Is it mandatory to be a good designer to be a great design leader?

What makes a design leader great?

Is it necessary to be a good designer in order to be a great design leader?

“Not really. How does it matter if a person is a good designer or not? If you want to be a great design leader, then managerial and process skills are most crucial for successful execution; everything else is secondary.

This is the most common answer that I get to hear whenever I pose this question to designers. I guess it’s because most of the design-led organizations grapple with planning, execution, and zillion other management related crapola. And maybe, just maybe, creative people find it a little difficult to brainstorm execution strategies. So a leader with such skills brings that missing piece of the puzzle with them.

No doubt, there is a certain element of truth in that answer but I’m not fully sold on it.

Of course, one has to have great managerial skills to lead anything. But, shouldn’t a leader have authority on the underlying nature of the business — in this case, design?

I’ve been wrestling with this thought for a while. No matter how much I think and the number of people that I talk to, it all gravitates back to a few central themes.

I don’t have an exhaustive list of traits of a design leader — Ah! that would require an exhaustive research at an epic scale.

But, the below list has recurring opinions that I heard from the fellow designer when I asked them “what kind of qualities are non-negotiable in a design leader?”

Putting down everything I heard and introspected-on as below-

Great design leaders are analytical

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” ― Alfred North Whitehead

Great design leaders have Sherlock Holmes like analytical skills

Being a creative genius is one thing but with great power comes great responsibility, so design leaders spend more time in the discovery mode. They listen more than they talk. They scout for problems, dive into…