The X-Interviews | The Power of the DEO

Interview #16 - Maria Giudice on Creative Executive Leadership

Maria Giudice on Creative Executive Leadership

Today on The X-Mentor, it’s Maria Giudice, Founder, Executive Leadership Coach, and Co-author of RISE of the DEO - Leadership by Design.

Throughout her illustrious career, creative teams and business leaders have sought the provocative vision and mentorship of Maria Giudice.

As founder and CEO of the pioneering experience design firm Hot Studio, Maria built a thriving practice around the principles of human-centered design. Today, former “Hotties” can be found leading teams at Adobe, Google, McKinsey, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

After Hot Studio’s acquisition by Facebook in 2013, Maria led global design teams at Facebook and Autodesk, building digital experiences for millions worldwide. And now, after three decades at the forefront of business and design, Maria has a new mission:

Build the next generation of creative leaders.

The X-Mentor: Welcome to the X-Mentor, Maria! Delighted to have you with us today.

Maria: I'm really happy to be here.

RISE of the DEO

The X-Mentor: As I was sharing with you prior to our interview; I've been researching and managing the business impact of design for many years. I’m a believer in the power of good design. I've seen what works and what doesn't.

While reading your book that you co-authored with Christopher Ireland, RISE of the DEO, I’ve taken note of things that have always worked for me as well as certain things that come as no surprise still today. It’s been 10 years since you released the book in 2014, but I think you were writing the book in the 2013 timeframe, while you were working with Mr. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, is that correct?

Maria: RISE of the DEO was the results of a Ted X Talk. I was asked to do a Ted X Conference, which terrified the **** out of me. I was running a very large design studio called Hot Studio in San Francisco and New York City. I went to art school and did not go to Business School, so I am a very successful businesswoman who has always led my life as if it was a design problem that needed to be solved. And that has always taken me to really interesting places because I’m leveraging design to solve any kind of problem, not just products, but life problems, right? And so, I was running Hot Studio, and I was really nervous about why anybody would want to hear what I have to say on stage? I'm just a leader of a design company, that's no biggie. And this woman who was coaching me at the time, Christy Dames, she was part of a coaching speaking bureau called TechTalk, and she said to me, “Maria, you run your company like nobody else I've ever met.” Again, I went to design school, not business school, so I didn't have any models. Christy said, “You know what you are, you're not a CEO. You're DEO.” So, she coined the phrase DEO.

The X-Mentor: Excellent. And interesting how an outside expert can see our personal brand better than we can.

Maria: That really was the spark to talk about how you can leverage your design skills in business successfully as leaders. What if all CEO's use their own design skills, and really tapped into the superpowers that designers have to lead companies? What would that look like? And you know the qualities that I leaned in on through research of design leaders was that they have these qualities. They are change agents. Everything in life, design equals change, change equals design. Nobody has a design team to maintain the status quo, we are risk takers.

And to make change, you have to understand and work with risk as an ingredient using your intuition. As well as analytics. Being a systems thinker. Putting people at the center of everything you do. So being people centered. And finally, getting **** done (GSD) because as designers we always have deadlines, and we have to execute. What if all leaders can apply those qualities and skills to their own leadership skills in business? What might their company look like? What might their culture be? How might their culture change? How might they innovate? How might they make decisions if they use these skills? We humans all have creativity, so we can tap into that ability at any time, but creativity must be tapped into and used.

The X-Mentor: Agreed, we all have creativity. However, not everyone knows how to effectively use it.

Something I would like to explore with you is to reflect on what's happened in the last 10 years since you’ve released the Rise of the DEO book.

Several things caught my attention while I was reading your book, and one of them was you were saying in the 2014 timeframe that, “CEOs are ill equipped to survive.”

You also stated that traditional companies, “are becoming dated through no effort of their own.”  

When I read that last statement, “through no effort of their own,” I immediately thought of IBM. They’ve always been able to reinvent themselves over their 112-year lifetime, just not always aggressively enough to outflank competitors.

So, let's talk about where you are today with these ideas that you’ve outlined in your ‘DEO’ book.

Maria: Well, it's super interesting when you look at things back in time. Globally, I think we were a lot more optimistic about the future back in 2014. I joined Facebook in 2013 and everybody was so optimistic, overly optimistic, unrealistically optimistic about how technology is going to improve the world. So, there's the good and bad. The good is there was a ton of innovation happening back then. Social media, the rise of social media, companies we're talking about AR, VR. There was a lot of risk taking and investment in startups back then. Right. And it was also the time when design companies were getting acquired.

