The New Manager Mindset

Chapter 7. Becoming Convincing

One of the best things you can do for yourself as a manager is become convincing. Higher-ups, team members, other departments, customers—you name it, you’re going to be spending a lot of your time either pitching ideas, defending them, or trying to demonstrate the value of a decision.

Ironically, this is just the kind of thing they don’t teach you in school. So I thought I’d offer a little assistance.

First, a quick story I told in Experience Required that demonstrates why this matters:

In 2005, I was running a UX team and in need of another designer or two. I wrote up a job description, handed it off to HR to post to the company website, and waited for the fantastic candidates to come running, résumés in hand. The first one I got was from a guy on one of the product development teams—a programmer who had recently become enthralled by design and wanted a chance to dig in. Seemed he’d been hovering around the Jobs section of the company site waiting for just such an occasion. As soon as it showed up, he clicked the button.

I’m the type who hires from all directions. The way I see it, a person can be better at the more readily learnable aspects of UX as long as that person has the intense curiosity and other qualities so crucial for a good designer. That same year, for example, I hired someone with fairly poor design chops, but who was hooked on it like a drug and who had a cognitive psychology degree—a combination that’s pretty hard to find. I’m ...