What Makes A Good First Manager In Advertising?

A single hand steadying a smaller hand on a pencil, rendered as a bold flat silhouette against warm colour

Most people can name their first manager years later without hesitation. Fewer can name the campaign they were working on at the time. That should tell the industry something about where it actually invests.

Advertising promotes people into their first management role almost entirely on the strength of their individual craft, which makes a certain intuitive sense, and is also almost completely disconnected from whether they'll be any good at the actual job of managing someone. Being a strong copywriter and being able to help a nervous, talented 23-year-old find their voice are not the same skill, and agencies routinely hand someone the second job as a reward for being excellent at the first one, with no training in between and often no warning that the two aren't the same thing at all.

The gap that actually gets remembered

Ask people, years into a career, what their first manager got right, and the answer is almost never about craft feedback specifically. It's about whether that person made mistakes feel like part of the process rather than evidence of not belonging, whether they explained the reasoning behind a note instead of just delivering the note, and whether they noticed when someone was quietly drowning before that person had the vocabulary to ask for help. None of that shows up in a manager's own performance review. All of it shapes how someone works, and how safe they feel admitting when they don't know something, for the rest of their career.

The mistake most first-time managers make

The most common failure isn't cruelty, cruelty is rare and gets caught eventually. It's absence disguised as trust: a new manager who assumes "giving someone space" means minimal contact, mistaking silence for confidence-building when it actually reads, to a junior who's never done this before, as being left to figure everything out alone. Good first managers check in without hovering, which is a genuinely hard balance to strike and one nobody teaches, because it requires reading whether someone's quiet because they're fine or quiet because they're too new to know what a real question sounds like yet.

The work gets forgotten. How someone was managed through their first mistakes rarely does.

What agencies could actually do about this

The fix isn't complicated, but it does cost something agencies rarely want to spend: real management training before the promotion, not after, and a willingness to separate "best individual creative" from "ready to manage people" as two different questions with two different answers. A handful of agencies have started building this deliberately, pairing new managers with a mentor of their own rather than assuming the skill transfers automatically from being managed well once. The ones that haven't are still running the oldest experiment in the industry: promote the best individual performer, hand them a team, and hope the rest sorts itself out.