Which Leader Are You Dealing With?

This article is adapted from our newsletter series on getting buy-in for human-centred design in the workplace. If you are not already subscribed, you can join our community at www.thisishcd.com to receive posts like this directly to your inbox.

What struck me most was how often the stories were not really about processes or frameworks.

They were about people.

A specific boss.

A particular director.

Someone in the C-suite who either opened a door or slammed it shut.

That tracks with everything I have seen over the years. The wall you hit matters, but the person standing behind it matters more.

​Jill Schulman​ spoke about this on the podcast when we discussed bravery in design leadership. And ​Marzia Aricò​ was refreshingly direct about the realities of leading design in organisations that are not set up for it.

What both conversations made clear is that you need to understand the person in front of you before you can shift anything.

You would not walk into a research session without trying to understand the participant.

So why do we walk into leadership conversations without trying to understand the leader?

Over the years, I have seen the same types of leaders come up again and again.

I want to walk through five of them here.

Not to label people or write them off, but because recognising what you are dealing with changes how you respond. And how you respond is often the difference between getting somewhere and going nowhere.

Ready? Drum roll...

1. The Metrics Leader.

Everything is a number. If you cannot put HCD into a spreadsheet with a projected ROI, it does not exist.

These leaders are not hostile to your work.

Most of them are not even aware they are blocking it. They just literally cannot see value through any lens other than quantified output. They were trained that way. They are rewarded that way. Their entire career has reinforced the idea that if you cannot measure it, it does not matter.

So when you walk in and talk about empathy, lived experience, or qualitative insight, you are speaking a language that does not register.

It is not that they disagree. It is that they do not have a category for what you are saying. You might as well be speaking underwater.

I wrote about this tension in "Connecting Design to Business Value", and the response told me this is one of the most common dynamics practitioners face.

Here is what I have seen work.

• Do not ask them to care about empathy. Show them what empathy saves.

• Connect your research findings to metrics they already track.

• Reduction in complaints. Call volume. Rework costs. Time to resolution. Average handling time. Cost per transaction. (Note: This is exactly where my ​Cost to Serve Model​ came from.)

If your research has uncovered that users are confused by a particular step in a service, do not present that as "users are frustrated."

Present it as "this step generates 40% of our inbound calls, and each call costs the organisation twelve euros to handle."

Same insight. Different language. Language they can act on.

The Metrics Leader is not your enemy. Repeat. They are NOT your enemy :-)

They are your translator once you win them over. Because when they start putting HCD outcomes into the numbers, everyone else listens.

2. The Speed Leader.

They want shipping, not thinking. Research feels like a handbrake. Co-design feels like a talking shop. They are under pressure to deliver, and anything that looks like slowing down is a threat.

I have a lot of sympathy for this type of leader, honestly.

Most of them are not anti-design.

They are just drowning in delivery pressure.

Their performance review does not ask whether the thing they shipped was the right thing. It asks whether it shipped on time. So when you turn up and ask for two weeks of research before the build starts, what they hear is "I want to push your deadline back."

And in their world, deadlines are not negotiable. Deadlines are how they survive.

As I wrote in "Why your big Design plans are stalling" last year, sometimes the problem is not the work, but the packaging. You are presenting HCD as a phase that comes before the real work. And in a speed culture, anything before the real work is overhead.

Here is what I have seen work.

Stop asking for time before the project. Start working inside the project's existing timeline.

Run a two-day sprint instead of a six-week study.

Do five user interviews in parallel with the kick-off workshops.

Give them something tangible fast.

A set of prioritised insights. A prototype they can react to. A one-page brief that reframes the problem.

What you are doing is proving that design can move at their speed. Not always. Not ideally. But enough to build trust.

Once you have delivered a quick win inside their timeline, you have earned the right to say, "Next time, if we start this two weeks earlier, I can give you something even better." That is a very different conversation from asking for permission upfront.

The Speed Leader respects momentum. Give them momentum first, then use it to negotiate space.

3. The Sceptic Leader.

They have seen it all before.

They sat through the Agile transformation.

The Lean rollout.

The innovation lab that launched with great fanfare and got quietly shut down eighteen months later. To them, HCD is just the latest rebrand of something that did not stick last time.

And honestly? They are not entirely wrong to think that. They have the background evidence to back it up.

Our industry has a branding problem.

Every few years, there is a new label for roughly the same set of principles. Design Thinking. Service Design. Human-Centred Design. Experience Design.

Each one arrives with its own consultants, its own certifications, its own promise that this time it will transform the organisation. And each one eventually gets absorbed into the existing culture without fundamentally changing it.

