypical Scandinavian coolness (as in “That was so hilarious it took everything I had to keep from laughing.”). As a problem is building, therefore, I may seem to be ignoring it. Inside it is building to an exploding point. When it reaches that point, then my inclination is to gird myself up, confront it, and resolve it. In resolving it, the place I typically come from is “Hey, we are two human beings. This is just a job, not life and death. Let’s just work this out.” That is how I approached the situation with my colleague at Bell Labs. While this situation resolved amicably, I find it difficult to teach my team to resolve conflict; it is just one of those skills I am not very good at passing on to others.

On the other hand, I have known several people who are good at it. At Ameritech I had a contractor working as a usability researcher, and it turned out that on the side she had been formally trained in conflict resolution. Time and again I could pull her in and she had a process to drive resolution that worked for all kinds of conflicts that arose in the course of our projects. More recently I have had some teams where individuals within the team seemed to go through periods of clashing with each other. Usually they are attributing some hostile intent to the other person, when in fact it is usually because the participants have somewhat different goals and are simply not communicating well with each other. One of the senior people on my team, Karen, is excellent at listening to each of the conflicting individuals to get their points of view, sitting them down together and getting them to listen to each other, and finding actionable win-win ways to move forward.

In general, when I work with my team as conflicts are starting to arise I first ask them whether they have talked to the other person directly about what they have heard and what they are feeling, and whether they have attempted to deal with the conflict directly. I believe the manager is not the first step in conflict resolution, but rather an escalation point partly because effectively dealing with conflict is a sign of growing as a professional. There is an interesting article by Gatlin et al. (2009) that argued there are eight causes of conflict. Conflict comes from conflicting needs, it comes from conflicting styles and conflicting perceptions, it can come from conflicting goals or conflicting pressures, it can come from conflicting roles, and it can come from conflicting values and policies. These sources, I find, often lead to conflict because of breakdowns in communication.

When you work with team members there are a variety of ways to deal with conflict, and as with situational management styles there are times when it may be appropriate to move between them. Each team member may have their own preferred style and will often become more effective as their toolkit becomes richer. One style is confrontational. This is often where conflict starts and it is typically highly emotional. There are times when it can get things done that need to be done, but you have to be careful to not win the battle and lose the war. Another style is compromise. In this case each person may need to give something up to reach a settlement. Here the danger is that the solution reached is not right for the business even though it deals with the conflict. Collaboration is a third style, and is sometimes known as driving win-win solutions. In a sense this can be thought of as win-win-win, as the solution may be more than just the least painful, a compromise, and may actually represent a new and better perspective on the problem. A fourth style is accommodation where someone just gives in. The key here is to realize that some problems are not worth fighting for, and accommodating at one point may mean someone will accommodate in the future when you want something. This may even be a little like sacrificing a pawn when playing chess in order to end up being in a better position. Finally, there is avoidance. Avoidance when there is a real problem can be bad. But avoidance in the early stages when you can steer around a problem — avoiding someone’s hot button by being aware of what is needed in order to make progress and achieve a goal — may be appropriate.

There are a variety of principles that are used by people who are trained in conflict resolution that can be adapted to work situations. At the risk of stereotyping, user experience people frequently approach problems with a lot of passion. Many of these techniques are particularly good at reframing the problem to make it more tractable. These techniques include:

Focusing less on the past and more on the goal is important. Avoid getting caught in resolving “facts” that cannot be verified and that are interpreted differently by each individual. Still, I have seen value in just getting each person’s perspective out on the table. Find out what happened in the context of each perspective and the feelings it caused. Each person’s perspective has validity and should be heard. The sharing can potentially help each person understand the richer context of where the other is coming from.