Hot Studio marked a moment where the tech world took notice of large design companies like Hot Studio. We were acquired by Facebook and that was part of a huge wave of design companies getting acquired by tech companies.

They had that, oh **** moment back then when they realized that it's not about technology. It's about designing good experiences in order to be competitive.

Our users were demanding that we have good digital experiences. So, there was this wave of investment in design. And there was a lot of optimism. And I'm getting this a lot now where people are asking, OK, Maria, 10 years later, where are we now as a society? Design leaders are getting absorbed under product. People are getting laid off left and right. Is design dead? Are we breaking up with design? All those conversations, right?

The X-Mentor: Precisely. Read: The Big Design Freak-out discussion in The X-Interview with Robert Fabricant.

Maria: I have to remind people, there weren't design leaders in positions of power 10 years ago. Very, very few DEO's existed. Very, very few Chief Design Officers existed. And here we are 10 years later, even though there's an adjustment, which is beyond our control. Innovation can be impacted because of fear and uncertainty. People shrink, they want to go to safety, they want to go to certainty.

That is the opposite of what designers represent. That's the opposite of what we do.

So, if its status quo, suddenly people are questioning our value. But there's more of us. So, if we look at where we were ten years ago to where we are now, even though we're in this period of restructuring and rethinking, and maybe we are at the dawn of the Renaissance era with AI, there's less optimism, there's more skepticism, there's fear.

Even despite all that, we have come so far in 10 years, and we're not going away. It's not like, see, designers are going to have to crawl back into their hole. No, there's going to be restructuring. There's going to be shrinkage. In the bad will come the dawn, the dawn, and the Renaissance. Like you said, people are going to recalibrate. They're going to restructure, they're going to reorganize, they're going to reevaluate.

Our skills are still relevant no matter how we apply them to anything we do. So, if it's AI, we're going to figure out and adapt what that means for designers in this new world. And so, I'm optimistic and I also know that change is slow if anything from the Change-makers book. Culture change can take decades, and it's not linear. We're going to keep making progress. We're moving forward. There are huge setbacks. You must believe that things will get better, and you have to fight to get better no matter what you do.

The CEO Gap

The X-Mentor: I noticed early on while reading your DEO book that you were talking about “Design as a Model for Leadership.”

In my recent X-Interview with Jared Spool, he was pointing to some examples of how there’s just a lack of good design leadership in many organizations and how that lack of strategic leadership results in design being perceived as and treated like a “dry-cleaning” service by C-level leadership. Jared attributes this problem to “the fact that UX people have been taught for 30 years now how to be tactical. None of them have been taught how to work strategically.”

 So, I'm just thinking about the “gap” that you point to in your DEO book between CEOs and the people that they lead.

Has that gap closed?

Or is it getting bigger?

Maria: Yeah, well, I definitely want to respond to Jared Spool, who I love, but respectfully disagree with him. I think when we talk about design as a UX activity, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

And so, you can make the argument that people who come from UX and have been trained to do UX might have too narrow a view of what their power is. I think we have so much power, but we shoot ourselves in the foot by limiting ourselves to thinking that it's only about delivery. I got a degree in design. I was part of that era that Jared was part of. We were like, what's this new thing? How do we apply this new medium to what we are doing? And there were no rules. There were no examples. There were no models. There were no Figma files. Like, I used to call UX “wireframes page architecture” because that's what I did. I drew diagrams in order to create a designed piece, right? But it was never just focused on execution. I mean, even from the very beginning I was asking questions like, who are we designing for? What do they need to know? What does success look like? These are strategic questions. So, the strategy is there.

Back then, designers did their own research. It wasn't like there was a research department and a design department. And the strategy was market research. Right? And there was a chasm between the strategist and the design studio. It was as if they're doing more important work than us designers. Once again, if you looked at the questions they were asking, the kinds of things they were trying to understand and the kind of things that I was trying to understand, they were the same things. We just were asking different questions. But we were trying to get to the same point. We were still thinking about the system. We were still thinking about how it impacts people.

I really get annoyed with designers who don't look up. It's like I need to say, stop looking down on what the task is and look up and use your powers to ask bigger questions.

 And when you ask bigger questions, you are going to become strategic.

I think what Jared's talking about are these people who are relatively new, who are just using frameworks and reading books on UX and using the tools. They haven't been exposed, or they haven't had the invitation, to become more strategic in their thinking. But they could because they have the potential.

The X-Mentor: These people do have the potential to develop strategic skills, even more so than most Senior Leadership can realize.

