Strategic Influence for Human-Centered Leaders

**Tuesday, October 20th, 6:00-8:00 PM EDT** **Presentation & Discussion** **Strategic Influence for Human-Centered Leaders** Presented by Misha Energí **Event Description** As service designers mature into senior leadership, our mandate shifts from advising on customer experience to defending headcount, budget, and bottom-line impact. This transition can feel jarring: leadership politics often seem counter to our core values like empathy and collaboration, while our classic defense, “the work speaks for itself,” no longer holds. To keep growing, we need to evolve how we position our work and our roles, and mastering peer advocacy is a key driver in this shift. But winning support doesn't require a ruthless posture. Nor do we need to abandon our human-centric values. In fact, as service designers, we already hold the tools for strategic leadership; we simply need to redirect our empathy, systems thinking, and co-design methods toward internal dynamics. This interactive session introduces **Strategic Influence for Human-Centered Leaders**: a practical advocacy framework to align user-centric goals, complex stakeholder interests, and our own aspirations. Aimed at senior contributors and team leads who are thinking about “what’s next” in their careers, the session will unpack four leadership personas: **Visionary, Driver, Partner, and Diplomat**.