The Sceptic has watched this cycle enough times to stop believing in it. Their resistance is not ignorance. It is pattern recognition.

So, pitching them a methodology is the worst thing you can do. It confirms exactly what they already suspect. Another framework. Another initiative. Another thing that will generate a lot of workshops and then quietly disappear.

Here is what I have seen work.

Do not pitch anything.

Solve a problem they care about.

Find the thing keeping them up at night and use HCD methods to fix it without ever calling it HCD. This is what ​Marc Stickdorn ​refers to as stealth projects.

No workshops with sticky notes.

No journey maps on the wall.

No design thinking double diamonds in the presentation.

Just do the work. Talk to people. Understand what is going wrong. Come back with a clear, practical recommendation.

When the Sceptic sees results, then you can name the approach. Retrospectively. "That thing we did? That was user research. That was co-design. That is what HCD looks like when it is actually applied."

Let the method speak through outcomes, not through slides.

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4. The Political Leader.

This one is the trickiest because on the surface, they often look supportive.

They will nod along in meetings. They will say the right things about putting people first. They might even champion a design initiative publicly.

But underneath that, they are running a different calculation entirely. They are thinking about territory. About optics. About what your research might reveal and who it might reflect badly on.

They are not against HCD. They are against anything that shifts power dynamics or exposes uncomfortable truths about how decisions get made. And the thing about good user research is that it almost always does both of those things.

Your insights might reveal that a service fails because two departments do not communicate.

But the Political Leader runs one of those departments. Your journey map might reveal that a policy decision created a terrible user experience. But the Political Leader signed off on that policy.

So your work becomes a threat.

Not because it is wrong, but because it is right.

​Richard Gahagan​ talked about the importance of getting organisational culture right, and this is exactly that territory. The Political Leader needs to feel safe before they will engage honestly with what your research surfaces.

Here is what I have seen work.

• Frame insights as shared challenges, not blame. Position research as "we discovered" rather than "your team missed." Use language like "across the organisation" and "systemic" rather than language that points at specific functions.

• Bring the Political Leader into the process early. Not to approve the findings, but to shape the questions. If they feel ownership over the inquiry, they are far less likely to feel threatened by the answers.

• And if you present findings to the broader group, give the Political Leader a heads-up first. Nobody likes to be surprised in a meeting. Let them see what is coming. Let them prepare their response. That courtesy costs you nothing and buys you a huge amount of political capital.

The Political Leader will never be your biggest champion.

But they can go from being a blocker to being neutral. And sometimes neutral is all you need.

5. The Absent Leader.

They are supportive in principle but never available in practice.

They greenlight a project and then vanish.

No air cover when things get difficult. No escalation path when you need decisions. No presence in the room when it actually matters.

This one is deceptive because it feels like you have buy-in. You got the approval. You got the sign-off. The project is officially sanctioned. Hurray! I hear you say...

But sponsorship without presence is just paperwork.

When you hit a blocker and need someone senior to clear the path, they are in back-to-back meetings. When a stakeholder pushes back on your approach, there is nobody to back you up. When the project needs more resources or a timeline extension, the email sits unanswered for two weeks.

You end up carrying the political weight of the project on your own. And you do not have the organisational authority to carry it.

I talked about this in "Trust Comes First" because that is what it comes down to.

Without visible, active sponsorship, trust in the work erodes. People start to question whether leadership actually cares about this. And if leadership does not care, why should anyone else?

Here is what I have seen work.

• Accept that you are probably not going to change this leader's availability. They are absent because they are stretched, not because they do not care. So stop waiting for them to show up and build your support structure elsewhere.

• Find the ally in another function who can champion the work at their level. Not as a replacement sponsor, but as a peer voice that carries weight. Someone in operations. Someone in finance. Someone who has seen the value of what you are doing and is willing to say so in rooms you cannot access.

• Make it absurdly easy for the Absent Leader to stay connected. Do not send them long reports. Send them a three-line update once a week. "Here is what we did. Here is what we found. Here is the one thing I need from you." Make the ask so small that ignoring it feels harder than responding.

• Hop Tip: Document everything. When the project delivers results, you need a clear trail showing what decisions were made, what the research showed, and what the impact was. For this reason, you need to increase the allocation to administrative time. Because the Absent Leader will want to claim the success later. Let them. That is fine. What matters is that the work got done and the evidence exists for next time.

Every organisation is different. Every leader is a mix of these types depending on the day, the project, and the pressure they are under.

The point is not to put people in boxes. The point is to stop treating every leadership conversation as if the same approach will work. It will not. What lands with a Metrics Leader will alienate a Sceptic. What works with a Speed Leader will frustrate a Political one.