Practicing effective leadership. The first step to building a luxury design firm.

THE FIRST STEP TO BUILDING A LUXURY DESIGN FIRM

Whether you are a sole proprietor, have a part-time remote team, or operate with a large in-office staff, the methods of guidance you’ll find here will be instrumental in increasing your efficiency and profit margin.

With experience building an international business, running a luxury interior design firm in Beverly Hills and working with AD 100 Designers and small firms alike over the past two decades, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work in every type of design firm, large and small. I want to share with you eight powerful action items that will truly make an impact on your level of success in the coming year. You will not find a lot of theory or philosophical insights here. This is all about implementation and giving you actionable tools to immediately impact your business for the better. I’ll provide you with methods, examples, and guidance that will make these action items painless and easy to implement.

In this blog series I will lay out for you, my eight steps to building a luxury design firm. The first of which is practicing effective leadership.

PRACTICE EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

It does start with you, and being a leader can be tough. It requires a nimble mind, boundless energy, an unwavering focus and guts of steel. There are many facets to effective leadership, and I am going to discuss two that I find most principal designers have had to master, especially during the last few years. These are delegation and leading through change.

DELEGATION

Delegation sounds so simple, but the truth is, its a real challenge to do well, especially for predominantly creative personalities. As a principal interior designer, you need to be extremely good at delegating. To compound this challenge is the emerging prevalence of remote team members, which adds an additional layer of demand for seamless delegation.

There is a difference between delegation and abdication. Lets first define what delegation is. There are seven elements of delegation. A delegated task is: specific, time bound, agreed upon by both parties, ethical, recorded, realistic, and has measurable results.

There are six steps to effective delegation. Pay attention here because these will help you.

SIX STEPS TO EFFECTIVE DELEGATION

1. First, define the task. This is before you even delegate it. Be clear about what it is you need done.
2. Figure out what it is you need in order to accomplish the task. Determine what resources are required. This includes information. If you don’t know the back story on a fabric or upholstery piece that was returned, and there is a lot of complexity to that back story that a junior is not going to know, then sourcing a replacement might not be the best thing to delegate. There is an art to knowing what you are best at researching.
3. Decide who is best suited for the task. Hopefully it’s not you, but sometimes it will be.
4. Explain the reason for passing the task on, if its not already clear. This is not about justifying yourself; it is about inspiring delegates by letting them know how this task fits in the big picture. Give them a little bit of context, so its not just a task. Who wants to just do tasks all day? That’s boring. Give the task meaning and it becomes a mission.
5. State the required results. Agree on a deadline and get your delegate(s) to say or write what they will have done by an agreed upon date.
6. Support and communicate throughout the process. If you can give empowering feedback, it will hone your subordinates’ skills, and that’s important because you invest a lot in your team; time, energy, and money. At a certain point, you need it to start coming back to you. Empowering feedback is a great method to boost your team’s value to the firm. Tell them what could have been done better, or, to engage them further in the revision process or in future tasks, ask them what they think they could have done better. Be very specific about what did or didn’t work. If they did a really good job, let them know specifically what it was about what they did that was so effective.

 

LEADERSHIP THROUGH CHANGE

Change: we’ve had a lot of it over these past few years, and I know it’s been a bit unsettling. However, it’s important for you to know that these changes a re just a natural phase of a company’s lifecycle. There are four general development cycles in any business. If we do a good enough job, they will cycle around like seasons.

There is a formative period. This is the phase in which external factors or internal forces are creating a need for change. This is where adaptation and development take place. Lots of moving parts, strategy and decision making will comprise a part of this period.

The next period is heavy growth. In this phase, you will be concerned with team development, capacity issues and the scalability of your company.

This is followed by a mature period where you’ve seen it all. It’s not new anymore. Business is pretty consistent and stable. All systems are in place and efficiency and profitability hit their peak.

Then, finally there’s the declining period. What was working well is no longer effective. What you were doing before does not produce the same results, so you see a decline. It’s your job to detect when it starts to happen and think, “Ha, we must be adaptive to survive. Who are we? Who are we now? What can we do differently? Who needs this? How do they need it?” There have been changes in the environment and your clientele that you need to detect. You will need to change and adapt in order to circle around to the formative period again.

In order to best adapt, you will need to identify the source of change as well as sources of new emerging opportunities, and identify possible strategies for capitalizing on these changes. The better you handle the declining period, the more likely your firm will thrive once again.

Leading your firm through change is especially challenging. The following is a list of things that can undermine your leadership your leadership efforts, so watch out for them. Would any of the following five pitfalls apply to you?

FIVE WAYS TO UNDERMINE YOUR LEADERSHIP EFFORTS

1. Allowing too much complacency and failing to create a sufficiently powerful guidance principle. That really is just all about goals that you set, and one of them is developing the key characteristics. This is your guidance. This is your navigation system. You must be anchored in that. You must know it. If you don’t know it, no one else will. People pick up on that. Be the straight arrow, that pure, pure tension. Be that sword.
2. Underestimating the power of vision and under-communicating that vision. Sometimes we take it for granted that everybody knows the vision. In fact, everyone does not have that list of key characteristics as goals, and there are lots of different ways that you can communicate them: with metrics, charts, or something similar that keeps staff in the loop and really builds that company culture. Think about it: all the big brands know who they are. Think of Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Starbucks; all those employees know who they are and can identify with that brand. It’s part of who they are. So it should be with your firm. You’ve got to give that to them. That’s your job.
3. Permitting obstacles that block the vision. Practice persistence. Be that force in your business that tears down walls. That’s what that’s about. Don’t let anything stop you.
4. Failing to create short-term wins. Some of these things take a long time. A lot of people need the opportunity to celebrate a small thing. Create that for them. In our office, we have a gong. Every time we do something that we feel in completely fabulous, whether its completing a project or meeting a major milestone on one of those projects, or signing a contract with a new client, or getting something really difficult done, we bang it. This is just one of a few things that make us feel that this is the best job and we are the person who does it best. We relish getting to take it off the wall, make our announcement, and gong really, really loud.
5. Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in a company culture. How many of you have implemented this great idea, learned this new thing, implemented it in your office, just to find that a few weeks later everyone is slipping back into the old routine? How many? Come on! Of course you have. It happens all the time, and why? Two reasons: either the system was not as well conceived or the change was not firmly anchored in company culture.

This implies that you have a company culture to begin with. You must reinforce your company’s key characteristics; everyone should know them by heart. Make it fun. A good technique is to talk about one of them for a little while at each weekly meeting. Perhaps your team can help you refine your company’s They’ll all take them to heart then!

This is the first step to boosting your efficiency and profit margin. Remember, you don’t have to be all alone on this journey. Aligning your firm for growth is the focus of this year’s BOLD summit, and we will guide you toward elevating your firm no matter where you are in the business growth cycle. See you at BOLD!!