Creatives Don't Want to Manage (But Someone Has to)

Our best creative just got promoted to the creative director level.

Everyone congratulated her. Leadership was excited. She seemed excited. Big title. More money. Recognition for years of excellent work.

Three months later, she’s on the phone with me. Miserable.

“I spend all day in meetings. Client calls. Team check-ins. Budget reviews. I haven’t actually designed anything in weeks. This isn’t what I wanted.”

I ask the obvious question. “Did you want to be a creative director?”

She looks at me like I’m missing the point. “I wanted to advance my career. This was the only way to do that.”

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

And that’s the problem. In most agencies, the only path up is into management. If you want more money, more influence, more recognition, you have to stop doing the work you’re good at and start managing people.

For some roles, that works. Account people often want to manage. They like the coordination, the client relationships, the strategic oversight.

But creatives? Strategists? Producers? Most of them got into this work because they love the craft. And management takes them away from it.

Your best creative becomes a creative director. Your top strategist becomes a strategy director. Your senior producer becomes a production lead.

Now they spend more time in meetings than doing the work they love. They’re managing teams, reviewing work, handling client politics, sitting in status updates.

And they’re miserable. Because the skills that made them great at their craft, curiosity, attention to detail, love of the work itself, don’t automatically translate to being good at management. And even if they could be good managers, many of them don’t want to be.

But agencies keep pushing people into management because that’s how career progression works. Individual contributor roles top out. If you want to keep growing, keep earning more, keep having influence, you move into leadership.

From my perspective, this creates multiple problems at once.

You lose your best practitioners. The designer who elevated every project they touched is now directing others instead of designing. The strategist who could see insights nobody else saw is now in budget meetings. Their craft suffers because they’re not doing it anymore.

You gain mediocre managers. Just because someone’s great at design doesn’t mean they’re great at managing designers. The skills are different. And when you promote people into management because they’re good at the work, not because they’re good at leading people, you get managers who struggle.

The person who got promoted is unhappy. They thought advancement meant doing more of what they love at a higher level. Instead, it means doing less of what they love and more of what drains them.

Their team suffers. A reluctant manager who doesn’t want to be managing can’t effectively develop people, give good feedback, or create the conditions for great work. The team feels it. They don’t get the leadership they need because their manager would rather be doing the work themselves.

I’ve watched this play out across every discipline. Creatives who became creative directors and stopped making. Strategists who became strategy leads and stopped doing deep thinking work. Producers who became production managers and spent all their time in administrative tasks they hated.

And in almost every case, there was a moment where they wished they could go back. But they couldn’t, because going backward felt like failure. And the agency needed them in that leadership role, even if it wasn’t right for them.

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

Here’s what happens when you force people into management they don’t want.

You lose talent. Your best people leave because the only way to advance is into a role they don’t want. They go to places that let them stay in the craft while still growing. Or they go freelance so they can do the work without the management burden.

I watched an agency lose a brilliant strategist who’d been there for seven years. She was being groomed for a director role. Managing a team. Overseeing multiple accounts. She didn’t want it. She wanted to do strategy. But that wasn’t an option at her level. So she left for a consultancy that had principal-level IC roles. The agency lost her expertise because they couldn’t create a path that fit what she actually wanted.

Quality declines because your best practitioners aren’t practicing anymore. They’re managing. The work gets done by less experienced people without the same level of oversight or craft because the person who used to do it brilliantly is now in meetings all day.

You create a management layer that’s ineffective. People who don’t want to manage don’t do it well. They avoid difficult conversations. They don’t develop their teams. They micromanage because they’d rather just do the work themselves. And the people reporting to them suffer for it.

Culture gets weird when people are promoted into roles they’re not suited for. Everyone can tell when someone’s a reluctant manager. It creates resentment. The person in the role resents being there. Their team resents not getting real leadership. And everyone else wonders why the agency keeps promoting people who clearly don’t want the job.

During one particularly bad stretch, an agency promoted three people into leadership roles within a few months. A designer to creative director. A strategist to strategy lead. A producer to production manager. Within a year, all three were struggling. The teams weren’t performing. The newly promoted people were burned out. And morale was terrible because everyone could see the promotions weren’t working.

So why do agencies keep doing this?

