Your Best Developer Might Be Your Worst Lead

On why the skills that earn a promotion aren't the skills that make it go well.

I've had this conversation more times than I can count.

Someone was the standout performer on a team for years. Brilliant engineer, incredible artist, best QA in the building. And now they're being handed a leadership role, and the assumption underneath it is: they're so good at the work, they'll obviously be good at leading the work.

It seems like a reasonable assumption. Reality often disagrees.

Doing and Leading Are Different Jobs

Here's my definition of leadership: influencing others toward a goal.

Notice what's in that definition. Other people. The whole thing falls apart without them. You can be moving toward a goal with incredible focus and skill and output, but if no one else is involved, you're not leading. You're doing. And doing is valuable. Doing is a huge part of how you ship games. But doing is not leadership.

A brilliant individual contributor can solve crazy game dev problems without incurring massive debt or forcing a ton of work from the teams around them. A solo dev who ships a game has demonstrated that they can make decisions, manage scope, push through hard problems, and deliver something real. Those are genuinely impressive things. None of them are evidence that they can influence other people toward an entirely different shared goal.

Doing great individual work never functions as proof of leadership capability. The context that would test that skill simply isn't present.

The Pattern I See Most Often

The version of this I run into most in game dev isn't usually the solo dev. It's that exceptional individual contributor who's been operating inside a dysfunctional organization.

You likely know this person. They're the one who somehow gets things done no matter what's happening around them. They architect their solution, find the resources, and ship their piece even when the broader project is a mess. Leadership may be actively making things worse, and this person just keeps delivering.

That is genuine skill. But here's what it isn't: leadership. It's the ability to perform well, sometimes in spite of bad leadership.

A few things might happen when this exceptional individual is handed leadership responsibility.

First, the thing that made them exceptional, the ability to operate independently and push through obstacles on their own, can now actively work against them. Leading a team requires slowing down, explaining your thinking, bringing people along, and making decisions in ways that others can understand and follow. The solo-operator instincts can struggle hard.

Second, and this is the one that really gets people: they've never had a good model to learn from. They survived by working around the leadership above them, not by watching it work well. So when it's their turn, they don't have much to draw on.

The question worth asking isn't "can this person perform?" but instead "can this person help other people perform?" Those are related skills, but they're not the same skill.

What the Transition Actually Requires

I'm not saying individual contributors can't become great leaders. A lot of them do. But the ones who make the jump successfully tend to have a few things in common:

1. They understand that their job has fundamentally changed.

It's not about their output anymore. It's about the team's output. Their personal productivity is almost irrelevant compared to whether they're creating conditions where other people can do their best work.

2. They get curious about the people they're leading instead of frustrated by them.

The person who can't seem to do it the way you'd do it isn't failing. They're operating with different context, different skills, different constraints. Your job is to understand that and work with it, not override it.

3. They accept that leading others is slower at one task than just doing it yourself.

It almost always is if you look at one specific instance. The instinct to just take something back and handle it, especially when you know you could do it better, is one of the most common traps new leaders fall into. It feels efficient. It's not. It doesn’t scale AND it undercuts the team’s creativity and growth.

A Note on What You Actually Gain

Here's the thing I try to leave people with when this comes up.

The individual contributor who is exceptional and has been pushing through dysfunction around them, imagine putting that person in a genuinely well-led environment. When there is a clear vision and real alignment within a culture where feedback is normal and trust is real, the output difference is enormous.

So if you're that person, or you're leading that person, the goal isn't to turn a great individual contributor into a mediocre manager. It's to understand what conditions would let them do their best work, and build those. That might mean a leadership track. It might also mean staying an individual contributor with more scope and autonomy. Both are legitimate paths.

What's not legitimate is assuming that because someone is excellent at the work, they're automatically ready to lead it. Those are not the same skills.

If any of this landed for you:

The Game Dev Leadership Accelerator is a 16-week program for leaders in game dev who were promoted for their craft and never trained to lead. It covers what actually drives whether a team works: leadership, culture, product vision, and process. In that order.

Leaders who go through it come out knowing where to actually point their attention, and with a clearer picture of why their team moves the way it does.

If you want to learn more, fill out the interest form and I'll be in touch: https://forms.gle/er6ew8DBKDnLLk319