Leadership
Hiring creative leaders, not just makers.
The best maker on the team is not automatically the person who should lead it. We promote as if they’re the same skill. They aren’t — and the gap is where good teams quietly come apart.
5 min read
There’s a moment that happens in almost every creative organization. Someone is brilliant at the craft — the strongest designer, the sharpest writer, the one whose work everyone quietly studies — and so, when a leadership role opens up, they get it. It feels obvious. It feels like a reward they’ve earned. And sometimes it works out. But often it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, the failure gets blamed on the person, when the real fault is ours: we promoted them for one skill into a job that requires a different one, and then acted surprised.
Making and leading are not the same skill. They’re not even adjacent skills that happen to travel together. They’re different jobs that draw on different instincts, and conflating them costs you twice — you lose your best maker and you get a struggling leader, and the team feels both losses at once.
I want to be clear about the difference, because hiring and promoting well depends entirely on seeing it.
A maker makes the work better. A leader makes the makers better.
That’s the whole distinction in one line, and almost everything follows from it.
A maker’s value is in the artifact. Their hands on it make it better. That’s a real and valuable thing, and great makers should be paid and respected like the rare resource they are — without being shoved into management as the only path up. Some of the most valuable people I’ve worked with never wanted to lead and never should have, and the org was better for keeping them in the craft and rewarding them there.
A leader’s value is different. It’s almost never in their own hands on the work anymore. It’s in the judgment they transfer, the standard they hold, the conditions they create, the careers they grow, the bad decisions they prevent and the good ones they make possible. A leader who’s still trying to be the best maker on the team isn’t leading — they’re competing with their own people, and their team stays small and dependent because every good decision still routes through them.
The hardest transition any maker-turned-leader has to make is exactly this: your job is no longer to make the work great. It’s to make the people who make the work great. If you can’t let go of the pen, you can’t make the shift, and no amount of talent in your hands will cover for it.
What I actually screen for
When I’m hiring or promoting into a creative leadership role, I’m not primarily evaluating the portfolio. The portfolio tells me they can make — usually that’s a given by the time someone’s in the running. I’m looking for a different and harder-to-fake set of signals.
Can they articulate judgment, not just exercise it? A maker can make a great decision intuitively. A leader has to be able to explain it — to say why this is better than that — because that explanation is the actual tool they’ll use to grow people. The single best interview signal is whether someone can take apart a piece of work and tell me precisely why it succeeds or fails. If they can only say “it feels right,” they have taste but not yet the ability to transfer it, and transfer is the job.
Do they get bigger when other people succeed, or smaller? Some people’s instinct when a teammate does great work is genuine delight. Others feel a flicker of threat. You can find this out — ask about work they’re proud of and listen for whether the pride is “I made this” or “they made this and I helped them get there.” Leaders need the second instinct. It can’t really be taught, and its absence poisons a team slowly.
Will they hold the standard when it’s uncomfortable? Leadership is mostly the unglamorous moments — the honest critique that risks the relationship, the decision to reship something that’s merely fine, the willingness to be temporarily disliked in service of the work. Plenty of people can have great taste and completely lack the spine to enforce it under social pressure. I’d take slightly less taste and more spine almost every time.
Do they think about the business, or only the craft? Creative leaders operate at the seam between the work and the company. They have to translate in both directions — make the commercial case for the creative ambition, and make the creative case in terms the business understands. A leader who can only speak craft gets steamrolled in the rooms where the real decisions get made, and the team pays for it.
The mistake of promoting your best maker by default
I’ve made this mistake and I’ve watched it made many times. The best maker gets the leadership role because not giving it to them feels like a snub. Six months later you have a frustrated leader who misses the craft, a team that isn’t being developed because their manager is still trying to do the work themselves, and a hole where your best maker used to be.
The fix isn’t complicated, but it requires honesty. Build a real path that lets exceptional makers advance, get paid, and grow in influence without having to manage anyone. Make leadership a choice people opt into because they actually want to grow people — not a prize you can only collect by leaving the craft you love. And when you do promote into leadership, promote for the leadership signals, not as a long-service award for being good at a different job.
What I’m really hiring
When I hire a creative leader, I’m hiring a multiplier. I’m betting that this person will make a whole team of people better than they’d be alone — that their judgment will raise the ceiling, their standard will raise the floor, and the careers they grow will outlast any single project they touch. That’s a fundamentally different bet than hiring a great pair of hands, and it deserves a fundamentally different evaluation.
The best makers make beautiful things. The best leaders make those makers — and then make more of them. Both are worth hiring. Just never confuse the two, and never make someone trade away the first to be rewarded with the second.
