Catt Small

put in the kind of work that will result in building that influence and to actually result in the kind of impact that you want to make, so being more intentional.

And what that does look like is relationship building.

It's a lot of understanding the fears and the

concerns of your teammates, of your leaders, and being able to essentially angle your communications to adapt to what those people are prioritizing while still delivering the message that you intend to get across.

And that is the kind of stuff that I think that we tend to

Right now or before this book, I think a lot of senior designers didn't really have a resource to understand how much of the transition is communication based and based on mindset.

So one of the other things that you have to do, for example, is to kind of transition from

being told what to do to essentially diagnosing what is important.

And that was something that I partially struggled with myself because I had viewed my manager as kind of, you know, someone above me.

But then when I became a staff designer, actually, my manager is kind of my partner.

And, you know, now I kind of I approach the conversation more around, like, how do I give you the information that you need to make good decisions?

And, you know, I want to propose things

and kind of have you be a thought partner instead of having kind of potentially an adversarial work relationship.

So I think that's like a lot of the effort.

I meet with a lot of people from across the company to kind of stay aware of what's going on.

And then you kind of never know when that is going to come in handy.

For example, you know, like semi recently at my current employer, I was I was talking with this brand designer and, you know, she happened to mention like, oh, hey, you know, we're kind of working on this one project in particular.

And then I was in a design crit with several other people on a completely different team.

And they mentioned, you know, oh, like our colors are a little bit discordant in this particular way.

And I could be like, oh, hey, I actually know that there's conversation about these things right now, and I can connect you with those people.