A service designer rarely has formal authority over policy, technology or delivery colleagues, yet the occupational standard expects them to question and challenge the design brief in order to lead, influence and guide stakeholders (Skills England, 2023). That gap between authority and expectation is filled by leadership stance: the pattern of behaviour a person brings to every meeting, brief and disagreement, whether or not “leader” appears in their job title. Because services cut across organisation structures and governance arrangements that were never designed with any single service in mind, a service designer’s influence depends less on where they sit on an organisational chart than on the stance they bring into each interaction. That stance, whether they default to agreement or challenge, to a narrow user group or a wide one, to a single stakeholder or several, shapes the service being designed as much as any method or tool chosen along the way.
Advocating for users starts with noticing who is missing from the room. Design built around one narrow picture of the user leaves some people out permanently, others only in certain situations, and the gap carries forward into every decision that follows (Kim, 2018). The occupational standard names the end user as the most important stakeholder a service designer represents (Skills England, 2023). A stance built on idealised influence and inspirational motivation gives that representation weight in the room (Bass and Riggio, 2006): naming an absent user’s likely reaction to a decision, not just reporting a research finding, and holding that position when convenient consensus is closer than an inconvenient user need.
Challenging assumptions is the intellectual stimulation strand of transformational leadership: inviting colleagues to question how a problem has been framed rather than accepting the brief as given (Bass and Riggio, 2006), matching the standard’s expectation that service designers question and challenge the design brief itself (Skills England, 2023). Challenge only surfaces where people feel safe enough to offer it. Psychological safety is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson, 2019); without it, doubts about a flawed assumption stay private, and a stance that punishes a wrong guess, even subtly, trains colleagues to stop guessing aloud. The practical stance is to ask the disproving question before a brief is signed off and treat a colleague’s challenge as information rather than a threat.
Influencing stakeholders across departments who share no reporting line calls for boundary-spanning leadership: building bridges between groups defined by different professions, priorities and languages (Ernst and Chrobot-Mason, 2011), echoing the wide cast of roles, from policy to delivery to frontline staff, that shape any one service. Where a boundary is left unmanaged, responsibility for a decision can be assumed by everyone and owned by no one. A stance that spans these boundaries treats every handoff between professions as a leadership moment, translating a research finding for a technical audience, or a technical constraint for a policy sponsor, so that influence is earned through shared understanding rather than asserted through position.
None of these moves, advocacy, challenge, influence and boundary spanning, work in isolation. Transformation happens when a consistent stance is repeated across many small interactions until stakeholders trust where a service designer is coming from, even under pressure to compromise. Sustaining that stance is also a discipline in its own right: each decision offers feedback on which move served users, colleagues or the service best, and reviewing that feedback regularly is what turns a promising instinct into a reliable, repeatable practice.
Action Point
Think of a service decision you influenced recently without formal authority over the outcome. Which stance did you take: advocate for an absent user, challenge an accepted assumption, or build a bridge between two professions who rarely speak? Identify the stance you used least. Before your next stakeholder conversation, plan one specific moment where you will deliberately use it.