Leadership Experience (LX): What if we deliberately designed the experience of leading?
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I've been thinking a lot lately about experience. That's probably a natural place for me to land — most of my life's work has been about making the experiences companies create, whether on an app or in person, frictionless, helpful, and if you're really lucky, unexpectedly delightful. It's that last one that makes my heart soar. Delight is deeply subjective, but when unbounded creativity connects just right with meaning-making, it truly is chef's kiss.
At its core, experience design is about crafting products, services, environments, and interactions so that the whole thing just feels good — needs are met, goals are reached, and every touchpoint feels intentional and intuitive. It's the shift from beautifully designed to wonderfully useful. And the locus of that shift — the decisions surrounding it, the language used to describe it, and what the ultimate experience actually is — lives not with the company or brand, but in careful consideration of the people using it.
What began as a practice of digital design expanded into service design, then customer experience design, and most recently, employee experience. I've worked across all four. But it's when the practice turns inward on the organization itself that I sometimes wonder whether we apply the same depth of curiosity and inquiry to understanding people's experiences at work as we do to understanding customers. The rigour that makes experience design uniquely valuable and creatively expansive has always been rooted in research.
There are, of course, monthly employee surveys that gauge satisfaction or surface common signals. But they don't always uncover the why behind Likert-scale questions, nor do they necessarily provide a clear line of sight into how those experiences connect to outcomes like performance, productivity, or progression. Now that I'm working alongside leaders through change, this is a question I sit with constantly: how might we understand the unique experiences of leaders in relation to what it’s actually like to lead within the organizations they’re a part of – and how does that shape everyone around them?
Because asking this can help us better understand how organizational systems, structures, and expectations contribute to some of the psychological, emotional, and practical challenges leaders face every day: loneliness, burnout, chronic overload, imposter syndrome, identity strain, and more. Which means, if you're a leader reading this, a lot of what you're experiencing may have as much to do with the environment around you as with your individual capabilities.
That last point resonates deeply from my own time in leadership. Once the initial onboarding journey fades — and that can range from "buy your own swag" to a structured buddy system spanning your first few months — many leaders are largely left to create their own adventure. Struggles get handled at the individual level: a performance and growth plan, maybe an industry conference, maybe a leadership training designed to replenish a flagging sense of agency. All of it well-intentioned. But I often wonder whether we're more inclined to strengthen individual leaders than to examine and improve the experience of leadership itself.
But as someone who has spent time both inside leadership and alongside leaders navigating it — especially through the kind of seismic geopolitical, technological, and economic shifts that have become a constant backdrop — I find myself returning again and again to the very human texture of that experience. And to what our systems quietly ask of the people within them.
Employee experience is often discussed in terms of culture, belonging, and engagement. Yet for leaders, there's an unspoken assumption that reaching a certain level means you've become as self-sufficient as you are self-directed. The two aren't quite the same thing, though.
Self-direction is the capacity to lead. Self-sufficiency is the expectation that you can do so without much in the way of real support.
Leadership, though, has never really been a solitary act. How well a leader can sustain themselves in the role isn't just a reflection of their personal resilience or self-awareness — it's also shaped by what surrounds them: the structures they operate within, the relationships they can draw on, the spaces (or absence of spaces) for honest reflection. In that sense, being a sufficient leader is as much a collective condition as it is an individual one.
Which is part of why I've been thinking about leadership experience as something that deserves attention across the full arc of a leader's time within an organization — not just as a footnote within the broader employee experience conversation.
Periods of uncertainty have a way of pulling us inward. That's a deeply human instinct. And yet the current moment seems to ask something almost contradictory of leaders: more flexibility where there's less certainty, more curiosity where assumption feels safer, more creativity at the edges of expertise. The conditions that naturally trigger self-protection are often the same ones that call for openness and connection. That tension is worth sitting with.
Leaders are employees, of course. But the particular shape of what they carry — organizational responsibility, decisions made with incomplete information, the need to hold steadiness for others while quietly managing their own uncertainty — introduces a set of human needs that can get lost inside the broader conversation about work experience.
Maybe that's worth paying more attention to.
I don't have a tidy framework for this yet — and I'm not sure I'm looking for one. What I'm more interested in is the question itself: what is it actually like to be a leader here, and what does that experience make possible or foreclose for everyone else?
Leadership Experience (LX) is a thread I'll be pulling on over the coming months — not toward a neat answer, but toward better questions. Maybe that's the more honest place to leave it.
