“We succeed when we tell good stories in the organization, and I think all of us can learn to be better storytellers.”
Welcome to the Inspirational Leaders Series, a collection of short interviews with sharp, impactful leaders that I know and respect—because the business world needs more refreshing people like them.
Meet Greg Petroff. With over 25 years of experience in design, Greg has an extensive track record of leading teams that deliver user-centric, context-driven, creative products and services that enhance the efficiency of enterprises and organizations. His mission is to bring design to the forefront of organizational communication, culture, and strategy, and to empower users with seamless, intuitive, and engaging solutions that solve their problems. He also thinks of himself as an ifnographer or possibilitarian.
(Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
WHY DO YOU CALL YOURSELF AN IFNOGRAPHER AND POSSIBILITARIAN?
I'm an architect by background, I have two degrees in architecture, I started my career as an architect, and then I drifted into digital and software, etc. We have a whole bunch of friends from our college years that could never figure out what I do. I was sitting in a ski cabin up in Tahoe with a bunch of my architecture friends, and one of them said, “I know what you are. You're an ifnographer.” And I said, “Well, what is that?”. And they said, “You're that guy who figures out ‘What if?’”—and it really stuck with me. I think a lot of what we do in design is discern what the possible future could be. So that was sort of the starting point of that piece. As for possibilitarian, you know, I've always been about the art of the possible. I'm very optimistic that we can solve problems within the constraints that we may have, that there's always a way that you can juxtapose or combine or put things together, and you know, improve the situation. It's really about having a positive outlook from a problem-solving perspective.
LET’S SAY YOU WERE GOING TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT YOUR LEADERSHIP APPROACH AND THAT BOOK WAS GOING TO HAVE CHAPTERS THAT HIGHLIGHT DIFFERENT THINGS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO YOU. WHAT CHAPTERS WOULD YOU PUT IN THAT BOOK?
I think designers do well with clarity, as much as we say we love ambiguity. To do good work, you need to have the box defined, and then you can always go outside the box, but you need to have the box—otherwise, you spend too much time moving around, trying to figure out where you are. And so I think one of the key things a leader can do is to drive clarity in the organizations that they work in. We find today often that design leaders are actually spending a lot of time with their product colleagues to drive more clarity out of roadmap so that they can then give that to their teams so that they can be more effective.
So, there would be a chapter on clarity and one on being kind to yourself. I think as you move up in leadership, it can get lonely at times. There's not anything you can share with your own team and your cross-functional peers may not actually understand all the things that you need to be taking into account because they have different backgrounds and different roles and jobs.
Then I would write something about over-communication. I think one of the things that's interesting about design teams is that they need to feel safe and purposeful to perform well. And if you don't have those conditions set up, they can get distracted. I gave a talk maybe 10 years ago and the premise that designers are natural-born conspiracy theorists. If we work in large organizations, if there's change going on in the leadership level, we see it before it gets announced. Leaders will believe that they're not behaving differently, but they are because they know something about the future state. Because we're human, we usually figure out the worst case and then, all of a sudden, we're distracted. We're not focused on work. You have water cooler conversations, etc. And so with design teams, you cannot avoid change in large organizations. When I was at GE, it happened every eight months. But what you can do is say, let's focus on the work. If we focus on the work and do great work, everyone's going to be fine. You really have to spend a lot of time with teams, giving people clarity, insight, outcome, direction, and repeat that over and over again. So that folks feel like they're connected to something that's meaningful for them. And if you do that, then you get higher productivity, and people feel better about the work that they're doing. And the quality of the work goes up too.
PEOPLE ARE GOING TO FEEL WHAT’S HAPPENING WHEN THINGS ARE CHANGING, EVEN WHEN NOBODY’S TALKING ABOUT IT. THEY’RE GOING TO CREATIVELY COME UP WITH REASONS FOR WHY IT’S HAPPENING, WHETHER OR NOT THOSE ARE REFLECTIVE OF REALITY.