A controversial area is whether or not the manager should bring the conflicting people together. One article says to never interview the participating parties together, and to ask them not to communicate to each other about the issues or with co-workers. I suspect this advice is more about the conflict that arises due to a hostile workplace. I am not dealing with conflict in this area, and my clear advice on that kind of conflict is for the manager to go directly to their Human Resources representative as soon as they learn of it and take the guidance of their HR person on how to handle it. Each company should have very clear steps that they want the manager to follow, and anything in the “hostile workplace” area is very serious and should be handled in close partnership with your local HR person.

Clearly work-life balance is important for each member of the UX team, as well as for the entire team so everyone can be as vibrant and creative as possible. The right balance also provides a willingness on the part of the team to bear down for the short term because they know in general they are being treated well. Obviously we all know from the research that stress shortens one’s life, and many of us have seen it impact health and the quality of performance. It often comes from within, however, as a way of avoiding the guilt of not attaining a bar we have set for ourselves. Being responsible is about actively managing your load and activity, and achieving the level of healthy stress that keeps us energized. Just as people should be mostly doing work that they find exciting and where they can have a meaningful impact, they are only really successful when achieving both professional and personal goals. They need to manage their own lives not just day to day, but toward the future as well (just as the group is being managed). They need to make sure there is time each day to take a breath and think about where they are at the moment, where they are heading, and to adjust their course.

This is one of the toughest problems I have faced over the years. I hire people and try to match them to jobs they have a passion for. I hire people because of their passion and desire to produce excellent results, and their commitment to taking responsibility for the quality of their work. I try to create an environment where they get into the flow and time disappears. I also reward them for their impact. That can mean that even when the project is scaled properly on paper (and often it is too ambiguous to scope cleanly), my best people will work their butts off to deliver something that makes them proud, but they often work too hard.

Unfortunately when the annual corporate climate survey is taken and they see the item on work-life balance they typically rate it as “Terrible.” Yet in general, I have given them the power to say “No!” to requests (including to me) and I will support them. I tell them I would rather know up front because I typically can find another way to get the job done if they do not have the capacity, or I can help them reprioritize and negotiate with their clients if necessary. The only time the issue appears during performance review is when someone is not as productive as someone else at a comparable level. It is usually only the most mature of my team who have learned the skill of managing their own workloads to ensure they are able to do their best work on the most important tasks and still have work-life balance.

One lesson I have learned over the years is that I cannot create work-life balance for people. I can do my best at balancing workloads, I can define policies, I can be consistent with my words, and I can try to model work-life balance, but I cannot force people into work-life balance. At least not when I am managing them as a higher performing person where I am trusting them to run their own work. The best I can do is to continue to message my goal for them to have the balance they want, coach them when I see behaviors that I think are going to hurt them in the end, intervene in extreme cases, and to regularly explicitly create a situation where we can have a heart-to-heart about how the work-life balance is going. I can check in regularly with them one-on-one, and take the kind of team pulse that helps me decide whether I need to more aggressively intervene.

I have also accumulated tools to support the discussion. While they are proprietary, the general concepts are what you would expect them to be and similar tools could be created within any team. One nice set consists of a checklist to help the manager and the employee prepare for a discussion about work-life balance, a script to help both the employee and the manager to have a fruitful discussion, tips for the manager to help in the discussion, and a warning to managers about being a good example.

The checklist includes a manager section and an employee section. The manager section reminds the manager to be explicit about making it clear that this is an important discussion, and to ensure that there is sufficient time to be candid. It reminds the manager to review the background material on both why a good work-life balance is important and how to be supportive. It suggests that the manager makes sure he thinks back through the past history of conversations and situations where this has been important, and encourages the manager to draw on his own mentoring and other resources in preparing for the discussion. The checklist reminds the manager to think ahead about what it might mean if the employee really is serious about reducing their workload. What can be dropped? What will need to be made up elsewhere, and how will that happen? What will need to change? The checklist sets the stage by having managers be ready to project openness, clarity, and their position on the topic, and the context. The goal is to find something actionable that both the manager and the employee can agree on, with a clear understanding of implications, time lines, and metrics.