For example, in my X-Interview with Peter Bull, which was my very first X-Interview, he's one of these people who happens to be a CTO, but easily could be the DEO because he has this penchant for design, this mindset that is just really structured for design thinking. He very much could be one of your DEO's.

I was asking Peter, what should design be bringing to the table? And he was saying, design is actually one of the preeminent metrics because it is the best leading indicator of value that's being created for customers. Whereas everyone else who's looking at the operational and executive level indicators is looking in the rearview mirror, essentially at the history of what has already happened in the market.

Peter was saying that everyone else in the organization is showing up at the table with a plan of what they're going to do to contribute to the goals of the organization, a plan that plots a course of action that’s going to move the business forward. Peter said, “it should be the same for design.” Yet, Robert Fabricant states in his X-Interview, design leaders want to be “Liberated from being answerable to day-to-day CX KPIs.”

Maria: Absolutely, yeah. Exactly.  Yes.

And it's on us to ask those questions. I grew up always feeling like I had to work twice as hard to be treated equally and fairly and seen as somebody who has a brain and power. So, you know, it's the era I grew up in. And even being a female CEO of a design studio, I was the only real woman leader. All my competitors were men who I liked and respected. But I had to double down, and I had to show up ready, ready to lead and ready to fight. And so, when people would come in and define design as just making things pretty, it's on me to educate them or ask questions.

Rather than being in a mode of defensiveness, I would just ask the questions that are what a business leader would ask. Right. I would start really thinking about what's the intersection between what your customers want and what the business wants to achieve. I would say, “let's go bigger before we can get to a solution.” You must show up that way. I always tell people when I coach, how you show up matters. And you set the tone, you step into the light, and you set the tone. And if you show up competitive, chances are nobody's going to listen to you. But if you show up with really great questions and you’re thinking bigger, you can demonstrate that you are more than just a pretty pixel pusher.

Adaptability

The X-Mentor: Just thinking about the characteristics and traits that you were talking about in your DEO book. You talk about the characteristics of the CEO versus the DEO. You also talk about change agents, risk takers, being intuitive, social intelligence, etc.

What of those traits or characteristics are still relevant today?

Rather, how might you talk about them differently today?

Maria: I would say the thing that is even more relevant today is adaptability.

Being adaptable rather than getting stuck in your ways, instead of being a tradition holder. When you hold on to certain ways of doing things, it makes you feel safe, right? Because of the certainty there, it doesn't allow any new ideas or new things to emerge. The difference I would say is the speed of change, the rate of change. The world is so much more complex. There's so much uncertainty and fear in the world right now. Sort of how social media has actually harmed us. These are new things that are different that CEO's have to grapple with. I think communication is even more important and more adaptable to change, like the Black Swan event that we experienced with COVID. Three Black Swan events are jumping out to me now:

1. 911

2. COVID

3. What just happened with Israel.

Events that have rocked the world globally. And it brings a lot of fear and disagreement and conflict to the way people relate to each other and then because of that, it's impacting businesses. I'm coming back to this idea of adaptability.

Before COVID, it was companies that moved so slowly, like even the discussion about whether people should work remotely. In terms of adopting new ideas and new models of working, there was a lot of resistance, and then COVID happened, and it was horrible, and people died. But guess what? All the old models were thrown out the window. All organizations had to adapt really quickly because the world essentially stopped.

As bad as COVID was, it proved that people could move quickly and adapt, should they choose to. And then you know, again, even though there was a lot of trauma around COVID, there are also new ways of working because of COVID.

The X-Mentor: You know, some of the things you were talking about in the DEO book included: catalyst, having influence, leading transformation, putting some emphasis on creativity, rewarding the right kind of risk-taking, relentlessly reinventing, making connections, seeing the unseen (I.e., being able to see the patterns), and understand the processes that generates results. Right?

Maria: Yeah. Yeah.

The X-Mentor: Today we're talking about things that are moving at a very fast pace, an environment where gut feelings tend to inform decision-making. This aligns very closely to things I've been researching and publishing on the role emotions play in our decision-making and the way that our brain predicts emotions and how that influences all human behaviors.

Maria: Yeah. Yes. Right.

The X-Mentor: At the time you wrote about gut feelings in your book, it had not been explained well by science.

Maria: Yes, yeah, yeah.

The X-Mentor: Let’s talk about “Intuition” and the role it can potentially play in leadership today.

Maria: I think it actually becomes even more important because people are so worried about AI replacing designers.

No matter what technology is in front of us, we are still human beings. Designers are attracted to the human condition. They inherently want to help.

