Rania Svoronou talks life at IBM and the power of mentoring
A key speaker for TEDx and an industry mentor herself, design director Rania Svoronou talks about the benefits and challenges of mentoring and life at New York’s IBM interactive experience division.
Winner of a TechWomen100 award, London College of Communication alumni Rania Svoronou is a design maven currently based in New York at IBM iX. Graduating with a Masters in Interactive Design and gaining a ceaseless drive for creativity, Svoronou is a keen advocate of mentoring.
How did you start working at IBM Interactive Experience division in New York?
Well, first of all, I started in London. I started at the IBM iX studio in London, Southbank when the studio had just opened in 2015. So it was brand new, it wasn’t established yet, but it had a lot of potential. Let’s say four years at IBM (in London), then I had a chat with a few people and they kind of put the seed in my mind: ‘what about New York, would you be interested?’
I never had the idea in my mind to go to the US, it was just kind of a vague notion, but then I decided why not? I started out connecting the dots and networking, I flew over here to meet the team, and IBM transferred me to New York IBM iX. It took almost a year to happen. I arrived in May 2019. So that was kind of the high-level story. It’s one of those conversations, you don’t know where they’re going to take you. It was literally just a conversation with a colleague and he says, ‘Rania, what would you like to do?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know’. So, hey, now I’m in New York!
What does your day-to-day work life entail as a design director?
It really varies. IBM iX is the business design arm of IBM services. My responsibilities vary from owning and driving client engagements to DesignOps. So it’s a part of sales, a part of delivery, managing teams, managing projects, but it’s primarily client-focused and at the same time, you’re responsible for the enterprise design thinking that we have, being an advocate and helping the internal IBM to transform itself.
Where there any moments where you naturally found yourself with your own mentor, either formally or informally?
Oh, absolutely. I’m a huge advocate of mentorship and I say to everybody, there’s no way I would be where I am now if I didn’t have the right mentorship. That’s why I’m also a mentor with LCC in London and now in New York. I always had internal and external mentors, always.
So, within the company, at IBM in the UK, and then when I arrived in New York. I have here, Sabine Roehl, our North America Chief Creative Officer and even my manager is my mentor. Then externally, I’ve reached out to, design leaders in the industry to get mentorship. Currently I also have Stephen Gates, who’s the SVP (Senior Vice President) Omni-channel Product Design at WW (formerly Weight Watcher).
I think mentoring is really about chemistry and knowing what you’re looking for. I had different needs five years ago or 10 years ago, but I always had a mentor, right from my university days. You have to make sure you have the right mentor, because you don’t need many people to get advice from, you just need the right advice.
But how do you end up finding the right mentor that fits your path?
So you learn that the beginning. For example, at university the first thing I did was to see who I admire. But not just design-wise; career-wise, skills-wise, and personality-wise, because for me that’s a big thing. If you’re the type of an arrogant design leader, I’m not interested, we have lots of them. I was interested in finding that combination of skills, being a brilliant designer, but at the same time being a good leader because the two things are different but we always put them together.
In my first job, I didn’t have anybody, but on my second job my design director was my mentor. Externally, it was a bit harder to find someone, but the better I knew the industry, the more I would network, the more I was at events, the more I could find them. Nobody’s going to come to you and say ‘Let me mentor you’. It was really just finding people I admire and respect and that’s what happened. For example, here in the US, I had to find my tribe from the beginning, I reached out to people whose profiles I really liked and had a chat with them, and I keep doing that.
So would you say, the key thing to get a mentor is by networking either in your own bubble or elsewhere?
For sure. Networking is one and asking what do you need? Like, what do you need to be mentored in? Be specific. I get a lot of requests, ‘I want to be mentored’ and all that, but it’s more about what specifically you need to be mentored in. Is it because you need to grow your career? Your skills? Your confidence? There’s so many different things you can be mentored in, so you really need to be specific.
And network — you’ll get rejected but sometimes that’s part of it, it’s okay, it’s a process, don’t take it personally. To be honest I wish I had the time to mentor more designers but, there are so many schemes, right now; I’m a mentor at the ADP List (Amazing Design People), which is a global network of mentors and it’s free. It was created because of Covid, and people just got into it — it’s a huge platform of design leaders who you can be mentored by. More of these, I think are going to come along.
I watched your TEDx talk in Athens, It was great by the way…
That was almost two years ago now. There’s always a theme on TEDx and (the theme) it was blank. So I found that very interesting. It was like, blank canvas, blank page. I was really fascinated by the topic and I kind of took an approach through my professional and personal career and when I combined those two things, I found what is dearest to me, which is resilience. I really believe in the whole mentality part of creativity.
