For a large part of my career, being good at my job meant being good at making things.

I started in visual communication and advertising before moving deeper into digital products. My confidence came from the craft. I could look at a layout, identify what was wrong and improve it. I could bring order to a cluttered interface, make communication sharper and turn an unfinished idea into something presentable.

Being the person with the answer felt valuable.

Then I began leading designers.

Initially, I carried the same definition of value into leadership. I believed that the best way to maintain quality was to stay closely involved in everything. I reviewed every detail, corrected layouts and sometimes showed people exactly how I would solve the problem.

The work improved, but something else was happening.

The team was learning how to get my approval instead of developing its own judgment.

That was an uncomfortable realisation.

If the best work could only happen after I had touched it, I had not built a strong design team. I had built a dependency.

When I started building a multidisciplinary team, I did not select people only because of their academic background or because their portfolios looked fashionable. I looked for curiosity, thinking, honesty and the willingness to learn.

Some were stronger at interaction design. Some understood visual communication. Some could turn complex insurance information into simple illustrations. Others were good at organising a problem before attempting to design it.

My job was not to make all of them design like me.

My job was to help each person become better at what they could uniquely bring.

This required me to change my own behaviour.

Instead of immediately correcting a design, I had to ask questions.

What problem are we solving?

What made you choose this approach?

What would the customer understand first?

What might happen if we removed this element?

Asking questions takes longer than moving a few things around in Figma. It is also much harder because the final solution may not look exactly like the one in your head.

That is the point.

Leadership is not about producing several smaller versions of yourself.

It is about helping people develop the confidence and judgment to arrive at strong solutions without needing you to prescribe every step.

This does not mean lowering the quality bar. In fact, the bar becomes more important. A team needs to understand what good design means, why a particular standard exists and which principles should remain consistent across products.

The difference is that the leader owns the standard without needing to own every screen.

I still care deeply about craft. I still notice the spacing that feels wrong, the message that could be clearer and the journey carrying more friction than necessary. Experience does not switch itself off simply because someone receives a leadership title.

What changed was my need to prove that I was the person who had noticed it first.

Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is step in.

Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is stay quiet for another five minutes and allow someone else to find the answer.

I have not always got this balance right. There have been times when I intervened too much and times when I should have intervened sooner. Leadership rarely gives you a neat signal telling you which moment is which.

But I have learnt to ask myself a simple question:

Am I improving this particular design, or am I helping this designer improve?

Both matter. Only one of them continues creating value after the project is over.

The day I stopped trying to be the best designer in the room was not the day I stopped being a designer.

It was the day I began measuring my contribution differently.

Could the team take on a larger problem?

Could a designer defend a decision with confidence?

Could quality remain high even when I was not present in every review?

Could people disagree with me without feeling unsafe?

These became more meaningful measures of leadership than whether the final screen looked exactly as I would have designed it.

The best design leader in the room may not be the person producing the best interface.

It may be the person creating the conditions in which several other people can.