A Seat at the Table
It’s one thing to hire strong individual leaders—it’s another to treat them as a collective whose power can drive your business to new heights.
BY HANNAH HICKOK
Excerpt from Winter 2025 edition of Business of Home
Soaring exposed-beam ceilings, black-and-white photographs and geometric motifs lend a commanding presence to this dining room by Britt Design Group. The 18-person company has benefited from forming committees to take the lead on specific business areas.
Photo by Ryann Ford
For Austin-based designer Laura Britt, a flexible leadership framework has meant forming several small committees within her 18-person firm, Britt Design Group, rather than one high-level group of senior staff. Each one has a specific focus—a technology committee, a process committee and, at one point, a marketing committee. “It’s not super formal, but it is our intention that everyone has a way to plug into the organization,” says the designer. “It started a few years ago, when we formed the marketing committee because we didn’t have a sole point person for marketing, and we found we needed a place where we can all come together, brainstorm and set out actionable items.”
The less centralized structure draws on employees at various levels, based on their skill sets or interests, who meet regularly and then share their ideas with the full firm at monthly all-hands meetings (and sometimes through the office chat platform). Still, the more casual quality of the committee system does not make it any less effective: “The process committee is a really important group that includes the director of operations, some junior designers and our marketing person, who is pulled in as needed,” says Britt. “Recently, we realized that our invoicing wasn’t presenting billing information in a way that was as useful as it could be, so I asked the process committee to work collectively with everyone to change the way we present information to make it easier to digest.”
In addition to improving firm procedures and leveraging staff expertise, Britt says that seeing her leadership framework operate like a well-oiled machine, even in her absence, is the most gratifying result. “I had to step away from the business and move to Houston for a short time due to health issues, and our leadership team and the entire team stepped up in such a big way that let the business continue to run and thrive. So I think it’s been incredibly successful, if not perfect.” And that really is the ideal outcome of a strong leadership team, no matter what future you envision for your firm.