Right. You can't avoid it. Large organizations change as part of the process, but you can help people feel more comfortable with it. One thing we know for sure is change is happening. It's always something that you have to address. Sometimes it happens to the design organization; sometimes it happens to other teams; sometimes it happens to strategy. Sometimes it happens to leaders. It has happened to me. So I think the more transparent you can be with your teams, the better. Part of that is recognizing how much they can carry. I've made that mistake before where I've overshared, and then people are like, “Oh my God, what's going on?”. You need to be very, very clear. That helps people stay grounded and feel like they're part of something.
I THINK THE IMPLICATION FROM A LEADERSHIP PERSPECTIVE IS MANAGING THE NARRATIVE, THE EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL NARRATIVE OF THE TEAM AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.
We succeed when we tell good stories in the organization, and I think all of us can learn to be better storytellers. And so that's also one of the things that I might have a chapter in a book around, growing storytelling skills. At Cisco we built this thing called Campfire, which is all about storytelling. We brought invited guests to talk about different ways to tell stories.
WHAT ARE THE OBSTACLES YOU’VE RUN INTO THAT HAVE HELPED SHAPE YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON HOW LEADERSHIP SHOULD WORK? WHY WOULD THOSE BE CHAPTERS IN YOUR BOOK?
I think you learn from the opportunities that you have in front of you. Every company that you work for has slightly different culture. What may have worked in Company A may not work in Company B as successfully as you'd like. I think there are a couple of things that are really important to learn when you move to a new company. One is to understand the maturity of the organization that you're in and its ability to receive the work that you are providing. You don't want to make the mistake of doing design strategy if there's no partner on the other side to receive the content. I've seen other people do that, where they say, “Oh, I'm going to add design strategy. And if we do it, then people will come. And they will love it.”.
The reality is, if you don't have a partner on the other side that's asking for it, it's arguably wasting company resources. If you think of a maturity curve of design organizations, it's to assess where you are and where you want to be, and then make steps that are practical and smart along the way so you have owners on the other side, or stakeholders on their side, who are invested in the result that you're building. It doesn't mean that you can't get to doing strategy.
Recently we did this mountaineering idea exercise with my team, and we said, “Look, we're trying to get to the top of the mountain. We're at base camp. What has to be at camp two? And we can't go to camp three before we get to camp two.” We had the team generate the ideas of the things that we needed to have in place. Once camp two is stable, you can start thinking about getting to camp three, right? I think an important thing for us as design leaders is to really recognize the maturity of the organization to accept the different kinds of things that design can bring to the table. And then be smart about how you build that capacity in the organization over time.
YES. SET YOUR OWN EXPECTATIONS ACCORDINGLY.
That's right. I think we all want to be a stage five design team, right? There's very few of those. I've never been able to get there. I think I've gotten to stage four and different maturity models once or twice, but we aspire to do that. You want to be in a spot where design is part of transforming the organization. It's doing work that's changing the outcomes of the business and creating outcomes for the users that the business is serving. And doing it in a way where your cross-functional peers recognize it and go, “Wow, that is super valuable. We want more of that.” To do that, you have to build trust with your cross-functional peers and you have to take steps along the way. Storytelling is a really important part of that aspect. You have to make sure that the work that you do is rock solid, but then creating space for exploration or moving to that next level is a trick. Sometimes it's very hard because you may not have the resources or you may not have the right people. You may have deadlines that are consuming your capacity and you have to make tough decisions. I think if you do that, then you start to build credibility and organization, and you have the ability to make change happen.
TELL ME MORE ABOUT WHAT HAS MADE YOU THE KIND OF PERSON AND LEADER YOU ARE.
I've always gravitated towards leadership roles, even when I was young. I like being in the middle of stuff and trying to help people along the way. I resonate when I'm helping people grow. I really love hiring people who are much smarter than I am, enabling them to be successful, and placing them in positions where they can maybe take over or move on to something that's better for them. I'm a big fan of servant-based leadership where the leader is not directing all the traffic. The leader is creating the conditions for others to be successful. Often my design problem is creating the conditions for individuals to be successful, to see their own careers grow. It's an art to be able to have an organization that allows you to mature people over time and identify what's in the best interest for each person in your team. At the same time, recognize you're running a business and some may not be aligned.
