As a creative and creative team lead, I value, respect, and admire functional expertise. There’s nothing more exciting than working with a rock star designer, copywriter, video editor, you name it. Unfortunately, I conflated technical and creative expertise with management and leadership acumen. After promoting a number of these talented experts from individual contributor roles to leadership positions all at once during a major growth restructure at a previous engagement, I watched with concern and then outright fear as more than a few faltered in their new roles. Even with leadership coaching and training, they struggled and worse were unhappy in their new roles.
I realized then that just because they could nail a creative concept and the execution of that concept, it didn’t mean they could or would even want to lead others beyond being a functional coach and mentor. Fortunately, we were able to move those who were not ready, willing, or able to lead into newly established subject matter expert roles thus establishing a career path separate from formal people management. They all expressed relief soon after getting over the initial disappointment of being moved out of the management positions. We then hired managers with some functional knowledge but more importantly, strong leadership and management expertise and experience to fill the lead roles.
I was very lucky that my mistake didn’t negatively impact the long-term careers of my team and I never repeated that mistake again.
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