The maker who became a manager

My titles tell a quiet story. Lead Designer. Creative Director. Managing Director. Each one a promotion, and each one a step further from the thing that made me want to do this in the first place: drawing, building, shaping something with my own hands. By the end I was overseeing operations, strategy, and a P&L, and I had to schedule time to design anything at all.

I do not regret a minute of it. But I want to be honest about a trap that is easy to walk into, because the industry sells the climb as pure progress and it is more complicated than that.

The title is not the destination

Every step up traded craft hours for leverage. As Creative Director I stopped making most of the work and started shaping how the team made it. As Managing Director I stopped shaping the work and started building the conditions the work happened in. That is a real contribution. A studio where good people do their best work does not appear by accident. Someone designs it.

The danger is mistaking the distance for the goal. It is easy to assume that because the next title is further from the tools, getting further from the tools must be the point. It is not. The point is impact. Sometimes impact means stepping back. Sometimes it means picking the tool back up.

Management is a design problem: you are shaping the conditions for other people’s best work.

Management is a design problem

The reframe that made me a better manager was treating it exactly like design. A team is a system with users: the people in it. A process is an interface. Culture is the default state you ship. Bad management, like bad design, makes people fight the system to get anything done. Good management, like good design, gets out of the way so the work can happen.

Once I saw it that way, the skills transferred. Listen first. Find the real problem under the stated one. Prototype, watch, adjust. Sweat the details, because in management the details are people and the details remember how you treated them.

Keep one hand on the tool

Here is the lesson I would give my younger self, and anyone scaling right now. Do not let the climb pull both hands off the work. The moment you lose all contact with making, you lose the thing that earned you the team’s trust and the judgment that made you good in the first place. You start managing a craft you can no longer feel.

I eventually chose to put both hands back on the tools, not because management was beneath me, but because making is where I do my clearest thinking. If your ladder only goes away from the work, build a different ladder. Progress is not measured in distance from the thing you love.

• Leadership
• Craft
• Teams