Other people saw I was ready to lead before I did

The sentence that finally landed

I did not doubt my design work, or my ability to communicate with people. Whether I could lead was a different question – one I had never said out loud. And here was someone telling me that question had already been answered, by somebody else, before I had let myself ask it.

I think that was the last moment. After it, I started talking openly – saying that I was ready, that I wanted the role.

It was not the first time someone had told me

My own son had already told me, more bluntly, while I was substituting for my previous manager. He sat me down and said, “Hey Daddy, everybody wants to lead. Everybody wants to be a manager, and you don’t. You’re stupid!” He said it the way a kid states an obvious fact – not unkindly, just baffled that I couldn’t see what he saw.

Colleagues at SEB were asking a version of the same question, half-joking: why hadn’t I applied yet for a role I was already doing?

I heard all of it. None of it registered the way that one-on-one did.

Why I couldn’t see it myself

At the start, the honest answer was fear – fear of responsibility. Specifically, of reporting and Excel spreadsheets: the parts of leadership furthest from the design and research work I knew how to do.

I had also stopped noticing that I was bored. I was already senior as a designer. I was standing at a threshold without knowing it.

So I started reading:

• Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager¹
• Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management²
• Michael D. Watkins’s The First 90 Days³
• George Kohlrieser’s Care to Dare⁴
• Tony Fadell’s Build⁵
• Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus⁶.

They were all about working with a team, about taking responsibility from an organizational perspective, about leading people instead of managing metrics. It showed me leadership was a bigger practice than the one I had assumed – numbers and reporting lines were only part of it.

A pattern I had never named

None of this was new, even if I hadn’t named it as a pattern. At CGI, I was the first UX designer hired. As the workload grew, I recruited and built a team. On paper, we belonged to another department – quality assurance and testing – managed there for legal and HR reasons. In practice, I set how we worked, what we did, and the principles behind it, until the day I left for SEB.

I had stepped into responsibility before, more than once, without seeking the title that came with it. I had done it again at SEB, in the same kind of substitute role. I still couldn’t see it as a pattern. I only saw a temporary position someone had asked me to fill.

What was still in the way

Even after I heard I had been marked as a successor, two things held me back. My own self-belief. And a question of ethics – I would become the official boss of people I had worked beside as a peer, and I did not know what that would mean, for me or for them.

The ethics resolved faster than I expected. My team had already been treating me as their boss in practice. When I finally took the title, it was not a surprise to any of them.

The self-belief was not abstract. If I took the role and, two years in, the team or the organization still saw me not performing the way they expected, I could revert back to an individual contributor. That was the actual risk sitting under the question. It took a conversation with my mentor at SEB to work through it, one barrier at a time, until neither reason was enough to say no anymore.

Writing my way into the decision

Before I said any of this out loud, I journaled about it. What I saw in myself when I set the fear aside. What I would do with the role, concretely, if I took it.

Somewhere in those pages, the question changed shape. It stopped being whether I was ready and became whether I was willing to gamble. If there was something in me that other people kept naming, I could either keep dismissing it or find out if they were right. Writing it down was how I let myself consider the second option.

What it actually took

I applied. I got the role of Head of UX. Keeping the title did not mean keeping the job the same.

Managing a team asked for something I had never done. I had worked alongside these same colleagues and designers as a peer, with no official authority and no official responsibility for them. Now I needed directions, requests, and feedback loops – ways to evaluate their performance and their results for the organization.

There was a second gap, quieter but just as real: I was not sure how to manage a design function as a business. I had read about it, heard it discussed. It was the MBA at Estonian Business School, and the seminars with my peers there, that turned that reading into something I could apply in my everyday work at SEB.

The biggest surprise of the MBA was managerial accounting and finance. I forced myself to put every theory into practice – journaling how I would use something like opportunity cost to evaluate a design project. None of that had been part of my knowledge or experience before.

That work fed into something bigger: the business processes I built afterward, an important addition to how the design function was changing within SEB. Metrics became a large part of it. The question kept coming up – do we even need an in-house design team, and what is the real value of having one? My answer was that the value sits in the processes we changed. Metrics were how I tracked that for myself: where we were, what we were doing. They were also the proof I could hand the rest of the organization, showing how we had improved.

I still think like a designer. I still think about how other leaders experience a UX or design function. That was never going to be enough on its own. What the role gave me was a new way to think about my own contribution – to SEB, and to the design community around it.

The blind spot

I did not recognize I was ready to lead. My son did. My colleagues did. My previous manager did, long before I knew it. My manager at the time did, in an ordinary one-on-one. My mentor helped me believe it last.

If I had not heard about that labeling – if my mentor, my manager at the time, and my own family had not all questioned my hesitation – I think my career would have gone down a completely different road. If someone had described my life now to me twenty years ago, I would not have believed them. I knew I was good at design, and good at talking to people. I never once saw myself as a leader.

That is the part nobody tells you about being ready: you are usually the last person to know. Hesitating that long felt like caution at the time. Looking back, it was self-sabotage – stalling on a risk that was never as big as it felt.