New Design Leadership with Chief Creative Officer Rachel Gogel

Rachel Gogel:

It's essential to understand the implications of all of our creative decisions from the people that you may portray in a campaign to the language that you use to collaborators and professionals that you hire. And if we're not thinking about these elements, then we're not thinking about the full experience.

Rob Goodman:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Now What?, the podcast from Wix about how technology is changing…everything. I'm your host, Rob Goodman, and in this series, we're talking all about evolution in business, design, development and beyond. In this new season of the show, we're diving into customer experience. As the world has rapidly transformed, customers’ expectations, behavior and needs have adapted with it. Paired with the emergence of new forms of social media, digital currency, the metaverse and so much more, navigating what this means for you and your organization can be a lot. So we're bringing you fresh interviews and new insights from leaders that are reshaping business today to better prepare you for what's ahead. Today, we're joined by independent Chief Creative and Culture Officer, Rachel Gogel. Rachel's work has taken her from Departure magazine and Godfrey Dadich Partners, to building multidisciplinary teams at the New York Times award-winning T-Brand Studio, GQ and Meta.

Rob Goodman:

She's operated at the intersection of editorial product advertising and strategy for the last 15 years. Now Rachel runs her own consultancy and is leading design initiatives at Airbnb. She's also the Women in Leadership and Design (otherwise known as WILD) Chair on the AIGA SF Board of Directors and a longtime member of Queer Design Club. Rachel and I dive into the future of independent work. She shares eight essential skills to lead and manage teams in today's new world. And we discuss at length the value and importance of inclusive leadership and building design and leadership practices that bring more people together. So let's get started. Rachel, welcome to the Now What? podcast.

Rachel Gogel:

Thanks so much for having me.

Rob Goodman:

So glad to have you here. And I look at your career and what you've been able to accomplish, and also this new version of it, as you as an independent consultant and working with all these different brands, and I see the new configuration of a career in the post- or mid- pandemic stage of our world, in the midst of the great resignation. How would you describe your role and how you work with teams now and how that kind of balances being an independent and driving your own vehicle, your own career?

Rachel Gogel:

So, yes, I'm now what I call an independent Chief Creative and Culture Officer. I'm based in San Francisco, originally from Paris, France. And for about 15 years now, I've been working at the intersection of advertising strategy, product and editorial. My formal training is in graphic design. I find myself committed to helping brands retain their integrity in a world demanding disruption. What I mean by that is I shape teams. I champion organizational culture, and as a people manager often dedicate my time to fostering spaces that unlock human potential. So as you alluded to, I launched my own consultancy at the end of 2020 – so amidst the pandemic. And I've led projects ranging from developing global brand systems to scaling creative operations. Last year, as an example, I helped relaunch American Express lifestyle brand Departures magazine as their Executive Creative Director, but as a contractor. And currently I'm advising Airbnb, who now is one of my other clients on how to restructure their internal brand communications and creative team and elevate their craft and storytelling techniques.

Rachel Gogel:

So, for most of these projects, I find myself leading fully distributed teams and hiring from my existing network mix of generalists and specialists, in order to get the work done while embracing a more flexible work week. And so I took this transition one step further as there was this historic moment in remote work history happening in 2020. There was this exodus of workers leaving the traditional office to a home office on a scale that had never been seen before. I decided to leave my role as Creative Director for a small San Francisco-based design firm to become my own boss and like many creative leaders during this time, I've been on a journey to understand how to manage teams remotely and now with the added challenge of also being an independent contractor.

Rachel Gogel:

In my experience when I was full time, most contractors barely would get to be in these creative leadership positions, especially at a part-time capacity, but I've been able to figure out how to keep doing what I love without being full time. I feel I've been able to build and lead teams in a very embedded way and oversee and influence work. So I really feel I'm testing out these new ways of working in real time.

Rob Goodman:

Well, that's amazing to hear. There's so much forethought and vision of the future. And when you are internalizing all of this leadership into your day to day as a manager, what does that kind of manifest as?

Rachel Gogel:

I can summarize some of the learnings that I've had into eight overarching skills. I'm definitely trying to harness these and I've been sharing them more lately because I feel if this is really about an art or something that you continue to learn and it's ever evolving, I try to create succinctly. So the first is around renewing your relationships at work. So obviously you learn a lot about this idea of fostering relationships and cultivating relationships just generally as you navigate your career and go from place to place. But the idea behind renewing your relationships is not assuming that the people coming back to the office or reentering whatever virtual workspace that you are now entering in after these traumatic two years, you can't make the assumption that person needs the same things from you as they did two years ago.