Most designers go into design because they want to improve things. They want to help people. You know it's the center of everything they do. We want to make things better. So, we are always going to be connected to the human condition. That's always going to be there unless we become robots.

In a world increasingly dominated by technology, our fundamental human qualities gain greater significance. AI's potential to revolutionize various aspects of our lives raises complex possibilities. On one hand, there's the ominous prospect of AI misuse leading to catastrophic outcomes. On the other, there's the promise of AI advancing medical breakthroughs like curing cancer and augmenting human capabilities beyond current limits. Among these extremes lies the essence of humanity, the human condition.

And this is where adaptation comes in.

Does that mean that our products and services are going to be a yearning for more one-to-one human contact, more intimacy? Is it going to be less about the masses and more about the individual? It's TBD (to be determined). But we will have to roll with it, and we can roll with it because again, we're putting people in the center of everything we do. And to this, I still think Rise of the DEO is very much about human condition, the human perspective. It's like standing in a perspective of leadership that I still think is relevant today. And it's going to become even more relevant as more and more diverse people enter organizations.

When I look at my daughter's generation, my daughter is 21, my son is 24. I look at her generation, where they don't see gender and sexuality and grew up with technology. They have a healthy skepticism about technology. They are skeptical about power structures. They're widely diverse in terms of culture, race, gender and all these things. They’re going to be an entirely different set of leaders.

Mentoring vs. Managing

The X-Mentor: I want to ask you about “mentoring” versus “managing,” something you’ve written about in Rise of the DEO.

You just mentioned the millennials, now there’s Gen-Z, and how those leadership traits are going to look very different.

As you’ve stated in Rise of the DEO, “Mentoring moves the company forward. And managing holds the company in place, managing equals control, conformity, monitoring standards. Mentoring equals growth, guidance, being proficient and exceeding standards. Mentoring really is about providing a greater job satisfaction.”

Maria: Yes. Yes.

The X-Mentor: Some of these things that we see in CEOs today, as you were just pointing out, don’t seem to have changed in the last 10 years.

So, let's talk about mentoring vs. managing.

Where does mentoring need to be applied today?

Maria: Yeah. Right. And you know, eventually, though, they're still leaders who are top-down managers, and they hold people down and they may not realize it, but they're preventing people from having good ideas and growing and breaking through to creating new products and services that may not see the light of day because they're micromanaging and controlling the people that they manage. And I just keep saying, when are they going to change.

There's this whole wave of diverse people who are ready to step into that leadership role. But there's a lock on power they're holding down because they know that there's the fear of losing control and power. It might take 20-30 years for us to really see what these people can do when they can get into these kinds of leadership roles. They're here now and they are more diverse. And when you look at companies that have more diverse people, they perform better. They're more collaborative. They do mentoring over managing because they know that mentoring is going to open people up, not shut them down. So, there are good leaders out there who are in positions of power, but there's still an overwhelming amount of the status quo.

This is my optimism. I can't promise it. But this is what I see. Again, when I look at my daughter's generation and I look at how powerful these kids are, they are powerful. They have strong points of view. They're going to be a different kind of leader.

You know, whenever I think of the word “management” it tightens me in my chest. For example, think about performance reviews. There’s this whole formula for performance reviews when you're a leader. It’s a curve or arc, you know when you're supposed to give people performance reviews, you have to manage them on this arc. You must target a certain percentage of people to be low performers that you're going to push out. There's a tiny group of people that have high performance that you're going to highly reward, and then there's those people who Meet or Meets Most right? Meeting most is like getting a C on your report card and Meets Expectations is like getting a B on your report card. And when you're in these leadership positions, you're given targets. You must put people in these buckets.

We spend so much time in corporate America going through these performance review cycles, and they kill [emotionally drain] people. They're based on fear.

I think about what if we did away with all that b***s***?

Instead, what if we talk to people and we make sure that if they're failing, trying to understand why they're failing, whether the company is a good fit for them or not, or whether they're trainable. And we then really reward people, but we don't. It's not punitive to get a raise and you don't have to fight to the death to get a raise. And I just think of it as like, what a waste of so much time. So much time on the part of the manager who has to go through this process and so much time on the people who are so terrified that they're going to get a bad grade during a performance cycle.

The X-Mentor: This has been my life for the last 20 years while working in big tech. At Microsoft, it was known as “Stack Ranking.” It goes by a different name at IBM and other big tech firms, but it’s the same concept. And so, it's no surprise even when Microsoft for example said, “we're doing away with the curve.” Yeah, right, it just showed up in a different form because they must have some standard by which to justify their rewards and promotions.

