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.