The Culture Catalyst (Book Chapter)


This is a chapter from my book The Art of Hiring UX Designers: A Quick Guide for Design Managers

Chapter 2: The Culture Catalyst

As a design leader, it’s all the more important to emphasize and address the aspect of diversity. Only a truly diverse group of design professionals can build a winning user experience that is diverse and inclusive. Diversity is not just about organizational compliance — It is about being more just and human-centred at work. Understanding this perspective is of paramount importance — when you’re venturing into building your design team. To begin with, take stock of your team composition and study the group’s diversity in various aspects like ethnicity, colour, age group, gender, location, prior work experience, educational qualification, domain specialization, and core competencies. Check your premises. You might be unknowingly building a homogeneous team, that thinks alike, works alike, and in some extreme cases — where everyone looks alike.

What’s your diversity quotient as a design leader? This is the fundamental question you should ask yourself. In today’s progressive workplace — you have a great responsibility and transformational opportunity to ensure diversity and enable inclusion through dialogue, collaboration, and a shared mission. I call this the culture catalyst.

Don’t limit your diversity thinking to demographics. Incline yourself to hire people who have a prior exposure of diversity in domains, markets, technology platforms, products, processes, users, and organization cultures. This kind of diversity and versatility enables peer learning and the capability of your design team to solve a range of problems for your business. As a hiring manager, having fixed ideas and hiring people only from a select school of thought builds a mediocre team, in turn generating a mediocre user experience. For example — hiring people only from a certain design school, alumni group, ex-colleagues, or only with a specific domain experience, or only hiring people from a certain cultural background is a culture destroyer. However talented they may be, a homogeneous group of professionals can’t think much different, due to their similar backgrounds and life experiences.


Building a heterogenous group of designers is in the interest of your culture, product outcomes and organisational growth. The primary function of a design leader is to enable creative dialogue, empower people to challenge the status quo, and promote diversity and inclusion at work. Diversity in design hiring leads to diversity in design outcomes. This is a strategic and winning hiring strategy — the one that builds your culture and also contributes to the end business outcomes. Leaders need to create and nurture a goldilocks zone — where a culture of creative dialogue thrives. This automatically translates into advocating and building an inclusive user experience for your products and services.

Hiring managers should leverage the diverse domain expertise of new hires to infuse unique learnings to existing teams. Leaders should explore the possibility of cross-domain hiring, enabling a fresh perspective via cross domain learning and innovation. Cross domain learning can be transferred to other team members through workshops, activities and twinning on projects. Let’s say your product is eCommerce focused. Design leaders hiring the entire team only from the retail domain builds a homogeneous pattern. How good is this pattern for critical, interdisciplinary and creative thinking? How different can your product be in the market?

Identify gaps in existing teams and infuse new talent with complementing skill sets. Every UX designer has their own career aspirations and expertise in one or more core areas. It is the job of the hiring manager to identify and leverage the interests of a new hire to build mutual synergy. This is win-win for talent and teams. Always look for value adds. This way, everyone grows and contributes their best for the success of product or service delivery. Finally, hire for right values and attitude to build great culture.

Turn hiring into a culture catalyst.

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