I'm very people-centric in terms of the way that I operate. I also believe that even when people are struggling in an organization, it may be that they're in the wrong role or that the conditions aren't set up for them to be successful. And they don't have the skill set or self-awareness to recognize how to get out of that. If I can coach or help people, that would be the first step to help them be more successful in the organization as a whole. Then, lead with empathy. To the degree that you can be vulnerable with your team and explain that you are human and fallible as well. It helps people recognize that they can be as well. I want people to become their authentic self when they come to work. Doing that sometimes requires us to be a little bit more open about our own selves along the way.
CREATING A SPACE WHERE PEOPLE CAN BE THEMSELVES IS SO IMPORTANT.
You don't get amazing work if you don't create conditions for people to be their full selves. We can help people become more self-aware. Then people can leverage their strengths and feel safe in doing so. In the end, what happens is the quality of your outcomes gets better over time. It's a strategy for doing great work. There's definitely room also in terms of my leadership environment to create a forum or a salon-like environment for great ideas to flourish. I want the folks that work for me to be empowered.
THE PHRASE THAT’S COMING UP FOR ME IS FROM THE FIELD OF DREAMS. IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME. IF YOU BUILD THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT, GREAT WORKS COME OUT OF THAT.
You can have a high-performing design organization and you can be doing great work, but your cross-functional leadership may not recognize it. You have to pay a lot of attention to the metrics that your cross-functional peers are measuring. How do you explain the wins that you're having in a way where they see them as well? That's challenging when you're pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Maybe you're showing up with something that a product peer or an engineering peer might feel like is their territory. Or maybe they didn't expect a design to show up in a certain way. As much as you can have a high-performing team, one of the design leader’s biggest jobs is to manage. Most of my time is spent managing with my cross-functional peers or managing up. And most of my staff's time is managing down and with their cross-functional peers. Together, we build a bridge between the work that we're doing and the outcomes the company is expecting, telling the story of the impact that we're making in a way the organization values.
THAT REMINDS ME OF THE QUESTION, “IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST, AND THERE’S NO ONE AROUND TO HEAR IT, DOES IT MAKE A SOUND?”. AS A LEADER, YOUR JOB IS MAKING SURE THAT THE FOLKS AROUND THE TEAM UNDERSTAND THE VALUE THAT THE TEAM IS CREATING.
At the end of the day, even if you're the leader of the organization, and you have super talented people underneath you, and you're kind of in the background, kind of orchestrating, there's some piece of your portfolio that you have to own. You have to show up and say, my fingerprints are on this. Engineering and product want the same thing. They want to see you not just as a successful leader of your organization, delivering results; they also still want to see you as a designer. I think for many of us who get really busy, or have very large organizations, that can be very hard. I want to have a very small team that just works for me and is incubating stuff that I can bring to the table. In large organizations, there's that visibility of, are you effectively delivering all the things we need? But also, is there some special sauce that the leader is bringing to the table?
A LOT OF PEOPLE IN THE DESIGN WORLD WANT TO MOVE INTO MORE SENIOR ROLES, AND THEY ARE WORRIED ABOUT BEING ABLE TO STILL BE CREATIVE.
I think you can still stay engaged with the work even as a leader. I mean, obviously, there's lots of things that leaders have to do that designers don't like doing. Budgets and headcount and evaluations and performance reviews. There's a ton of administrivia that happens in organizations that are actually important. But we're not necessarily super enthused to do it all the time. Frankly, you need to do it well, because you want to help your organization be more successful.
WHAT IS A BELIEF OR TWO THAT YOU HELD ABOUT LEADERSHIP EARLIER IN YOUR CAREER THAT YOU’VE SINCE CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?
I'm a very patient person. I'm usually willing to listen to differences of opinion. When I was working at GE, about 10 years ago, I had assembled this really awesome team. We were very popular. There were lots of asks for our time, and I thought at the time, I should answer everything. I tried to be everywhere at all the places if I could.
