with Joanne Jørgensen
Founder of TeamGlue & ex-Design Director at Nike
Tom Honeyman, Product & Design Consultant at MacGregor Black, sat down with Joanne Jørgensen, Founder of TeamGlue and former Design Director at Nike, for an exclusive conversation exploring the insights and experiences behind her remarkable career.
From gratitude flowers to less is more, Joanne talks through the bitter experience of burnout as a young professional to being part of one of the most influential design teams at Nike and how, now that she’s operating her own teams and leadership consultancy at TeamGlue, the focus is on positive cultures…one hundred and ten percent.
Early Lessons in the Fashion Industry
Joanne’s formative professional years were spent at art school, where she studied textiles, securing her first role in the corporate fashion world in New York, a position she says taught her so much of her professional craft. But it wasn’t, she felt, without some drawbacks of traditions in the design world that she’s now working hard to try to change.
During my discussion with Joanne, it’s clear that some painful early experiences in the industry, especially while in the United States, have shaped her mission to help teams and leaders of teams identify the need for more compassionate and deeper understanding of the need to engender positive mindsets.
The situation she observed, even as a green shoot in the fashion and design industry, was one sadly not uncommon to many of us but clearly started to shape the way she now approaches things at TeamGlue.
“I never quite understood how these young interns were asked to make coffee and do the photocopying as an introduction to the industry.”
She observed of her formative years.
“I found it so strange that these talented, hungry art students, brimming with ambition and ideas, had their talents go unused. Structure and hierarchy seemed to dominate, and that struck me as really odd in a world where you’d think creative freedoms would allow the best results. It felt like a tipping point in my own mindset. For me, everyone matters, but here was an industry trying to fit rigid structure and long hours as the norm. Being at work from 8am to 10pm does only lead to one place, and it’s not a good place.”
Building Culture and Leading with Empathy
With that experience under her belt, she returned to the UK and worked with a number of High Street brand names, further honing that craft of combining creativity, design, and commercial application.
But it was her degree show that she feels brought her round to her ‘full circle’ moment. She’d designed knitted uppers for sport shoes for that show and was amazed to be approached by Nike, via LinkedIn, to lead their studio for what would become one of the sports giant’s most revered ranges: the Flyknit.
“It was high energy. A lot of fun.”
She recalls of her nearly ten years at Nike, where she was involved in a sustainability and circular textiles approach to the Flyknit design process, which would go on to encompass women’s, men’s, kids, and wider sport performance footwear.
“Over that time, I had a growing team and started to become really drawn to how my role was starting to shape. It had become a blended approach of coaching, consulting, and creativity. But of course, things simply don’t sit in neat boxes, do they? That’s when I started thinking seriously about creating my own agency.”
So what, I ask, did these experiences teach you and shape your approach to how your own agency would look?
“Know yourself.”
She says confidently.
“And by that, I mean know your strengths and weaknesses, know where your own personal growth will be satisfied, and build accordingly. Never stop learning. I don’t want to be a leader who’s in the weeds, but I want to know a bit about all of it, so that does mean I crave an understanding of some new technology. Yes, I have functional experts on my team, but I want to have played with that new thing and understand what it does.”
Joanne stresses that, for her, culture is crucial, and the culture at TeamGlue has been led by her thirst for making sure she truly knows her team.
“You have to put the work into getting to know everyone. And by that, I believe you have to go way beyond blasé one-to-ones once a month. Schedule time every week to get to know every single person on your team, from top to bottom. Creative directors, vice presidents, interns…we’re all human underneath it all. We’re way more than a scary title. I truly believe this ethos helps us, as a team get through the challenging times, as well as the good times, together. That’s my thing: culture. 110 percent.”
As if to prove her point that 100 percent focus on culture is maybe not enough, she digs deeper into the subject, her animation growing as she does.
“It’s funny. People talk a lot in business functionality about updating their operating systems, and it’s always tech advancements. But why don’t we talk about the operating system of the team? For me, that’s about getting into habits of talking about your culture: How are we going to show up? What are our accepted norms? How do we speak to each other? What are the rituals, the things we want to do together as a team? How do we get inspired?”
She continues.
“What about mission statements and values? That can’t be a ‘one and done.’ You have to revisit that every year.“
Overcoming Burnout and Redefining Success
When asked about some of the big challenges and how they’ve been overcome, she returns to the difficult subject of burnout. Admitting she became a victim of cultures that show signs of being better understood now, but when in them, they were difficult periods for her personally.
With just ten days leave annually and an ‘always-on’ business culture, she now knows she couldn’t possibly have been at her most productive.
“At the time, I imagine I was the same as a lot of people. You just don’t realise it’s happening to you. It’s a sneaky one. I didn’t understand what was going on.”
Consistent bouts of illness led her to her doctor to refer her and identify that the nine-to-five had become far more than that, and dangerously so. She was suffering from burnout and, for the good of her health, had to lift her foot off the professional pedal.
“That’s when I realised I had to slow down to speed up. And things changed for me from then. I reflect on that period now, and I know I was not more productive working all those hours. I know myself better now. When my brain is calm, I’ve got flow. I’ve really tried to help support other leaders to be comfortable at creating balance. It’s not easy, but in design, for example, we encourage people to go and get inspired for a day. Switch off the phone and go to a gallery. Your teams WILL do more as a result.”