Rachel Gogel:

So it's this idea of essentially restarting and renewing your relationship with each individual person in some way. The second is actually, I've just been reading more about this and I feel it in the day to day, which is this concept of coaching over management. So, instead of maybe this idea of management, which sometimes to some can trigger this idea of it being maybe micromanaging or that certain management practices are dated, there's more people talking about coaching philosophy. It's a different approach to that relationship, that duo between you and your direct report. And showing up for them probably in a different way than you had in the past. The third is modeling behaviors that you want to see, which sounds pretty obvious, but essentially embracing this new distributed model. As a people leader, you want to take breaks, take your vacation. Respecting people if they want to go off camera once in a while.

Rachel Gogel:

Be really in tune with what the team needs. I've been in certain setups at work where your boss is not necessarily leading by example and then your direct reports essentially feel guilty if they go off course. So, doing that and actually sticking to it. The fourth is around establishing team agreements. Essentially creating some kind of social contract between each member and between each member as a team unit. And it can be something that you co-author together. So whether that's certain types of meetings or certain ways of working or ways to check in or processes, but actually putting everything on the table and really trying to renew that social contract,

Rob Goodman:

That can be a little scary, maybe. To just open up in that way to your manager, your direct report, your colleagues...because you really have to share more about yourself, you have to share more about your learning style, your collaboration style. So it seems like that might be part of trust building with your team, but it also might be a little mini hurdle you have to get over in order to open up and say, "Hey, I'm a little bit like this and what I'm looking for is this." Expressing your needs in the workplace can be a brave act.

Rachel Gogel:

Definitely. Cut to a few decades ago, even talking like this wouldn't be something that would be a consideration. It would feel either weak or not bureaucratic enough for something. Whereas this new human-centered leadership is somewhat of a still very new concept. Number five is around encouraging autonomy and innovation. So there's also been some articles lately surveying people, asking them if they even think they need managers anymore. It's really interesting because I think that the last two years have given people a taste of autonomy and freedom that maybe they hadn't tasted before and they won't give it up that easily. And so it's this idea of encouraging that entrepreneurial spirit and autonomy and trust.

Rachel Gogel:

Moving away from, obviously, more micromanagement tactics, delegating more, assuming good intent, empowering people at different levels to become leaders and owners of different tasks and projects. And innovating because a lot of the work and how we're collaborating and creating – depending on the project, you may be faced with something that you've never had to tackle before. How you're going to create something or build a mood board in a distributed way or whatever that task may be. And so bringing people in to come up with new ways of collaborating and innovating, I think that's where you'll see more people potentially participate or engage.

Rob Goodman:

I think that not only works for the project at hand, maybe it's new to that worker, but also for the way that we work. It's changing, it's new, there's so many opportunities to innovate, workflow processes and how teams communicate. So that idea of making sure that people are empowered to innovate, I think is wonderful.

Rachel Gogel:

For sure. And that it's not just the responsibility of the people manager. Usually, there's an assumption that certain kinds of innovation or process ideas or ways to engage the culture at a company tends to be more for senior leaders. But if you empower more junior members or people across every level to feel trusted and empowered to own different parts of these tasks, you'll notice that they become confident faster. The sixth thing is around gatherings. The idea is to facilitate more intentional gatherings. So that could be in real life settings or even virtual settings or hybrid settings. The keyword here is intentional. I think there was a meeting problem before the pandemic. There's still some work being done to figure out what's worthy of a meeting. And when people should come together in person, as long as it's safe.

Rachel Gogel:

These new protocols being written are really fascinating to watch but your responsibility as a people leader is to act as facilitator and almost look at how people are using their time. And when they come together, what is the purpose of that time together? And almost question how the teams gather, and when they don't gather, and when they should? And when offsites start to happen again, what should they look like? And so really almost redesigning gatherings and evolving in terms of the art of facilitation too, which has been really interesting.

Rob Goodman:

Hey everyone, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you more about Wix. Wix is the all-in-one platform for running your business online, trusted by over 210 million people around the world. With Wix you get incredible security, reliability, performance and SEO no matter the kind of business you run or the size. I've built my websites on Wix where I share more of my career story, podcasts I produce like this one, artwork and merchandise, and I can tell you it is so fun to build sites and apps on Wix.

Rob Goodman:

And I know agencies, startups and larger eCommerce companies scaling their businesses and relying on Wix for impeccable security, reliability, performance and search engine optimization. It's because with Wix, anything is possible. So if you're interested in learning more, visit wix.com to start building and growing your business today. That's wix.com. Now let's get back to the show. 

