#17: Leadership Experience Design with Roberta Dombrowski

Roberta Dombrowski is a passionate research leader focused on building research practices inside organizations. Over the years, Roberta has researched and designed experiences for communities of learners, educators, and enterprise clients at companies like Year Up, edX, Pluralsight, and The Predictive Index. Throughout it all, she strives to lead with empathy and mindfulness with everyone with whom she works.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. Leaders operate at every level—Whether you’re an individual contributor or a CEO, if you woke up this morning, you have the opportunity to be a leader.
2. No leader is perfect—You’re a work in progress, and as you expand your leadership scope, you won’t have all the answers. Be transparent and honest about this with your team.
3. Your leadership is an experience—Take a moment to check in with your followers and peers to find out where that experience is positive and where it could use some polish.

From the Source

“I think a lot of people who move from IC—individual contributor—into management still have that perception too. I've met tons of managers over the years who think about managing rather than leading and inspiring and things like that.“

“It's very robotic when you're just leading with managing tasks and outcomes. People are the best part of business and the work that you do. I remember every relationship that I have with someone that I work with. “

“What are the relationships that I want to build with people? What are the types of impacts? And building up my own confidence while I was doing it as well.”

“Whenever I go into an environment or I have the opportunity to give back to others, I always try to do that.”

“You're human. You're making your mistakes right along with your direct reports later on, along with other leaders too. So there's vulnerability and truth in that too. “

“If you're trying to think about your direct reports or even if you're hiring somebody—so say a candidate applies for a role on your team—What is your experience from the moment they hear about your organization?”

‘I do a lot of surveys when I'm doing employee experience work. Depending upon the size of the team that I'm working with or organization, I've done things like company values or team values surveys, quarterly reviews. So seeing how your team—Are they motivated? Are they inspired—keeping track of that, especially with COVID, sometimes you don't know, and you're not able to check in one-on-one with everyone.’

“I set up my mornings for deep work because that's what I know works best for me.”

Connect with Roberta

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertadombrowski

Website: http://robertalearns.com

Website: http://learnmindfully.co

Links

“Six Degrees of Design” reference:

https://www.niche.com/colleges/search/best-colleges-for-design/