Growing people is the part of the job I've enjoyed most

I've always learned much better by doing something, getting it wrong and working out why than by studying the theory first. My first job at a small agency in 2007 was mostly that, building things that rarely worked properly the first time.

At the time it was frustrating. Looking back, the loop of making something, seeing where it failed and improving it was probably the most useful thing I was learning.

That belief shapes how I coach. I try to give people real work with real consequences and then stay close enough to help when it goes sideways.

At Selfridges I built a coaching culture across the function and developed people from junior level through to management. That was a deliberate choice rather than a happy accident, and it required protecting time that could easily have gone to delivery.

The hardest part was consistency. Coaching works when it happens in the ordinary weeks, not only in the review cycle, and there were periods where I let it slip under pressure.

When it worked, the effect was visible in how the team handled ambiguity. People stopped waiting to be told what the answer was.

Watching designers become managers taught me that the transition is mostly about identity. The thing you were rewarded for stops being the thing that matters, and that's genuinely disorienting.

I try to be explicit about that rather than letting people discover it alone. The craft doesn't disappear, but it changes into judgement about other people's craft.

I've also learned to be honest when someone would be happier staying senior in their discipline. Promoting a good designer into a role they didn't want serves nobody.

I have run POW XD alongside employed roles since 2009. A fair amount of that work is mentoring and coaching businesses and individual design professionals.

Working with people outside my own organisation keeps me honest. Advice that only makes sense inside one company's conditions is usually not advice, it's habit.

I don't think I have this fully worked out. The questions people bring change as the industry changes, and I'm still adjusting what I offer in response.