The three pillars of design leadership: vision, operations, and coaching

A while back I read an article about design leaders being a visionary, operator, or coach. I didn't make much of it until I started seeing "visionary" in almost all design director job descriptions—which became the inspiration for this article.

Looking back at my personal experience and interacting with and learning from leaders in past positions, most leaders are great at one, good at the other, and either don't have the time or the ability for the third.

As a leader, your ability to execute well depends on your ability to understand your strengths. You need to know what you're great at so you can capitalize on it. You need to understand what you're good at so you can do it long enough before you delegate it to someone who can do it better.

You also need to admit what you're not good at to ensure someone else on the team can do it—or make it your top priority to hire that person.

There is generally a feeling that one of these three is superior to the others. Most people you ask are looking for a visionary. However, the most important skill in an organization is the one that's missing or don't know they need. Understanding your skills and those available in your organization is key to recognizing the gap. For example, being an operations-focused leader is extremely important to an organization as long as someone else is there to set the vision. Operators keep the team functioning and growing together.

There are concrete reasons why you're great at one but not the others. Sometimes, you're born with it. Other times, it is your environment and life story that directed you to one path or another. Most, however, have been molded and hardened over time. Leaders, just like anybody else, get better at things the more they practice them, and the more you're good at something, you naturally end up gravitating towards it.

Vision

I've met leaders who are very capable of articulating a clear vision to their teams, rallying people around it, and thinking of the strategy around its edges. Visionaries serve as a north star to teams, helping to create a new future for an organization, not in all cases have lost their way.

Not all leaders are visionaries. In fact, most that I've met are not. The other angle to keep in mind is that there is generally limited space for how many visionaries you can have on your team before you start having too many visions and none serves as a true north star. Vision isn't just a statement. It is the ability to understand the market, the business, and the direction continually to align the direction of a company. Most companies have an aspirational mission statement, but their vision continues to evolve, and placing bets on a new direction has its risks.

Operations

This is key and a foundation for great leaders. Vision without execution is just that—a vision. Well-planned and productive execution is a skill that very few leaders truly excel at. Most leaders are good enough at execution to translate their vision but not necessarily good enough to carry execution forward. If you look around you, most visionary leaders that are successful have excellent operating officers, operations teams, or operations staff that cover for them and a design ops person is the number one hire on their team.

Design operations is the backbone that transforms creative vision into tangible outcomes. It establishes the systems, processes, and frameworks that enable design teams to work efficiently and deliver consistently. Without strong operations, even brilliant design concepts remain unrealized, deadlines slip, and quality suffers. A skilled operations leader ensures resources are properly allocated, workflows are optimized, and the team can focus on what they do best—designing—rather than getting bogged down in administrative chaos. In fast-paced environments where delivering value quickly matters, operations excellence is what separates successful design organizations from those that merely have good ideas.

Coaching

I personally find this one to be the hardest to do and the hardest to find in leaders. This is probably a result of multiple factors. Leaders are busy aligning vision or executing, sometimes even if they're not good at it, because that's generally the focus of the business and a leader's role. Coaching takes time, effort, and planning. It also takes a lot of thinking. Coaching is also a long-term investment. That said, coaching is probably one of the most important pieces of a company's ability to articulate a good vision and execute well on it. The ability to educate, improve, and continue to push your team forward is one of the most important things you can do long term.

Effective coaching creates a multiplier effect across the organization. When leaders invest in developing their team members, they're not just building individual careers—they're cultivating future leaders who embody the company's values and approach. This creates resilience within the organization, as institutional knowledge and leadership capabilities become distributed rather than concentrated. The best coaching leaders I've observed don't just solve problems; they build problem-solvers. They ask thoughtful questions that challenge assumptions and help team members develop their own critical thinking skills. This approach might seem slower initially, but it creates exponential returns as team members grow from requiring constant direction to becoming autonomous contributors who can coach others. In today's competitive talent market, having a reputation as a leader who develops people also becomes a powerful recruitment and retention tool—designers want to work with leaders who will invest in their growth.

If you're already a leader in your organization or would like to be one, what leadership pillar matches you?