Hello and welcome to Design Leadership Insights, a podcast where I share the real stories, strategies and lessons learned from building and leading design teams. I'm Paul and I've spent the last 15 plus years navigating the complex world of design leadership in the fast-paced world of design and technology.

Retention is a persistent challenge. Most companies struggle with designer turnover rates. Watching talented professionals leave after just 18 to 24 months, the cycle becomes familiar, enthusiastic hiring, promising beginnings, and then the inevitable departure for better opportunities elsewhere. Behind each resignation lies a complex mix of unmet expectations, missed growth opportunities, and a disconnection between individual aspirations and organizational needs.

For many design leaders, breaking this cycle seems nearly impossible. When I joined a global logistics company, I was determined to break this cycle of turnover. I didn't just want to hire designers. I wanted to create an environment where they would stay, grow, and do the best work of their careers. Fast forward four years, and we'd achieved something that seemed impossible.

An 89% retention rate across a global team of 16 designers. Today I want to take you behind the scenes of how we built that 89% retention rate at this global enterprise. Not through fancy perks or inflated titles, but through a systematic approach to understanding what designers really need to thrive.

And I'll share the frameworks and practices you can implement regardless of your team size or where you are in your leadership journey. Let's start with something that fundamentally changed my approach to team development. The Petals framework. I first discovered this elegant framework created by side joing.

When I was struggling to understand why a talented senior designer was showing signs of disengagement, our conversations felt superficial. I'd ask how things were going, she'd say, fine, and we'd move on without addressing the underlying issues. The Petals framework gave us a structure that transformed these conversations.

It's simple but powerful. In each one-on-one, team members score five aspects of their work experience. On a scale of one to five, productivity, how efficiently they're able to work, enjoyment, their interest and motivation, teamwork, quality of collaboration, learning, growth and development. Serenity, perceived job stress.

What makes this framework so effective isn't just collecting numbers, it's that these scores create natural structured conversations that surface issues before they become deal breakers. I remember when we were in the intense phase of rolling out our design system, our teams Serenity scores began dropping across the board.

Rather than pushing through and risking burnout, we implemented no meeting Wednesdays and dedicated focus time blocks. This simple adjustment allowed designers to maintain deep work while still meeting project milestones, and within two weeks, the Serenity scores began climbing again. But frameworks are just tools.

They only work within a broader ecosystem designed for growth and retention. This starts with hiring the right people and creating clear paths for their development. When building our team, we focused on three key areas in our recruitment process. First, technical excellence beyond portfolios. We asked for case study submissions and deep dives into raw design files.

This revealed candidates true capabilities when hiring for our design system team. We paid particular attention to typography and information architecture, experience skills that would be crucial for our global implementation. I remember interviewing a designer who had a beautiful portfolio, but struggled to explain her process.

When we asked to see the working files. By contrast, another candidate with a less polished portfolio showed us the evolution of her thinking through her Figma history, demonstrating both skills and thought process. Second, cultural alignment, cross-functional interviews helped ensure candidates would thrive in our collaborative environment.

One of our most successful hires emerged from a session where the candidate demonstrated exceptional ability to bridge technical and design considerations, asking thoughtful questions about our development stack, and suggesting implementation approaches that would respect both design integrity and engineering constraints and third growth potential.

We incorporated two-way feedback sessions that allowed mutual assessment of growth opportunities. This transparency helped build a team where designers could see themselves staying and growing. Once designers joined our team, each received a personalized growth framework. We leveraged LinkedIn learning and internal resources to create customized development paths aligned with both individual career goals and team needs.

This framework included quarterly skill assessments, individual growth plans, aligned with team needs, project assignments, matching growth areas, and monthly progress check-ins. The structure was important, but what really made this effective was the personal connection. I remember sitting with one of our junior designers who was passionate about animation, but lacked confidence.

We identified specific skills to develop, matched her with a senior mentor and created opportunities for her to apply these skills on progressively more complex projects. Within six months, she was leading animation strategy for a major product launch. Another critical element was creating psychological safety, an environment where designers felt comfortable taking risks, sharing early ideas, and learning from failures.

When I first started at the company, design reviews were TENS Affairs, where designers presented nearly finished work and braced for criticism. We transformed this with a structured design critique framework, followed by a 15 minute problem solution overview and structured meaningful feedback. This approach paid off when one of our most junior team members felt confident enough to challenge our approach to onboarding during a critique session.

Her suggestion, I. A simplified flow that introduced features progressively became one of our most successful implementations, dramatically improving our user metrics. We also instituted weekly show and tell sessions where designers were encouraged to share work in progress. This normalized vulnerability and created a culture where iteration was celebrated rather than hidden.

Beyond frameworks and processes, we found that designers stayed when they understood the why behind their work. Many design leaders shield their teams from business realities and stakeholder pressure thinking it protects their creativity. I took the opposite approach regularly involving designers in stakeholder meetings and user research sessions.

For example, during our enterprise dashboard redesign, designers participated directly in stakeholder discussions about feature prioritization, accessed user research sessions and analytics data, and joined business strategy conversations about market positioning. This gave them a deeper understanding of the problems they were solving and created stronger connection to their work's impact.

This approach embodied what I call the bridge principle. The idea that design leadership serves as a bridge between user needs and business objectives. Rather than viewing these as competing interests, we taught designers to find solutions that served both giving their work deeper meaning and impact.

So what can you take away from our experience? Here are three actionable steps you can implement regardless of your team's size. First, implement a structured framework for one-on-ones, whether you use petals or another approach. Create consistent check-ins that go beyond service level updates. Ask specific questions about growth challenges, and work satisfaction and track patterns over time.

Second, make growth visible work with each team member to create a personalized development plan that connects to real project opportunities. Review progress regularly and celebrate skills advancement as enthusiastically as you celebrate project launches. And third, create psychological safety through structure.

Establish clear guidelines for design, critiques, and feedback that focus on the work, not the person model. Vulnerability by sharing your own works in progress and lessons from failures.

The 89% retention rate we achieved wasn't a happy accident. It was the result of intentional systems designed to help designers thrive, but the real success wasn't just keeping people in seats. It was building a team that consistently delivered exceptional work while growing professionally and genuinely enjoying the journey.