[TMA] Overcome UX/Design Leadership's Learned Helplessness

Over the weekend we dropped the latest episode of Finding Our Way, (Apple Podcasts, Spotify) where Jesse and I discuss my 2025 State of UX/Design Organizational Health research and findings. That conversation, combined with having taught UX/Design Leadership Demystified last week, and some recent coaching discussions with design executives, has coalesced my thinking around how UX/Design leaders need to overcome a learned helplessness acquired over the last 20 years, and meet the current moment.

Yes, there are systemic reasons for UX/Design's challenges

Let me begin by recognizing there are very real reasons why UX/Design struggles relative to other functions in a company. One that has persisted for decades is how UX/Design is under-leveled in relationship to peers. As I said on the podcast:

"Design is one level lower in an org chart than product and engineering, right? So you’ll have a VP of Design, but their peers will be SVPs of product and engineering, or you’ll have a director of design who is working with VPs throughout the organization and that cascades down."

This will persist as long as design reports up through other functions and not into a business leader. As the organizational research shows, when when UX/Design reports into a function that is not strategic (like Engineering, Marketing, or even many Product Management teams), its health suffers, as its value is seen in execution and output, not definition and outcomes.

There's this conversation about how teams should be 'three in a box', meaning product, design, and engineering are partners, but when one of those practices reports in to one of the others, the power dynamics shift from "partnership with" to "in service to."

Not only is UX/Design under-leveled; it's under-understood. Unlike other functions of the firm, UX/Design is generative, creative, ambiguous, and human-centered. Its iterative and exploratory ways of working do not align with the mechanistic, programmatic, and analytic nature of the other functions of a firm. So, others simply don't 'get' UX/Design. And when they don't get it, they're less willing to empower it.

And, UX/Design leaders bear responsibility for their disempowerment

From around 2004 or 2005 through 2022, UX/Design teams grew, elevated up the org chart, got seats at tables, and its members got paid more. Many UX/Design leaders convinced themselves they'd arrived. That the work was done. That design's place in organizations was secure.

They were wrong.

While many UX/Design leaders took credit for perceived success, the reality is that this occurred due to a variety of forces outside of their control:

• agile transformations that led companies to build huge in-house product development teams
• the success of Apple and its association with design
• the acquisition of Mint and what it communicated to Silicon Valley about investing in design
• a business press enamored with 'innovation,' 'design thinking,' and 'the power of design'
• zero percent interest rates that gave companies access to free money.

When resources were abundant, these leaders were able to just ride the wave.

But, when things turned, they hadn't developed the muscles needed to perform the real work of leadership.

The heart of learned helplessness

The Organizational Health research identified a puzzling contradiction: On one hand, UX/Designers felt good about the work they delivered and its positive impact on users, but on the other, felt that their organizations were guilty of shipping low quality work, and that they don't have time or people to do their work well.

My interpretation is: For that which people can control, they feel pretty good, but in those areas where others get involved, things go negative.

But, to be a leader is to bring others along.

This lies at the heart of my 'learned helplessness' narrative. When the good times stopped rolling in early 2023, many leaders had no idea how to respond to adverse situations, lacked the self-awareness of their role in their own setback, and adopted victim stances.

Victim stances become an unfortunate reinforcing negative spiral. As one participant in my masterclass said, his design agency had been hired because an internal head of UX took a victim stance ("we don't have enough resources; bad outcomes are never our fault"), and the company's other leaders just sought to actively avoid them.

It's time for UX/Design Leaders to actually do their job

Creative leadership is only a small portion of a design leader's responsibility. More important is the work UX/Design leaders do to establish and environment where good practice is able to flourish.

And yes, this is more challenging because of the systemic issues I pointed out at the beginning. But, well, it's also the job. The UX/Design leaders who have struggled most these past few years are those who hadn't figured out how to:

• Understand the business context in which they were operating
• Navigate organizational politics without whining about how things "should" work
• Connect their work to business outcomes in ways that matter to senior executives
• Build relationships based on mutual value exchange, not just some shared belief in "good design"
• Develop practices for strategic, even visionary work, instead of being capable only of production-level efforts
• Articulate growth paths that set their teams and team members up for long-term success
• Fight for reporting structure changes (CEO/digital vs. IT/engineering)
• Push empowerment downstream to seniors (not just path up ladder)

Where There's a Vacuum, There's Opportunity

One participant in my recent masterclass said something that crystallized this: "We have a lot of victim mindset on my team. People are like, 'Product didn't give me the requirements, so I guess I'm just gonna sit on my hands and wait to be told what to do.'"

This is very much what UX/Designers and design leaders need to shift. Instead of learned helplessness leading to paralysis, or seeing something this as a burden ("why do I have to do product management's job?"), recognize that where there's a vacuum in authority and power, it's an opportunity to be seized.

How can I help you fill that vacuum?

If you've made it this far, you're likely interested in how to step up and meet the moment. And I've built my business to help UX/Design leaders to do just that. I'm looking forward to a 2026 where I'm enabling design organizations to be their best. Some ways I can be of service:

• Thought Partnership—This is my coaching practice. I work with design executives across the globe to help them situate and elevate their teams to reach their potential.
• Organizational Effectiveness Consulting—Either as a fractional contributor or on a project basis, I establish ways that your organization can improve its effectiveness, which in turn drives quality and leads to real impact
• Design Org Dimensions—My evolving digital 'book,' including the tools I use in my practice to assess organizational health and create team charters.

If any of this is of interest, don't hesitate to reach out, let me know what's up, and we can find a time to talk!