Kindness First

Kindness allows for team members and clients to get to the root issues and form strong business relationships. Being kind to my team allows them to share genuine roadblocks in processes and have a smoother communication process throughout project work.

Emotional Resilience

Keeping it cool and keeping it together are important to my management style. When issues come up, I start with an “airing of grievances,” even if I cannot change what is going on with my team it is important for me to hear them out and see how they are feeling. Once we move to the “finding the solution” part of the meeting, I work to keep gripes to a minimum and focus on honest positives and negatives.

One-on-Ones are Key

One-on-Ones are an important venue for a conversation between myself and team members I supervise as well as myself and my supervisor. These venues allow us to get to know each other, talk about current blockers and career goals. For people I supervise, I like to discuss trends I see with them, for example in their redlines or with their team interactions. I want to have similar conversations with my supervisor to feel like part of the team and the overall company, to discuss ideas and difficulties.

Conversational Mark ups

It is a personal style choice, but it’s important to me to make conversational mark ups. Markups that ask questions as “based on what you’ve drawn in your elevations, I would expect sconces on the lighting plan, is that correct?” I want the team member to understand the why behind a mark up and add that to their thought process when they are creating drawings. These questions should encourage them to respond and promote the understanding that the drawings have to stand alone and show their vision completely.

Developing concise and easy to navigate documentation

Documentation that is easy to navigate, accessible to multiple tiers of coworkers, and prevents silos allows for an even playing field across team members. It allows for an increase in quality and decrease in team frustration. These should be living documents, and team members should always have input into adding to and editing them.

Proper noun processes

Processes should have the same proper noun or reserved term across communication. The process should have the same name in billing software as it does in the document file structure, how-to document, conversations with clients and team, and coordinate to the same scope benchmark every time. This reduces overwork, promotes accuracy in billing and contracts, and clears up communication with all stakeholders.

Calendar days vs Actual Hours

Planning calendars need to have room for risk. Just because the task should take 4-8 hours does not mean it only needs one day in the project schedule. Accurate turn around times for client reviews and internal tasks must account for multi project work. This approach keeps more time in the schedule but allows the client to rely on an honest schedule that should be adjusted only by an outside force or unforeseen risk. Providing the hours expected gives the production team a transparent view into what their project manager expects of them and the level of detail required. It opens the conversation for a designer to say “hey I think this will take me twice as long as the estimate, am I approaching the task differently than you expected?”

Honesty in Billing

All timesheets should be filled out with actual hours worked. If a discount or cost adjustment needs to be made for a client issue, that should be coordinated with the Project Manager and Accounting. This prevents confusion when production team members are filling out their time sheet and creates real project time data . Sorting the data by employee tier provides accurate benchmarks for future project estimating.