Rob Goodman:

Is there an example of a gathering, an event that you've put together that has a little bit more of that intentionality behind it over these past months or years from one of your experiences that you think would be interesting to share?

Rachel Gogel:

The first thing that came to mind probably would be my wedding. My wife and I got married in October and one activity in particular that jumps out was we wanted to avoid our families having small talk or the usual conversation where it's, "What do you do?" And, "Tell me about your work." Or whatever it may be. We prepared a deck of cards. I can't take credit for this, my wife can totally take credit, but it was like a deck of cards with questions. Everything from pretty intimate questions, "Your favorite toy from childhood." Or "Things that you used to collect." To "Attributes that you feel like you get from your mother." It was really across the spectrum and we divided our families into groups and then had it rotate.

Rachel Gogel:

This was like a cozy day. It was raining outside. And this was one of the first times our families were meeting in person. It was like an icebreaker, but it just turned into a really beautiful gathering where people got to know certain sides of one another. And it was less about what they did for work and more about who they were as people. The seventh one is around just increasing recognition and feedback. So I think just the fact that a lot of teams are more distributed now, it's even more important to not have built up feedback for someone, whether it's in the sharing or receiving end of feedback. And recognition as well being able to give someone praise or say thank you or send appreciation. It used to maybe be easy, where you could take someone out for a quick coffee and thank them for contributing to a project, whereas now it requires thinking through other ways to make someone feel seen.

Rachel Gogel:

One thing there is to recognize that it's very much still very individualized in doing that as well. The last but not least point is this idea of improving onboarding practices and any relevant HR program. So, onboarding in particular is top of mind just because, let's say you're working for a company that has decided to go fully remote first, and maybe you don't even have a physical office anymore. What does an onboarding program look like for any new hire? And really designing a program to not assume that you can just get onboarded for a day and then that's it. And then also because you may be working with full-time people, contractors, freelancers, vendors, etcetera, is actually just becoming more inclusive in your onboarding practices so that you're taking the time to onboard contractors just as much as you would a full-time person.

Rachel Gogel:

Obviously, there's maybe certain things that may not be relevant for a contractor related to benefits or other things. But when you think about onboarding someone to a project or to a culture, or making them feel part of a team, there are certain things that, I think, we can do better in terms of just looking holistically at what it looks like to have a check in at a company, and then not assume that it's just done at the beginning of someone joining but it's an ongoing thing.

Rob Goodman:

I love that. And Rachel, I'd love to ask you about your work with WILD, Women in Leadership and Design and Queer Design Club. Just tell me about your work with these organizations. And then I want to ask you more about leading inclusive teams and also really creating a space for marginalized voices within the work organization.

Rachel Gogel:

I just have come to care deeply about using my voice and privilege to help create inclusive and connected communities, especially for women and the queer community. So as the somewhat newly appointed, since I think October or November, Women in Leadership and Design, the acronym is WILD, Chair on the AIGA SF Board of Directors, it's clear that I'm passionate about addressing gender-based disparities in the design industry. WILD's mission is to help women and non-binary leaders, essentially, get into leadership positions in the field of design or create space for them or help them get to those spaces. Since, generally, it's still quite a male dominated industry, at least in the leadership tier. So this particular initiative has been dormant for the past few years due to the pandemic, but I just built a committee and there should be more active programming happening later this year with the goal to launch a WILD conference in the Bay, hopefully next March.

Rachel Gogel:

And I've been doing this for over a decade. I know that you mentioned WILD, which is something very new. But I've been always trying to strive to put something out in the world that matters. Like working hard to earn my seat at the table as a queer Creative Director and as a female. Someone took a chance on me early on in my career and I'm eternally grateful and so I'm always trying to figure out how I can also pay it forward. I think, generally, by being more public facing or whether it's appearing on a podcast or being interviewed for an article, I'm really trying to inspire other queer women by holding leadership roles. Besides WILD, you were alluding to this, but I'm also an active member of Queer Design Club, another initiative called Women Talk Design. And I'm also a part of a collective called the Institute of Possibility, which I'm happy to say that I'm actually one of the few white women in that collective. And so it's nice to just be part of more diverse spaces.

Rob Goodman:

And for business leaders out there who are making the business case for more inclusive workplaces and cultures and the ability to bring in marginalized voices – we know these make better products. We know these make better experiences, when more voices are at the table, participating in all of these design processes and all these product development processes to reach more people, to satisfy larger and larger audiences. But how do you think about these things in the terms of building stronger businesses and products, inclusive design leadership practices?