For employees, the checklist also reminds them to prepare for the meeting with the materials provided, advice from their mentors, and other information available. It makes it clear that they need to be drivers, but they also need to be aware of potential implications and be ready to accept them. They should talk to friends, family, and colleagues, and think through questions and bring well-proposed solutions. They should also think through the implications for potential actions, time lines, and metrics. They are reminded to be open, and how to engage in this sensitive topic with their manager.

The script sets up an assessment stage where employees are encouraged to figure out where they are on the “I am satisfied with the balance” to the “I want to change something” dimension. It encourages them to be explicit about their personal life priorities around physical health and mental health; their spiritual, self-realization, and values goals; their family and social goals; and their career aspirations. It also encourages thinking about the relative importance of each. People need to be realistic. They may need to understand it is going to be hard to be rated as the very best in the team if they are choosing to only work part time, but that the right balance point is theirs to determine.

The second step is for the employee to explore with the manager who or what is inhibiting the right work-life balance. Those challenges could come from work, family, friends, personal style, health, or other sources. The script also suggests thinking more deeply about personal drivers (e.g., desire to please, perfectionism, fear of authority, etc.). Then it goes on to suggest they can also think about where they have support in achieving the right balance. With this information, the encouragement is to brainstorm specific personal steps that the employee can take that would help achieve a better balance.

For those steps, the two of you can discuss what is needed and who would provide it. Talk about how to harness the support structure to implement the ideas, and about likely outcomes and implications (and as with most things in life, there are probably pros and cons). Out of that discussion you can identify the most promising steps. The final step is to formalize an agreement about which actions will be taken and by whom with milestones and clear accountabilities to know when they were accomplished and (as with any good user experience activity) an evaluation of whether the desired result was achieved, and if not why not. This agreement is typically not an “official record,” but rather a working agreement between you and the employee; although both of you could decide that some activities are represented in formal objectives.

A section on discussion tips consists of tips that are usual in the UX field, but that are probably worth noting as a reminder. There are suggestions about active listening, and the attributes the discussion should have (honesty, openness, action and solution oriented, clarity, staying focused, etc.). It encourages thinking through pros and cons honestly and candidly, and to be explicit about the feelings that typically float around the various situations that lead to the discussion. The discussion tips document suggests open-ended questions and thinking about the future to get the context out, and then more precision questioning and closed-ended questions to bring the discussion to concrete action. There is clearly a sense that the employee should leave feeling like he owns the action plan, that it came from him and that he believes it will achieve his goals. I would encourage that there should also be a sense of balancing the personal and strategic goals and tactical responsibilities of the team. It is about trying to get at the optimal match that the UX manager is after to put together the most creative and impactful environment. Impact, as we know, is not so much about working more hours; it is about working on the right problems and bringing the solutions that no one else can produce in a way that generates big value for users and the business.

Michael Wiklund (1994), in his book Usability in Practice: How Companies Develop User-Friendly Products, does an excellent job of describing one of the key challenges managers face.

Part of identity is just shared experiences, especially shared experiences that are unique to the team. These might be formal morale events such as the gourmet cooking class illustrated in Figure 7.3, or they might be more casual shared experiences. When I started with Sapient in Denver, they had just moved into a new space in the LoDo area. The space was open with large rooms, lots of whiteboards, and long walls of windows looking out on either the Rockies or the city. It also had an incredible deck area off to one side, cleverly wired at the time with ethernet and power so you could work outside. The space was enlivened by the game room, which got regular use, late night parties when projects were runn­ing long, regular BBQs on the deck, and other events. The social times were part of what bonded us as an office, and that bonding in turn was behind the effective operation of teams working out of the office. When people got together for morning stand-up scrum meetings and looked each other in the eye to talk about who was doing what, whether it would be delivered on time, dependencies, and other project-related topics, that conversation built on a history of personal relationship and friendship.

