Podcast: Designing Healthy Teams for Success — Richard Banfield, ex-VP of Design Transformation at InVision

Richard Banfield is a design executive, author, and artist, and the former VP of Design Transformation at InVision. His path into leadership is unusual — conscripted into the South African military after high school and trained at an officer academy, then a diving instructor leading 40 staff on a remote Indian Ocean island, then tech entrepreneur and media operator, before becoming an executive in the design industry. He has written multiple books on design leadership and now coaches design leaders one-on-one.

He means that design leaders often describe their product as the output (features, screens, shipping) when their actual product — the thing they make and maintain — is the team itself. The leader's job is to 'make a product (the team) that makes a product (the work).' If you're not doing people work, you're not doing the leader's job. Richard uses this reframe to force leaders to decide whether they actually want that role at all.

Shame. Richard says the fear of being disliked, misunderstood, or accused of being unfair is 'part of the family' for a lot of people, particularly those who grew up in shame-oriented cultures or religions. That shame keeps leaders from saying the thing that needs to be said, and unresolved conflict compounds inside the team. Richard has a painting titled 'Shame Will Kill You' that's explicitly about this pattern.

Not as mean conversations — as honest, open, meaningful ones that expose everyone to some vulnerability and allow the team to move forward. Richard frames this as a learnable skill, not a personality trait. The leaders who do this well aren't more naturally confrontational; they've decoupled 'being disliked in the moment' from 'failing as a leader.'

Be honest with yourself and move back into a senior IC role. Richard is direct: many designers are pushed into management because the HR career ladder gives them no other way to grow, but if you don't want to do people work — if you'd rather be pushing pixels or writing code — then management is the wrong job for you, and trying to do it without wanting to do it damages you and the team.

Richard was conscripted into the South African army after high school and trained at an officer academy during a period when the military was moving from top-down command to distributed decision-making on the ground. He describes that transition as his first real lens on what healthy teams look like — leaders creating the conditions for frontline people to decide, rather than trying to decide everything themselves.

He coaches and advises design leaders, often through the hardest people moments of their careers — conflict, reorgs, the first management job, exits. He also writes books and works as an artist. His core belief is that design leadership is fundamentally emotional labor disguised as strategy, and that most leaders don't get the support they need for the emotional part.

Trying to keep doing the practitioner work they were good at while also trying to do the people work they've never been trained for. Richard's prescription: pick. If you pick management, commit to making the team your product — psychological safety, hard conversations, resolution — and let the team do the practitioner work.