Running her own business, Joanne admits that she still struggles being strict with herself when there are a million things to contend with, from business development to social media, accounts to team challenges. It strikes me at this point that through our hour, Joanne never once uses the word ‘staff’ when referring to her team.
And she’s quick to underline that point when I ask her about some of the proudest achievements to date in her career.
“I think about the team we built at Nike and the culture we built through the processes we worked through. Its legacy is the feeling that although we’re no longer a team now, we’re together for life on that journey.”
She hesitates on the word ‘family.’
“I don’t really like to use that word with work, as I think that can be a bit dangerous, but we created such a magical, airtight culture where we really did break boundaries, break barriers, and break records.”
Joanne explains how the pride in achieving that within one of the globe’s best-known brands is something that now drives her understanding when coaching leaders and directors through TeamGlue.
“It’s very clear to me that the methodology of creating a strong and safe culture is something that is really, really needed. There is a need [in leadership] for emotional intelligence, vulnerability, and asking for feedback on your project, your processes, your brief…and yourself. Leadership is more important than it has ever been, and that’s really the point of TeamGlue. I really hope I help impact other leaders and teams in the future.”
Her next point about structuring working processes then makes you understand just how much she prioritises team culture built on something far deeper.
At one stage in our careers, we’ve probably all felt the inner dread of a Monday morning team meeting. Joanne has too, so set about changing that to make it something far more productive.
“There’s nothing wrong with coming together at the start of the week, seeing what’s on the collective plate, and then prioritising your workload. But you have no idea how everyone’s private life has been over the weekend. Maybe they’ve had relationship issues, maybe they’re coming in with a carer or just had a bad commute that morning.”
“So I added something else, which I called the gratitude flower. A simple, sharable Miro board, and every person on the team placed a short note on what they were grateful for from their teammates. It’s so easy to be blind, to forget what others see in us and the value we bring. It became a really powerful thing to remind individuals what their teammates see in them. It really helps to build a sense of camaraderie.”
Within her own team, the process helped her realise that too much time is spent focusing on the things that need to be fixed, and not on the things that they succeed in. Her example:
“We had a textiles team and we had someone who’s an amazing yarn nerd, knows everything about all the threads. Telling them directly that, without that person on the team, things become really difficult. Everyone on the team recognises it, tells that person how much respect they have for that knowledge. It’s a really powerful exercise.”
Driving Innovation with Purpose
Talk switches to industry-relevant innovation in fashion, particularly in sustainability. With Trump openly and consistently questioning the science behind the earth’s environmental decline, does she fear those in the industry will start to also row back on their own commitments now and in the future to pursue more sustainable solutions?
“The green shoots remain.“
She says defiantly.
“I see and hear the industry talking in the right way. I think we see more and more sustainability becoming the norm across all areas, rather than it just being the responsibility of a sustainable team. In silos like that, it can become dangerous, because it’s the responsibility of that team ‘over there’, so we don’t need to think about it here.”
She points to organisations she’s working with where there’s more cross-company work with non-virgin materials, or where there are company-wide commitments to producing fewer prototypes, and where more and more leaders are embedding sustainability into KPIs.
Inevitably, the spiky issue of AI rears its head. Again, Joanne is aptly reflective on its uses and businesses in the fashion industry needing to be crystal clear on why it feels the need to develop and implement AI-led strategies. Identifying team or process needs for improvement and then seeing if and where AI tools can support that.
“I think it’s really exciting, but it needs to be used with eyes wide open. I’m very pro-piloting, and doing that with quite a diverse group of team members who are open to removing assumptions and being playful and curious.”
“Equally, there is no silver bullet to making everything easier and perfect, so we have to be cautious and say to ourselves ‘wait a minute, is this really something that’s going to push our product to the place it really needs to be?”
“I hear quite powerful senior people asking ‘will we still need design?’ And I say ‘yes, more than ever’ It’s the testing, the empathy. My view is that designers should be the thread through every part of the business, not just in their silo.”
Reflecting Upon Her Own Inspirations
When asked about her own inspirations, the responses are an unsurprisingly diverse and make for a fascinating collection of individuals around the proverbial dinner table.
“I think I’m inspired by anyone going against the grain and swimming upstream. The disruptors.”
She points to people like architect and author of Humanize, Thomas Heatherwick. Many will recognise his work when thinking back to the extraordinary and spectacular Olympic Cauldron at the London Olympics in 2012, and even the new Routemaster buses in the capital. She adds Virgil Abloh, the American cultural phenomenon, who founded streetwear brand Off-White and rose to become creative director at Louis Vuitton, before his untimely death in 2021, and also includes Nari Oxman and her work at the intersection of science and design at MIT. Oxman is a pioneer of 3D printed garments and developments in sustainable fashion.
I bring our talk to a close by asking what might have been. What would have Joanne Jørgensen’s life have looked like if she didn’t choose her current path?
“I actually applied to be an art therapist when I was aged 22 or 23 and there were only two places in the country that did art therapy in the 90s. So I took myself to Edinburgh, and the guy said to me ‘you do realise the average age of this course is mid 30s?”
She chuckles.