May-Li Khoe: What it means to manage: Designing teams and cultures for the future

In today’s episode, I speak with May-Li Khoe. May-Li is an
interdisciplinary, quatricultural, twice-immigrant
artist-researcher-designer-inventor who combines invention with
cultural practices, bright colors, faces-on-things, and glitter.
She brings over 20 years of experience in design, including
serving as VP of Design at Khan Academy, co-founding two
companies (Scribble Together and Sprout, formerly MakeSpace), and
recently creating a music and dance toy-game for the new Playdate
game platform. Before that, she worked on new technologies at
Apple and other tech organizations ranging from IBM Research, the
MIT Media Lab, and Dynamicland, to the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, Universal Music Group, and Oakland Museum of California.
She also DJs, dances, writes, makes art, speaks, teaches, plays
music, and cultivates joyful ways to subvert the status
quo.

We dive into what it means to manage and lead by understanding
the emotions that drive people’s behaviors in an organization,
the power and responsibility of being a manager versus
influencing as an individual contributor, ways to communicate
your true authentic voice as a new manager, and how EQ can help
you manage more humanely and inclusively in the future. Check
out links mentioned in the episode: Catt Small’s article,
Should you become a design manager and Kat Vellos’s tweet on the
Fast Co. article, The DEI disconnect between tech leaders and
their teams.