For each team I have managed we found time to get together for lunches and occasional social activities. At one point in Chicago, for example, I held a beer and sausage tasting party at my house that brings back fond memories (and we did not forget the mustard tasting either). I am sensitive to the fact that some people are reluctant to invest non-work time in work relationships (and that may be part of how they maintain a work-life balance), so I avoid too much outside activity that might be interpreted as mandatory. But new-hire lunches, birthday lunches and celebrations, farewell lunches, and so on all provide a calorie-based mechanism for helping the team to bond and develop identity. There is nothing like breaking bread together to support a relationship. Sometimes people pay for themselves, and sometimes I have budget for the group that I can use. Who pays does not seem to matter, especially when the group already has good morale. (If the team is bitter about something the company is doing, making them pay for themselves for a “mandatory” lunch could feel like rubbing salt in a wound and the conversation might not go in the direction intended.)

It struck me a few months ago as we were sitting in a grill restaurant in Issaquah, WA, how important this is. Jak’s is one of those grill and brew houses that remind me of my college days. It has lots of dark wood, oversized tables and benches, and forgettable art on the walls. Some people ordered iced tea and some beer. Most ordered some sort of gigantic meat sandwich dripping in BBQ sauce, but the vegetarians were able to find pasta and salads. Over the course of the lunch, conversation let us find out more about each other, our hobbies, and our lives. We talked about interesting books one or the other of us had read, and learned more about how each of us thinks. We were able to get a deeper appreciation of the diversity of the team, a team from a variety of countries, from a variety of life experiences, and from a variety of user experience backgrounds. There was some natural conversation about things going on with projects and in the company. The nice thing was that it could be light and candid, and we could work through some of the thoughts and feelings people were having about the work. While it was specifically a time where we did not want to dwell on work topics, I could insert a few light issues into the conversation here and there that I thought were worth fitting into that sharing discussion.

In addition to these ongoing casual gathering opportunities, in most companies I have worked at there have also been official “morale events.” Many teams use these events purely for fun and that is okay. It can be worth it to get away occasionally, and again, there is nothing wrong with having shared enjoyable experiences. My teams have certainly had some of those events. At US West Advanced Technologies we went to Dave and Busters, a kind of arcade for grownups. I paid for food and beer (there is clearly a theme here) and tokens. We all ran around in various combinations competing on the games. The arcade had a virtual reality flight simulator that was wonderful. For each game, you received tickets that could be traded in for cheap prizes. What we did was combine all of our tickets and we picked out a giant stuffed rabbit as the team prize. The rabbit became a team mascot; a mascot can be one of those objects that contributes to identity.

There have also been morale events that we have held that taught something, stimulated ideas, or reinforced a user experience principle. In Chicago we all went out to a firing range. In case you are wondering, we already had good morale at this point. Part of what was interesting was to see how much fun some members of the team had who had never even thought of using a gun. What was really fascinating for everyone was when we tossed marshmallows into the pond and tried to shoot them. It was a very visible example of the importance of feedback in becoming more accurate in a targeting task. When you eventually hit one, they jump 10 feet in the air emerging from the splash. I should point out that some HR departments might frown on the safety issues associated with a team building activity like this. Also in Chicago, we went down to a new virtual reality-based gaming center. We played, which was fun, but we also had a chance to experience the technology and what could be done with it. We were starting to explore interactive television at the time and it led to lots of brainstorming around entertainment possibilities in the new digital environment. It also eventually led to the design of a project we installed in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. We managed to get time with the head of the company and had a great conversation about potential projects we could work on together.

