Austin Interior Designer Amity Worrel on why she celebrates her team loudly and often.

Whistling a Symphony

I’ve never understood why acknowledging someone else’s talent supposedly diminishes your own. But in creative businesses, there’s a strange instinct to protect credit.

I get where it comes from. I founded this firm. My name is attached to it, and I have a real responsibility to protect and guide the brand we’ve built. But none of that requires me to pretend I do this alone. If anything, it’s the opposite: the stronger my team gets, the stronger the firm gets. The more talented the people around me, the better our work turns out. Being secure enough to say that out loud is one of the most useful things I do as a leader.

H.E. Luccock said it better than I can: “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” Interior design is very much an orchestra.

The Unspoken Rule

In high-end interior design, there’s a kind of unspoken rule that a principal should be careful about over-celebrating the team working under their name. The logic makes sense on paper: employees come and go, a principal is supposed to be the constant, and the firm’s identity has to be strong enough to survive whoever’s currently on staff. If the public gets too attached to a particular team, what happens when that team changes?  

I understand the concern. I just don’t buy it, at least not for me. If I am the constant, and I am skilled at training, teaching, and mentoring, then that is where I provide the most value. That is the thing that our clients can trust. No matter what happens, we’ve got ya!

Yes, the brand has to stay connected to me as the founder. But I’m not intimidated by the truth of it, which is that my team is vital to that brand, and always has been. I can’t really separate the two.

I celebrate my team openly, individually, and often. I think of it as a strength rather than a liability.

What Happens When People Leave

I think one of the reasons firm leaders are afraid to celebrate their team is because of turnover. But people leave. That’s just part of running a business, however much you’d rather it weren’t.

And there’s real loss in it – the practical kind, losing someone talented and experienced, and often a personal kind too. You work closely with people for years. You travel together, solve problems together, sit through stressful installations and impossible deadlines and the occasional very hard conversation, and somewhere in there you get close. So when someone I care about decides it’s time to go start something of their own, I feel it.

I celebrate it anyway. Early in my career I worked at firms where designers would come in, stay for years, learn everything they could, and eventually leave to start firms of their own. The people I worked for celebrated that when it happened, and I remember thinking it took a real kind of confidence to do it that way. There was no panic that someone else’s success somehow erased theirs, no sense that the person walking out the door was taking the firm’s identity with them. Just an understanding that someone new would eventually show up with a different set of strengths and maybe pull the work somewhere even better and teach us new skills nobody had planned for. That’s not a threat to a creative business. It’s usually how one stays alive.

Creating a Culture Where People Want to Stay

My real focus isn’t on how gracefully we let people go. It’s on building the kind of place people don’t particularly want to leave. 

I have been an interior designer for 30 years and a business owner for 15. I’ve said before that I prefer running a business over designing, and this is a big reason why. Building a team, mentoring people, creating systems, and figuring out how a group of very different personalities and talents can do their best work together is every bit as creative to me as designing a room.

I think this is one of the biggest things that sets our firm apart, and one of the things I am proudest of. I have team members who’ve been with me for twelve years, ten years and eight years, which in this industry is not the norm. I’m proud of that in a way that’s hard to fully explain. It tells me something is working here beyond a paycheck. It shows that people are finding room to grow, to do work they’re proud of, to be genuinely known and valued for what they bring. That’s the culture I care about protecting most.

Why I Keep Score Differently

I don’t keep a running tally of who gets credit for what. We can’t do anything at AWCO without each other – it’s really that simple. 

Someone on our team is exceptional with clients. Someone else sees the technical fix before I’ve even finished describing the problem. Someone can find the one object nobody else would have thought to look for, and someone else can walk into a tense room and just quietly lower the temperature. Those are real skills, and they matter as much as anything I bring to the table.

I want the people who work here to be sharp, well-trained, and genuinely thoughtful. I want every client, vendor, and tradesperson we deal with to walk away impressed by whoever they happened to talk to that day, not just the person whose name is on the door. That comes back to the firm in more ways than I can count.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that a successful business isn’t just about what it produces or what it earns. It’s about the people it supports, the opportunities it creates, and the collective success you get to watch unfold along the way.

There’s Enough Credit to Go Around

I’m competitive. I have an ego, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. There have been plenty of moments where my first instinct was to hold something a little closer, to make sure my part in it got noticed. But I’ve learned, slowly, that credit isn’t a finite resource. Acknowledging someone else’s brilliance doesn’t make me less capable. Praising an employee doesn’t weaken my position. Watching someone take an idea I started and make it better doesn’t make the idea any less mine.

It just makes the work better, and that’s increasingly where the real satisfaction is for me. My favorite moments in this job are the ones where someone on my team takes an idea further than I ever imagined it could go. My team knows things I don’t, they see things I miss, and they deserve all the praise they get.

I could run a business built around protecting my own importance. Or I could build one full of people talented enough to make my ideas better than I could on my own. 

The Lone Wolf

I think about the lone wolf a lot, honestly, because I understand the appeal of it. There’s something clean about the name on the door being the only name that matters. But a lone wolf is also, definitionally, on its own. It doesn’t get you team members who have been with you for twelve years, watching the firm get better and making it better in return. 

I’d rather have the orchestra. I’d rather have a firm full of people I trust enough to hand struggles to, who make the work sharper than I could on my own and who, more often than I probably deserve, choose to stick around and keep building it with me.

The lone wolf has no part in the culture here at Amity Worrel and Company.