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Articles · · 5 min read

The Multi-Mode Advantage: Managing a Range of Partnerships through Positioning

For design leaders, reading the room is everything. While conventional wisdom suggests that positioning drives perception, the reality for design teams is often reversed: your ability to read and respond to shifting stakeholder perceptions should drive your positioning decisions.

The Multi-Mode Advantage: Managing a Range of Partnerships through Positioning

The email arrived on a Thursday afternoon, just as I was wrapping up my first month back at Electronic Arts, this time building a team within IT. "We need these intranet mockups by Friday. Nothing fancy, just make it look good." I stared at my screen, feeling that familiar knot in my stomach. Here we were again—the design team relegated to last-minute cosmetic touches, our expertise reduced to "making things pretty."

This moment became a turning point in how I understood organizational partnerships at EA. In just that first month, I'd encountered the full spectrum: from teams that maintained rigid control and saw design as purely executional, to those eager to explore new approaches that could transform the employee experience. Learning to recognize and work with these different partnership types didn't just help us survive—it became the foundation of our success.

The Three Partnership Types

Through both of my experiences leading design at EA, I began to see clear patterns in how different teams approached their relationship with design. Each type required a different strategy, and understanding these differences helped us navigate the organization more effectively.

I've previous written about finding Executive Champions at work. As a refresher, there are three partnership types for which I've had to give energy to:

Challengers: High Power, Low Flexibility

The HR team exemplified what I came to think of as a "Challenger" partnership. They held significant organizational power but showed limited willingness to embrace new approaches. With the intranet project, despite mounting evidence of declining employee engagement, they remained committed to their established ways of working.

Working with Challengers taught me to focus on excellent execution within constraints. While we couldn't drive strategic change directly, we could still deliver value through careful implementation. More importantly, I learned that Challengers often change their approach not through direct persuasion, but by seeing successful results elsewhere in the organization.

Champions: High Power, Evidence-Driven

I found that Champions operated differently. These executive-level partners had the power to drive significant change but needed to see evidence before fully committing. They were willing to experiment but required concrete results before scaling new approaches. Once convinced, they became powerful allies, often helping to influence more resistant Challengers through their success stories.

Sidekicks: Lower Power, High Trust

The Talent Management team showed me what a "Sidekick" partnership could achieve. While they had less organizational power, they trusted our expertise and were willing to try new approaches. These partnerships, though smaller in scope, produced the case studies and evidence needed to convince Champions and, eventually, Challengers. Our work on Interview Sidekick demonstrated how these partnerships could create transformative results that influenced the entire organization.

The Multi-Mode Reality

Through these experiences, I developed what I called our "multi-mode model." Instead of trying to transform every partnership into the same ideal state, I learned to optimize our approach based on each partner's type and potential for evolution.

With Challengers like the HR team, I focused on:

With Champions, my emphasis was on:

With Sidekicks, I prioritized:

Managing Partnerships on a Spectrum

I discovered that success wasn't about trying to transform every Challenger into a Champion, but rather about working effectively with each type. Here's what worked for me:

  1. Identify Partnership Types Early
  1. Deploy Appropriate Strategies
  1. Create Success Networks

Your First 90 Days

Based on my experience, here's how to implement this partnership model:

Days 1-30: Partnership Mapping

Days 31-60: Positioning Development

Days 61-90: Implementation

Positioning Your Design Team

For in-house design teams, reading the room is everything. While conventional wisdom suggests that positioning drives perception, the reality for design teams is often reversed: your ability to read and respond to shifting stakeholder perceptions should drive your positioning decisions.

I learned that understanding partnership types was only half the equation. The other half was positioning the design team appropriately for each audience.

Positioning for Challengers

With our HR partners, I learned to position the design team as execution specialists rather than strategic consultants. This meant:

For the intranet project, I shifted from pushing for strategic involvement to positioning us as technical experts who could deliver precise implementations on time and on budget. This approach helped maintain productive relationships while we built influence elsewhere.

Positioning for Champions

For Champions, I focused on evidence-based positioning that spoke to business outcomes:

Positioning for Sidekicks

With the Talent Management team, I positioned us as innovation partners and change catalysts:

Cross-Pollinating Positioning

The real power came from using these different positioning strategies to create a network effect:

  1. Using Sidekick successes to build case studies for Champions
  2. Using Champion endorsements to influence Challengers
  3. Using Challenger execution wins to demonstrate reliability to everyone

The Long-Term Impact

What I ultimately learned at EA was that success in organizational design isn't about converting every partner to your way of working. It's about understanding each partnership type and optimizing your approach accordingly. While our HR partnership remained a challenging one, we excelled at execution in that partnership while building evidence of novel and unique solutions through Sidekicks and Champions elsewhere. This multi-speed approach led to broader organizational change, driven not by force but by example and influence.

To sum things up, each partnership type plays a vital role in making progress. Challengers keep us sharp on execution, Champions help scale proven approaches, and Sidekicks are the partnerships that create the kind of evidence needed for broader change. In my experience, success has come from working effectively in this multi-mode model.

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