The best morale events have been those that intentionally pulled the team together in unique ways, and that were also fun and rewarding. I mentioned earlier that Dick Notebaert was brought in as a change agent at Ameritech. One of the steps he took was that he looked at all of the purely entertainment-oriented morale events taking place across the company and concluded that all money being spent on those events could achieve the same goals but with more return. He argued that what people needed was to get closer to the users of their services, and that the brand should be more about projecting that Ameritech cares. He mandated that every team have two morale activities a year, and that each of those activities consist of an activity working with a non-profit. I remember tutoring kids at an inner-city school, and handing out groceries at a food kitchen in Michigan. Dick arranged for a database to be created with potential activities throughout the region that any team could access and materials were put together around the activity to help get the most value out of it. We gathered and talked through the lessons that we hoped to learn and the experiences we wanted to have during the event, we met with the non-profit contacts who set up the goals, did the event, and then finished off with a debriefing and casual time to explore what happened during the activity.

My favorite projects were those with Habitat for Humanity. At these projects there was a chance to talk with the users — the people who were going to live in the houses — because they were participating as part of the crew. You knew you were doing something good, and for many of us that is why we got into the user experience area in the first place. We were building something to a design. We were, in essence, the developers putting together a user experience. Sometimes we were undoing what previous crews had done badly and redoing it. That is not too different from fixing bugs, and like bugs, the more that had been done before the problem was discovered the more effort it took to fix the problem. Many learned new skills, but we also saw people in new ways as the context changed.

I recall one house where our vice president, who was an engineer, and a few general managers were supposed to put siding on a house. They were measuring and leveling and measuring and leveling, trying to get each piece of siding perfect. They covered about two or three rows as they worked on their part of the house, while the site supervisor did the wall on the other side of the house. There was a sense that sometimes good enough is good enough. Different team members also had a chance to step into new roles. I had a great user experience person working for me named David. He was normally pretty quiet and mostly led through his tremendous competence. At one point in his life, he had built his own house. In the Habitat for Humanity project he was clearly the lead as he worked with the site manager and directed us here and there on what we should do. It changed everyone’s mental model about David, and expanded our appreciation of each other and our various hidden talents; people directly experienced that each of us has many competencies that potentially can be mined in different situations.

Here in Seattle we had a very different morale event. You can take your team to a restaurant called Kaspars where they take you back in the kitchen and organize you into smaller teams. Each team creates a course of a gourmet meal. Everyone wears chef’s clothing, and we ran around in the industrial kitchen, squeezed around each other, and shared the equipment and resources to pull the meal together. The chef moved from team to team and taught each of us a little of what we needed to know to create the course. During this event there is lots of laughter, but also lots of concentration as we taste and season and get our hands in the food. Again, it is about creating a user experience from a design (the recipes), but it is also about reusable patterns (sauces, etc.) that are used in different ways. When we were about two-thirds of the way done, we all went out into the dining room. It was a beautiful space with a view of the Olympic Mountains. Crystal and china and silver were everywhere, and there was ample wine. The sub-team that created the first course went back, suited up again, finished off their course with help from the chef; and then they served it. We all sat and ate and talked about the experience. Then the next sub-team would go back and do the same thing. The ample wine clearly greased the conversation and the sharing. Finally, the chef came out and went through the menu with us, talking about how with the basic patterns of each course, you could vary this ingredient or that ingredient and create a whole variety of experiences. Through this event another way of experiencing teamwork was demonstrated. The kitchen was a kind of dance. The resulting experience touched nearly every sense. The richness of this morale event served as a context for the way my current team framed its shared values, and how we want to operate as a team.

Clearly one of the most important influences on the organization’s climate is the manager. This is especially true for a UX team where the leader and the team often feel out of sync with the engineering culture around them. I have found that my teams are often tuned in to what I am feeling, and to how senior management is relating to us. If my boss is largely absent from the team and they have no sense of what he or she is feeling about their work, or if my boss is either hostile or a randomizer, the team feels it and responds to it. As a manager I am often caught in between — on the one hand with a trust bond with my team that dictates that I should be as candid as I can be, but on the other hand with a responsibility as a manager doing my best to represent the company and its management chain. I have repeatedly found that building loyalty to a bad senior management team unfortunately can have a backlash effect on how I am seen as a manager; and if the senior managers really are not the best, it is clear who will take the beating if the UX team is not happy.