And then I had colon cancer and had to take a step back. When I came back, one of the things I learned was that your time is super valuable. What you choose not to do is almost as important as what you choose to do. You have to protect your space from people who are asking things from you, for all sorts of legitimate reasons or just because they are who they are. And say no. Because that gives you the runway to do the things that you're saying yes to. That was a hard lesson for me to learn. But I learned it because during my recovery my energy was so low. I really had to be ruthless about what I said yes to. My time was very, very valuable to me, and I worked through that whole experience, which was like, a little bit crazy, but that's how I processed it. Thankfully, I'm all fine and healed up from it. That was a major learning for me. Use your time wisely.
The last thing I think is declaring what you're not going to do is really important. Making it clear for people that we're not doing that. The reason behind that is in organizations, human nature is such that, if there's an idea that someone wants to promote, they're going to do the job that you ask them to do. And they're going to do the job because they believe either that it’s going to allow them to gain traction in the organization and allow them to move forward, or it's the thing that they love doing. All those are great reasons for them.
But they're not great reasons for the organization as a whole. And every time you have that extracurricular idea floating around in the organization, it means that someone's having a meeting about it. It can create friction in organizations and people even start competing for resources to promote those ideas. Some managers may support that, for their own reasons to either help that person move forward or help their own agenda and organization. What ends up happening is you start to lose your capacity to work on the things that are really important because you've got these little extra things going on. I think one of the things I've noticed in a lot of organizations is we don't have the courage to stand up and say, “We are not doing this. If we see people doing this, we're going to ask them to stop doing it. Because it's something we're not doing right now. Now, you may not agree with that. If you don't, then that's okay. Maybe this isn't the right place for you to park your hat.”. Knowing what you shouldn't be doing is really, really important.
THERE WAS A WOMAN I WAS SPEAKING WITH WHO SHARED THAT SHE HAD A MANAGER THAT WAS REALLY GOOD AT SAYING NO. SHE FOUND THE SITUATION REALLY LIBERATING BECAUSE HER MANAGER WAS MODELING NO, AND IT MADE IT MORE OKAY FOR HER TO SAY NO.
One of the things that you have to do if you're going to be successful is understand your capacity, like really well. You should have an air table or some tool that shows the work that your teams are doing down to the week. If a leader comes to you and says, “We need you to do this.”, you can say, “That's awesome. If we're not in capacity, great, we can take that on. That's a really interesting idea.”. Without that, you don't have the bargaining power within the organization and you end up having to say yes to things from senior leadership. Sometimes senior leadership is asking you to do something because they know something, they see something that they can't articulate well, but they're right. And you have to just go with it and say, “We'll figure it out.”. But then you still have to go all the way through your organization and say, “We're not asking people to do more than they're already doing. We have to work smarter, and we have to figure it out. Is there something we can stop doing to support some new initiative?
WHAT TIPS WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE WHO IS CURRENTLY NOT IN A LEADERSHIP POSITION BUT WANTS TO BE? WHAT’S SOMETHING YOU WOULD SUGGEST TO THEM TO SAVE THEM HEARTACHE?
I think it's important for people to recognize the difference between being a manager and being a leader. They're different, and you can be a leader without managing people. You can be a manager and not a leader. Leadership is about influence. There are individual contributors (IC) in organizations who have enormous influence. Leaders and organizations who recognize them should have a performance track that allows someone to be an IC, at a director level, or even a VP level if their impact is high enough. If they can pull the organization in a certain way based on the way they work, the way that they collaborate, the way that they organize people towards an outcome. Leadership is about setting the conditions for people to be successful, setting a vision of what you’re keeping people accountable to. Delivering results.
Managing is about growth, maybe telling people what to do. That's important, and you need that, but leadership is much more about the driving impact, and bringing people with you along on that journey. The advice I would give someone early in their career is when you have that first role, the first thing to master is the management level. You need to master that because you need to know how to do that. You'd be surprised how many leaders and organizations never master that activity and are terrible at it. They're all career. You need to focus on learning how to communicate effectively and aligning your team towards a goal. How do you take them on that journey? How do you make them feel? Have they accomplished something? What are the rituals that you create to celebrate along the way? How do you make tough decisions and be explicit about them? Leadership roles mean you can’t be best friends with everybody in the organization because sometimes you have to make choices that are hard.