The title itself was ‘Think Like a Designer Act Like an Athlete’, which means you don’t need to be a designer, you don’t need to be an athlete but if you take a combination of those two skillsets, you can apply it to everything — easier said than done. I realised after many years, that’s what I was doing. I was an athlete myself when I was younger, so I had this discipline from a very young age, and I’ve been a creative, of course.
One thing that stuck out, a phrase, during your talk you said “athletes have coached, designers have mentors”. So poetically worded because I never put it into that perspective. Why do you think it’s important for young creatives or graduates to have a mentor and gain tailored industry experience and advice?
All the best athlete have the best coaches. It’s interlinked. But for some reason we think that any other profession can figure it out themselves just because it’s not physical. It shouldn’t be that way. You still need coaching. You still need mentorship. People keep saying that it’s not a sprint it’s a marathon, you still need somebody to get you where you want to go. That’s exactly what’s behind the quote.
You’ve been part of LCC’s industry mentoring scheme since 2018, What initially drew you into the programme and why?
First of all, I am an alumni of LCC. I love London College of Communication, anything that has to do with UAL. I’m a very proud alumni. There wasn’t a scheme I think when I was starting, but I was kind of creating my own network. It’s really good to actually mentor new designers, so I felt like, of course I would be part of this. I wish I had it when I was younger.
I have two or three designers per year, it really depends. They can match me with skillsets, for example, I graduated with a Masters in Interactive Design, so I would be matched with other designers from that field. It’s really hard to mentor somebody who’s in a completely different field, not impossible, just harder. I’m an alumni and we need to give back and I hope the younger generation later mentors the next ones.
As a mentor, when you get allocated a person, do you have a specific way you mentor? What’s your mentoring methods?
There are a lot of different methods. My type of mentorship — because it’s one-to-one; mentorship, management and coaching they’re all different. Somebody phrased it really well as, ‘I’m not going to give you the answer, but I’m going to help you find it. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I’ll show you options. It’s psychology. By discussing it, you basically uncover what you want to do. I wouldn’t say to somebody, do this, but I would lay out the options and base it on what that person would tell me and my experience. In the end, it’s always their decision and what they want to do. That is how I usually do it, I keep it more casual.
It’s different mentoring students and mentoring professionals. They’re navigating different problems. What they want to do next? Maybe they’re not sure. But it’s always one-to-one, and I used to do either once a month, sometimes it was every two months. It really depends on the need of each student
I find people my age or young creatives in general a bit hesitant in seeking a mentor. Why do you think that’s the case? And what’s your advice on overcoming that hesitation?
I think there’s two things. One, it’s because a lot of people are actually shy, they feel shy reaching out, like, why would that person talk to me? The other one is ‘I don’t need a mentor, I know what I’m doing’— I’ve that heard a lot, or the ‘no I don’t need it’. I think it’s because creativity is a very specific discipline and it’s very organic. You like the design, but I don’t like it doesn’t mean you’re right and I’m wrong. It’s so organic itself that defining the right mentor and match.
Creatives by nature, we’re still learning how to accept criticism or feedback. I think sometimes there’s this hesitation, but I would say that it’s not about that. It’s really coaching your mindset: think, I’m an athlete and this is what I want to achieve and I need a coach to help me. Then you just break all the barriers, stereotypes or whatever else you could have in your mind.
That links back to how being creative is all about individuality. So when you are mentoring someone, you don’t want them to be exactly like you, you’re not doing a copy and paste, you want them to find their own individuality.
Oh, absolutely. Everybody needs to be their own selves. My mentor actually says, ‘The scariest thing somebody can do is be themselves’. I had that chat with my mentor when I came to the US, about being Greek, about leaving the UK. So I have a mix of personality and cultures, I felt like, ‘Now that I’m in the US, I might need to fit in more with US culture’. He was like ‘No, because that’s exactly what you bring to the table’.
But it is a process to realise that, by being yourself and optimising yourself it will serve you best rather than trying to copy somebody else’s style. You can get good traits, absolutely, like being an empathetic leader, because we want more empathetic design leaders out there, but you need to be your own version. It’s finding your own way. It is a self discovery journey.
Lastly, any words of advice you’d tell your younger self?
Oh my gosh, so many. Trust your gut. It took me awhile to trust mine. I was recently reading an article, that said, your body always knows. Don’t ignore the signals, trust your gut and take that job. Trust your gut, that this person might not be good for you. It takes some time, but this is how you learn. I’ve learnt that trusting your gut is a great thing, it’s a great skillset to have, especially as a creative.
*Views are Rania’s own and do not represent her employer.
Feature image: Rania Svoronou at TEDx AUEB talk, 2019. Photo used with permission by Svoronou, Rania.