I did for around 6 months, then leaped back again.

I always held a relatively weird design position here; being one of the original designers pre-acquisition it meant I was seemingly the natural one to step up to a management position when the team grew to around 10 designers; I naturally assumed some kind of leadership position simply because I was the one that had been there the longest.

When the idea was presented to be an actual manager, I was relatively accepting of this at first; in a previously very flat organisation suddenly a ladder was placed in-front of me that I could climb. I thought about how I could amplify my own design strengths through this design team. It’s basically multiplying my own skills, right? I could channel good design into every decision we make.

Well, it turned out to be a lot more difficult. I attended courses around management, HR, assessments, coaching conversations, compensation. It became increasingly clear to me that being a manager was not the same as being a leader; all of this stuff was deadly important, but it was stuff I neither had the talent for or real desire to learn. It was dealing with people. Just because I can throw together a good design, present it well, execute it well and provide good feedback to others does not mean I’ll make a good manager. It’s an entirely different skill set (one that I have a massive amount of respect for).

During my time as a manager, I never truly felt I was doing a bad job, but I certainly didn’t feel like I was doing a good job. There were just so many parts of it that would take me years to learn; managing people is an incredibly nuanced skill, one that does require almost all of your time if you're taking it seriously. Not that the team was hard to manage, quite the contrary, it was just the vast amount of my brain power it absorbed.

Ultimately I was designing less and less.

I took a weekend away with my girlfriend and she forced me into thinking what I really wanted; what makes me happy.

“I just want to design.”

I wanted to lead by example; I wanted to create great solutions myself and alongside the design team. I wanted to create great design strategies, gather a team and execute them. I didn’t want to plan the Q4 resource allocation budget.

So that was it. It may not be the smartest or most future proof plan, but the fact is that where I am right now creating stuff is the most important to me.

I needed to find a clear definition of management and leadership. At first they presented themselves as the same thing, it was only over these 6 months I found they were very different. And only one of them can make me happy right now.