It is a designer’s duty to aptly confirm the fit, importance, and purpose of a particular project in accordance with an organization’s vision. Easier said than done, it is but a challenging task to construct a detailed story, which defines what interacting with the parent company will entail in the foreseeable future. Organizations spend immense amounts of capital on digital assets that are eventually razed to the ground in a few years. Besides, some projects fail to see the light of day as they get eliminated at root level by unyielding internal competition. So how does one rise above hierarchical melodrama to make their voice heard and their work shine?
Organizations today are rife with politics. Smaller the issue, greater is the hubbub around it. When it comes to dealing with a human being, you need to take into consideration perceptions, ego, and inherent insecurities. The instant you create a situation where there is a winning side and a losing side, you create politics.
Office drama has an insane effect on internal dealings. Why, sometimes, irrespective of how dazzling your design may be, organizational politics will kill your idea before it really has a chance to blossom. It’s sad, yes, but unfortunately that’s how the cookie crumbles.
However, you need not despair as there is always a way to get out of sticky spots. The best option here is to deal with office politics at face value by surreptitiously eliminating perverse competition. This is how you proceed:
- The Resolute “Yes”
A very important aspect of understanding how to manoeuvre around organizational politics is the ability to say ‘no’ versus ‘yes’. You sweat it out in an office, clock in late hours, and strive hard to meet company deadlines, all to say that determined “yes”. The word is encouragement in itself. It bestows a respectful disposition to your dream, passion, product vision, design innovation, and eventually customer delight.
However, we all know that exercising this ideology is no mean feat. There are individuals or colleagues in an organization who have the tendency to raise concerns about almost all proposals. These concerns are reasonable, but they may or may not be valid. It could be constructive criticism to up your ball game or a hard Yorker to trip you up and damage your image as a competitor in the organization. If you feel that your opponents motives are personal, do not try to prove it as you’ll only be wasting your precious time and energy. The only solution: stand up to the competition, believe in your work, and say “yes” to dispense maximum credibility to your web design.
However, playing the “yes” game can be very costly. You are putting yourself out there by being highly specific. Basically, you are opening yourself up to vicious attack by attempting to accomplish something. Hold fast and stand your ground. Oh “yes”, you must.
- Design to Inspire
Designers are artists. Yes, that’s true. When coming up with a prototype or the initial layout, make sure you focus on the artistic elements as opposed to the technology or code that goes behind designing the website. In order to effectively eliminate undue competition, creativity needs to stump feasibility. The design needs to breathe life in order to have maximum impact on the customers.
Basically, your creative genius needs to be inspiring. Nobody is interested in flat or boring. Technologically “smart” designs are important yes, but make sure that they refrain from progressing on an uninspiring path.
- The Smooth Talk
This is perhaps the best option to attract attention without having to transact with unnecessary chaos. Use logic of your arguments to get the administration on board. Every individual in an organization intends to co-exist harmoniously, despite having knowledge of what actually happens at ground level.
Bigger the organization, greater is the chance of interacting with individuals who do not believe in the conjoined concepts of ‘reason’ and ‘collaboration’. They tend to hamper the acceptance and progress of your work through repeated arguments and criticism. This is where you bring your personal charm to effect. Possessing good communication skills, presence of mind, and tact will help you articulate your case better and sell an idea through all the obstruction that can be.
- Highly Reliable Visualizations
These visualizations could refer to anything from beautiful UI mockups, to freeform prototypes that could be tried by the audience, to user experience prototype on any topic, to a well-produced video showcasing the customers using the prototype.
You think your visualization could get rejected? Yes, it could. There are always some individuals who will say “no” to your idea. “No” is easy and, essentially, yawn-inducing. Such individuals lack counterproposals. They are afraid to go out on a limb for fear of being openly attacked. It is often not very difficult to sway such opposition. All you need to do is swoop in, tell a great story, project your visualization, and make the entire room fall in love with your design. The higher echelons will get excited and start defending your designs against the pessimists. Emotion will motivate them to advocate your idea, which is obviously a good thing.
The truth is that by setting the right tone you can easily neutralize the opposition in your organization. Having the right weaponry in your kitty will make every individual who’s trying to get in your way fall by the wayside.
Conclusion
If you really want to come up with an exceptional design, which appeals to the customers, then either partner with the doubters or run them over completely. Collaborating with the naysayers is always preferable as long as it ceases to conflict with the acceptance of your ideas. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. If you are working in an organization where people suffer from limited vision and politics are forever interfering in your design delivery, then you need to prepare yourself and fight.
You can never pick the people who you work with, but you can always choose the organization. This does not mean that a company comes with a tagline of what its employees are all about; however, this freedom to choose from a variety of organizations offering web designing jobs equips an individual with the required confidence and panache required to excel in this field.