Successful teachers, like successful leaders, engage people’s hearts. Sidneyeve Matrix is one of my favorite people to talk about this with. A marketing professor and graphic designer with a Harvard credential in Instructional Design, Sidneyeve devotes (I’m guessing) most of her waking moments to thinking about how to help people learn by surrounding them with beauty. 

Sidneyeve joins us to talk about how design stimulates empathy, facilitates learning, and acts as a catalyst for entrepreneurs. We talk about how visual cues prompt our brains to fire, and how color, curiosity, and empathy keep us engaged in what we’re learning. Sidneyeve shares examples from her college teaching, her coaching with entrepreneurs, and from her own design shop, Valentine Course Design. 

In higher ed we talk a fair bit about how visuals support teaching — the visual syllabus is nothing new — but I’m struck by the analog to leadership. Imagine the joy of attending meetings where documents are actually enticing to look at, or where visualizations are used to engage our hearts and minds and prompt rich conversation. Sidneyeve makes even basic ideas — like using color-coding to help cue people to where they are, or creating simple  leaderboards with eye-catching graphics — feel not only manageable but desirable. 

No matter where you are in your leadership journey there’s something here for you. And maybe you’ll come out on the other side not just with ideas for using color and images in your LMS, but possibly with an idea or two for creating pretty agendas to bring life to your administrative docs. 

Other episodes you might enjoy

Monday in the Park with Rand: On Teaching, Leadership, and Why We Don’t Want to Be College Presidents (with Rand Park) (episode 64).

How Teaching Prepares You For Leadership (episode 63).

Excellent Teaching, Excellent Leading (episode 38).