One of my managers, who was particularly astute and a mentor in guiding me through the organizational politics, had a piece of interesting advice. He noticed how loyal I felt about my team, and he argued there should be a limit to that loyalty. Just as I try to create an environment where each person on the team gets up in the morning and is excited about the day ahead, he argued that I should be feeling that as well. If I do not, if the prospects in the organization will not let me achieve the team vision, and if what I do achieve will not be recognized and contribute to my own growth, it may be time to move on. He argued that the team will take care of itself. Some of the best will follow, and others will move into their own new opportunities. This is even true in situations where everything is going reasonably well but the excitement of the job is no longer there. Some people start a job and are there for years and years. Some people receive the most stimulation during startup phases, others from big challenges or big problems, others from periodic new experiences, and others from implementing and optimizing. Just as with your team, it is important to know yourself.

The team definitely picks up the vibe from the manager. When you are excited about the job and the prospects for the team, when you believe in the vision and the mission, and when you are having fun and enjoy working with the team they will feel it and respond to it. At one of the management courses I attended, they strongly encouraged scheduling a regular time to just get outside of the office and think a bit. They had us practice taking daily time to check in on ourselves, to explore what is and is not going well, and to sort the chaos into more concrete steps to address making things better both personally as well as for the team and the work program. The course encouraged thinking about what is happening right now, what you are doing, what you are feeling, and what you have been thinking about. They suggested working through what you are trying to achieve and what you may be doing that is getting in the way of achieving your goal. They then encouraged brainstorming alternatives and thinking about what you might change, and what you should keep doing or what you should do more.

I found over the years that having a personal mentor or mentors can have a similar function. Early in my career I looked for people who struck me as being particularly successful in areas of the business where I wanted to grow, and I asked them if they would be willing to serve as mentors. Even now, it is clear that there are many smart people out there with life experiences that I will never have. I have been fortunate to have several people I consider both friends and mentors. I always feel privileged to get together with them periodically to pick their brains on whatever issue it is that I am working through.

I have been lucky on several of my teams to have key people on the team with high emotional IQs who are especially attuned to my state. They will leave a card or a note or a book or something else often at a time when I am stressed. When I get something like that it is a wake-up call. Not too surprisingly, when I find myself in that situation I often realize that I have not taken time off for a while. The other day, for example, I suddenly discovered I was only half way through the year and had somehow accumulated an entire month of vacation time. No wonder stress was building. I know I need to give myself the same advice I give my team, take time off. If I am not taking time off and if I am sending e-mails in the middle of the night and all weekend, the team will feel that they need to do it as well. This makes it even harder to get them to the work-life balance that makes them the most creative and productive.

For myself, there are other things that add spice to the job and that make it more interesting. I enjoy my own research and working on tough problems. I like to get in the flow of inventing something new. Professional activity provides a chance for stimulation, for growth, and for networking. I personally enjoy teaching as well and working with students on research and sharing my experiences with research, design, and management.

Hal Hendrick (2010), a luminary in the human factors and ergonomics area, has recently published It All Begins with Self: How to Become a More Effective and Happier You! based on a course that he has taught over the last 19 years. His book covers several important areas for growing as a leader, drawing in part on his own experience in the user experience field. He addresses becoming more self-aware, improving communication and influencing others, reducing your stress, moving toward conceptual maturity, and leadership.

The lesson is make sure to take care of yourself. If you are doing your job, taking time off will not hurt the team; in fact it will give members of your team a chance to grow their own leadership skills. Take a break and keep your own work-life balance in check, and model the right behaviors for your team. Find the things that energize you and make sure they are present in your job. Check in on yourself periodically to make sure you are not falling into a rut, but are taking risks and staying in your own zone of optimal development.