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Making an impact as an individual contributor

6 ways to increase your influence

Many people buy into the misconception that the best way to increase impact is to manage people. But management is not the only path to leadership. Individual contributors (ICs) can also wield a wide sphere of influence, both inside and outside an organization.

Here are six things you can do to chart your course toward an outsized impact:

1. Make the craft to business connection
Designers of all levels have to reckon with the fact that the business is an essential part of our craft. When you help identify opportunities, map major initiatives to business outcomes, and support other ICs in doing the same, you increase your functional impact.

2. Help others level up
Craft excellence is important, and it can absolutely help you increase your impact. But you’ll get to a point in your career where greater influence happens through and with others. Look for opportunities to teach and mentor more junior designers, helping them level up their own craft while continuing to produce your own high-quality work.

3. Develop your functional team
Work with your manager to define what the team needs, and then seek out opportunities to contribute. They could range from improving craft to helping the team be more productive or efficient to shaping team culture and practices.

4. Facilitate cross-functional decisions
Think about how you can get involved with projects that stretch across multiple teams or products. As you get involved in these types of projects, you can combine your facilitation and relationship-building skills to make cross-functional connections more broadly and at higher levels than before.

5. Lead complex projects
You’ll gain greater visibility as you take the helm on complex, ambiguous projects that other designers are contributing to. These are the sorts of projects that allow you to build cross-functional relationships and practice important skills like project management, mentorship, and effective critique.

6. Create north stars
Develop and communicate your future vision for a product. You can create the frameworks and north stars that shape mental models, strategy, and ultimately roadmaps. Then, align a cross-functional group around them to make pivotal product decisions.

All of this may sound like a big ask, and it is.

That’s why increasing your impact is something you’ll work toward gradually. Manage your expectations — it takes time to build up the skill and experience required to move from level #1 to #6. (Gaining skill and experience is also the reason why climbing levels later in your career takes longer than it does when you first start out.)

Get rigorous about time management. To increase your influence, you’ll need to shift a portion of your time away from project work and toward systems design, capacity building, and accomplishing work through others.

It’s all worth the effort. You’ll find that when you widen your sphere of influence and build more connections and relationships, you can accomplish more than ever before.

If you want to increase your influence as a senior creative, we recently introduced a workshop series created specifically for individual contributors: Design Leadership for ICs.

Here are three ways Design Dept. can help you grow as a leader:

1. Attend a workshop to focus on a learning area, or design a customized learning series for your team
2. Work one-on-one with leadership coach to tap into your creativity as a leader and transform the way you work with your team
3. Sign up for our newsletter to get design leadership wisdom in your inbox each week