Rachel Gogel:

So you're spot on, which is this practice is good for business and simply put, it's just the right thing to do. On the creative front, the concepts and best practices around, let's say, accessibility and inclusion should be baked into all work that you touch from the beginning, not a requirement that is checked off once the project is complete. A lot more teams are bringing these types of conversations earlier on in the funnel. There's still, obviously, a lot of work to do. But it's essential to understand the implications of all of our creative decisions from the people that you may portray in a campaign, to the language that you use, to collaborators and professionals that you hire, or the cultural references in your copy or marketing. And if we're not thinking about these elements, then we're not thinking about the full experience.

Rachel Gogel:

And this is important, whether you're serving a global audience or not. Even a small size of people has different needs. And then on the leadership front, building teams that reflect the expansive needs of our audience or of your audience is critical as well. The idea which you alluded to is that, definitely more perspectives on solving the problem, the better the outcome. And you have to design with people, not for people. The hard part with that I've seen happen to date though is that often certain brands may be reaching out to let's say, a DEI consultant or someone who maybe represents a certain slice of the community to bring in that particular perspective and help teams learn and do better. The hard part by doing that and only doing that is that you're essentially still taking one voice and adding it to the table.

Rachel Gogel:

And then you're putting extra burden or extra responsibility on this one person to represent either a whole race or a whole gender identity. And there's more that you have to do to actually build in diverse practices to your business. You can't just bring in someone from the outside, assume that they can represent a whole group and then call it a day. Sometimes that can also feel like you're targeting someone, so it can sometimes backfire if you just do that. So there's a lot happening where I think it's important that people are doing this more and more. Especially over the last two years, I would say there's been more movement and momentum thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement in particular. But there's still a lot more to do to make this feel really authentic and every part of a company's practice. From the top, all the way to the bottom of the chain. And then across every dimension of a certain task or function.

Rachel Gogel:

There are certain inclusive practices that you have to adopt. And then it will be this thing that will continue to evolve over time. But you have to start somewhere obviously, but you have to almost commit and then make real change across the board. So even in a more distributed model, successful collaboration still depends on trust, psychological safety, the open exchange of diverse ideas, expertise, etcetera – that hasn't changed. And if anything, certain companies have actually been exposed in the last few years more so for not doing this correctly. And so you have a lot of people who are trying to get on track. So I'm glad people are talking about it. It's really important. And there's a lot of work to do.

Rob Goodman:

Absolutely. Rachel, thank you so much for joining the podcast and sharing so much with us. It was a joy to talk to you.

Rachel Gogel:

Thanks.

Rob Goodman:

That was such an insightful conversation with Rachel Gogel. And I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. I really appreciated Rachel going through those eight keys to better management in this new world we're living in. And I love learning more about her own story and path because the great resignation is really just one part of the story happening these days. One of the other sides is folks like Rachel who are creating new leadership roles, not as embedded full-time employees, but as independent partners to companies. Her story speaks not only to the future of leadership and design, but to the future of work itself. And I thought it might be useful just to run through those eight skills that Rachel shared with us. I've jotted these down on a post-it note on my desk, and maybe you'll want to also. First, she spoke about renewing relationships. Not taking existing connections at work for granted, but instead nurturing them, especially after these challenging and traumatic couple of years, checking in with people, seeing how they're doing and re-sparking those connections is so important.

Rob Goodman:

Next, the idea of coaching over management as a means of focusing on the behaviors and bigger picture rather than task-oriented micromanagement that happens so often between a manager and their employees. The third was around modeling behaviors. Be the change you want to see at work. Fourth was establishing team agreements. This one was really interesting, a way to get out into the daylight, the ways your team likes to work and getting a better understanding of individual needs too. Fifth was around encouraging autonomy and innovation. The sixth key was facilitating intentional gatherings. Seven was increasing recognition and feedback. And the last point that Rachel shared was around improving onboarding, which is so important in this new remote/hybrid/distributed world of work, where people need to be set up for success and have more access to more information, right from the get go. You can learn more about Rachel at rachelgogel.com and explore lots more about Rachel and the incredible organizations she supports and leads over in our show notes at wix.com/nowwhat. 

Rob Goodman:

This is Now What? by Wix, the podcast about how technology is changing…everything. Be sure to subscribe and follow the show wherever you're listening to get new episodes first, and please rate, review and share this show with your friends and colleagues too. Now What? podcast is produced and hosted by me, Rob Goodman, Executive Producer for Content at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Executive Producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. You can learn more at wix.com/nowwhat. We'll see you soon.