When I started working for HBO 10 years ago, one of the first big projects I worked on was the redesign of the main HBO website. 

There were many reasons it was being redesigned, but I'll only get into one of them here: that the image production process was a sh*tshow.

The main HBO website required key art from different shows and series to be cut into around 10-12 different sizes, with different safe areas, for each piece of art. There were approximately 100 shows per quarter (at the time) that required images to be cut. 

The amount of time to do this for each show varied depending on the type of modifications needed to adapt the art, but it could be an hour or multiple hours of modifications and resizing for each artwork.  

We were spending SO much time and so much bandwidth on this production work. Even worse, the designers on my team had so many mind-blowing skills, but they were spending most of their days cutting squares into smaller squares. This was making them feel jaded — and it was making the department view the entire team collectively as "junior employees."

During the redesign, I worked with the teams involved to ensure the new website design was able to reuse various image types rather than forcing a brand-new version of an image to be created for every single placement.

The result?

-We went from 10 required resizes for each key art to only THREE required resizes.

-We simplified the design so that it did not require the images to be prepared in a such a unique way for each placement, and it could be template-ized to a single file on our end.  The average time spent per title reduced from hours to minutes.

-There was more than a SEVENTY PERCENT reduction in the amount of time needed to produce artwork for the same number of titles. 🤯

Because I made a stand for this system to be designed better...we freed up all this extra time and money to be able to get more involved in, well…everything. What I did, as boring as it sounds to be arguing about image types, was one of the things that made it possible for us to show that we were more than just "busy-work" artists. 

There's a whole bunch of stories I could tell you about similar things I did to intentionally create more space for innovation on my team in the midst of keeping critical items on track.

When I started, my design team had mainly been used as a support team doing image production work for the main website. 

But when I left 8 years later, we’d quadrupled in size and had become the in-house design solution for social content design, AR content, micro-content and social video, product design for the official HBO website, podcast production & marketing, website design for special activations, and various other things. 

We’d become leaders in our own right in the marketing of each show, the product, and the brand itself. We'd become well-known for working efficiently.  

We'd absorbed creative and design responsibilities that included, per quarter, ~75 marketing campaigns, around 25 podcasts, 2-3 augmented reality filters, hundreds of video and motion assets that ranged from smaller social assets to full-length podcast episodes, product design oversight of our main marketing platform, several brand social channels, in addition to that 100-title-per-quarter workload I mentioned earlier.

There's no way I could have enabled that for my team if I'd clung to my single-person mindset. If I'd been convinced that the only way to lead well was to be the shiniest person on the team.

Point of fact, several of them had much better skills than me in certain areas. I am proud of that, not scared of it. 

I also wouldn't have been able to do it if I'd been scared to introduce better processes for fear of making us look redundant.

I don't say all this to toot my horn, but because I believe that media tends to send all the wrong messages about leadership.

Media says leadership is talking a lot, seizing control of anything and everything in your view, being the best at your craft and "looking the part." Especially that last one.

But in my experience, none of that is what actually matters. What matters is getting to know your team, understanding the blockers to their success, and working to remove them. Growing in a way that is natural and makes sense — not land-grabbing everything around you regardless of whether or not you understand how it works.

Look, I have confidence in my skills and I believe I'm a pretty solid designer in my own right.

But I KNOW that what I can do can't possibly compare to what a well-functioning team of designers can do...even a small team.

Well-functioning teams can change the world.