After a conflict over mission tanked morale at her firm, the designer tapped an internal team member to oversee the staff’s growth and development.
In 2022, Andrea Schumacher embarked on a yearlong book tour for her first design monograph. It was an exciting time for the designer—months spent crisscrossing the country attending industry events. It was also something she had planned carefully for years: In her absence, she entrusted the daily operations of her 12-person firm to two key employees—a creative director who had been with the company for eight years, and a COO who had handled its finances and balance sheet for more than a decade.
But Schumacher’s time away didn’t go quite as planned. Instead, her longstanding relationships with those two team members began to fray as her focus shifted toward national brand-building efforts. It wasn’t until her travel schedule slowed that she realized just how much the energy had shifted. “My office felt the growing pains, and [my vision] didn’t resonate with some of the people on the team,” she says.

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