I appreciate what you're saying here, Maria. The mindset around mentoring versus management is more like the idea of parenting versus controlling. The noble idea of parenting is to pass knowledge on and to really help someone improve their skills. It’s about actually attending to the needs of people. Not just the outcomes of employees. It’s about ensuring a person’s growth, and ultimately their success in the world.

Machines as Mentors

The X-Mentor: Maria, I’d like to shift our conversation with the time we have left to this notion of how we collaborate with machines, and people’s relationships with machines.

Maria: OK. Uh-huh.

The X-Mentor: Human-machine relationships are changing.

So, let's talk about this idea of machines as mentors.

What might human and machine mentorship look like?

Maria: Yeah, yeah.

The X-Mentor: Machines are going to advise us to some degree. Either they're going to augment our decisions, or we may delegate a lot of our decisions to machines. Right?

Maria: Yeah.

The X-Mentor: Technologists speculate about scenarios where machines could become our supervisors, and even be responsible for conducting performance reviews. Some even go as far as envisioning machines as our bosses.

This technocentric perspective goes back to your earlier comment about Facebook being, “overly optimistic, unrealistically optimistic about how technology is going to improve the world.”

I believe it's crucial to not allow this sort of technocentric thinking to go unchecked. We need to think about how design can best position itself to ensure our fundamental human needs are being addressed.

How can we advance business and technological goals while also considering Human-centered outcomes?

Maria: We've been collaborating with machines for 20 years now. I mean, look at Alexa and how [Oh sorry, she's listening. Oh, yeah. The wake word. OK!] we ask A***a to do something. You know you have a relationship, but my elderly mother, who lived home alone, would constantly ask Alexa to do things for her. Right? So, we have been doing that for a while now. But it's still a machine, and it has bias because the machine will only give you advice based on what it's been trained on. And so that means we must be approaching that relationship with skepticism. And that is going to require trial and error and it's going to require education.

Like I said, I think my kid’s generation has that skepticism already built in. And we all know about ChatGPT and likely have played with it. But you know it's still biased and people who are on the other end of the bias are even more aware of that. There are tons of studies around the impact of machine learning and on populations of people of color. Right. So, there's a lot that we have yet to uncover, but it's still a relationship with the machine. It does not replace face to face because we have energy around us. We are sentient beings, and we surround ourselves with this energy that machines do not have.

I think about the remote world where people have been remote, and we have a relationship through a remote environment. But if you and I met in person, we would have an entirely different experience together, right? And when people who are in remote environments meet it's like a love fest, people want to touch each other. That will never go away.

The X-Mentor: On that note about energy, that's the one thing that machines need, meaning they require a certain type of energy to operate, they have to be plugged in. But that's not the same kind of energy that we humans have. Our energy is more like the type of energy that HeartMath Institute studies.

Maria: Thank you!

Editor’s Note: For over 30 years, the HeartMath Institute has researched the heart-brain connection, focusing on "heart coherence," the rhythmic patterns of the heart's electrical activity measured by heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is influenced by emotions, stress, and physiological factors. The Institute has discovered that the heart emits a torus-shaped electromagnetic field detectable several feet away, with its pulses modulated by emotions. Positive emotions like love create harmonious heart rhythms, promoting coherence—a state where the heart, mind, and emotions align, benefiting health and well-being.

Maria: Absolutely.

The X-Mentor: The model lies at the intersection of business, technology, and behavior, where energy—specifically emotional energy—serves as the driving force behind human behavior. Our emotional responses most often precede conscious decisions, shaping our actions and behaviors, including all economic behaviors.

Maria: Yes. Yeah.

The X-Mentor: Our enthusiasm for technology poses a risk of overshadowing our essential human focus. We’re going to need more expertise in human behavior, ethics, behavioral science, and ethnography to guide us appropriately. From a design standpoint, that human element, emphasizing mentorship qualities over management qualities is essential.

Maria: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you have to lean into it and adapt.

The qualities and skills that you have as a human, the qualities and skills that you inherently have as a designer are Evergreen.

And then you're just going to reapply them and deal with what's going to be in front of us, but we have the power.

The X-Mentor: Maria, thank you so much for being on The X-Mentor. This was an absolute pleasure! I really appreciate you taking the time to share your unique perspective on creative executive leadership.

Maria: I'm thrilled. Thank you, Greg!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Maria Giudice is a Founder, Executive Leadership Coach, and Co-author of RISE of the DEO - Leadership by Design. Maria was founder and CEO of the pioneering experience design firm Hot Studio prior to Facebook’s acquisition of the firm in 2013.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.