The traditional career ladder only goes one direction. Up means management. That’s how it’s always worked in most industries. And agencies haven’t figured out a different model.

There’s also an assumption that your best practitioners should lead. If you’re great at the work, you should teach others to do it. You should set the standard. You should guide the next generation. That sounds logical until you realize teaching and managing are different skills than doing.

Financially, it’s easier to justify paying someone more if they’re managing a team. Leadership roles come with bigger budgets. IC roles, even senior ones, have caps. If you want to pay someone what they’re worth, putting them in a management role is the clearest path.

And honestly, agencies need managers. Someone has to lead the teams. Someone has to interface with clients at a strategic level. Someone has to make decisions about staffing and priorities. If your most experienced people won’t do it, who will?

But just because you need managers doesn’t mean everyone should become one.

Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

Here’s what I think needs to change. Agencies need to build real IC career paths that don’t top out at mid-level.

Create senior IC roles with real authority and compensation. Principal designer. Lead strategist. Lead senior producer. These aren’t just fancy titles for people who don’t want to manage. They’re roles with influence, autonomy, and pay that competes with management track roles.

These people should be the craft leaders. They set the standard for quality. They mentor junior people, not through formal management but through their work and guidance. They’re on the most important projects. They have a voice in how the discipline evolves.

But they’re not managing teams. They’re not in operational meetings about utilization and budgets. They’re doing the work at the highest level and making everyone around them better through their expertise.

I’ve seen a few agencies do this well. They created parallel tracks. One for people who want to manage. One for people who want to stay in the craft. Both tracks go high. Both have compensation that reflects seniority. Both have influence. They’re just different paths.

The management track leads teams, handles operations, interfaces with clients on strategic relationships. The IC track does the highest-level work, mentors through craft, and sets the quality bar.

Make the choice explicit early. Don’t wait until someone’s been promoted into management to ask if they actually wanted it. Have conversations earlier in people’s careers about what they want. Some people want to manage. Some people want to stay in the craft. Neither is wrong. But knowing which path someone wants helps you develop them appropriately.

One agency I worked with started doing “career pathing” conversations with everyone at the senior level. Not performance reviews. Just conversations about where they saw themselves in three years. Did they want to lead a team? Did they want to be the go-to expert in their craft? Did they want to move into strategy or client relationships?

The conversations were simple. But they changed how the agency promoted people. They stopped automatically pushing everyone toward management and started creating paths that actually fit what people wanted.

Recognize that managing is a skill that needs development. If someone does want to move into management, don’t just promote them and hope they figure it out. Train them. Coach them. Give them support as they learn a completely different set of skills.

Too many agencies promote someone to creative director or strategy lead and then act surprised when they struggle. Managing people is hard. It requires skills most people don’t have naturally. If you’re going to put someone in that role, invest in helping them succeed.

Let people try management without it being permanent. Create project lead roles or interim leadership opportunities where someone can test whether they like managing before fully committing. If they discover it’s not for them, they can go back to IC work without it being a demotion.

Picture this. Your senior designer has been with you for five years. She’s incredibly talented. You want to promote her. Instead of automatically making her a creative director, you ask what she wants. She’s not sure. She likes the idea of more influence but doesn’t know if she wants to manage.

You create a six-month trial. She leads a small team on one major project. Gets coaching on giving feedback and developing people. Tries the management side while still doing some hands-on work.

At the end of six months, she knows. She doesn’t want to manage full-time. So you create a principal designer role for her. She’s the go-to for the agency’s most important design work. She mentors junior designers. She has significant influence on creative direction. But she’s not managing a team day-to-day.

She’s happy. The agency gets to keep her expertise. And the junior designers have someone setting a high bar without a reluctant manager forcing them into a structure they don’t want.

You know who on your team doesn’t want to manage but is being pushed that direction because it’s the only path up.

The question is whether you’re going to keep forcing people into roles they don’t want, or whether you’re going to build paths that actually match how people want to grow.

Not everyone should manage. And that’s okay. The best designer doesn’t automatically become the best creative director. The best strategist doesn’t automatically become the best strategy lead.

What do your IC career paths actually look like? And are they real paths with compensation and influence, or are they just consolation prizes for people who don’t want to manage?