Creatives thrust into management must learn hard, valuable lessons

Fred Wilson's stories are frequent visitors to this site. Fred, a principal of Union Square Ventures, shares his experiences in tech investing on the very popular blog AVC.com. Today Fred took up the shock a creative "maker" encounters when she suddenly has to manage and lead. (The inspiration for Fred's post was a quote from Lena Dunham, the creative force behind the HBO series "Girls.) The following paragraph resonated big time with me:

When we had our USV CEO summit last fall, we kicked it off by asking each founder/CEO to open with the one thing they had learned the hard way during the year. The recurring theme was that they had to let the people they hired do the work even though they wanted to jump in and do it themselves. And as they are all going around the room telling this story over and over, I am thinking "and I want you to jump in and do the work too". Because these are the people who made the thing that got us to invest, the thing that we fell in love with, the thing we believe is big enough to build a business around.

In his book "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others," Justin Menkes asserts that anyone who rises through an organization (or, to Fred's point, starts something that grows bigger than themselves), will encounter a time where their prior talents and experience are not at all useful in the new role. Then they will have to buckle down, and work their way through the hard lessons to learn this new competence. That, or fail.