Month: September 2026

Iced Coffee and Other Disqualifiers

Reason for rejection: iced coffee.

Recently, a recruiter posted on social media that young candidates were showing up to interviews with iced coffee and that it was disrespectful to their potential employers. That indicated a casual tone, like the whole interview was just one more errand to run that day.

I wouldn’t judge if a candidate showed up with an iced coffee. Unless they showed up late mumbling something about “traffic” while swirling their iced latte.

A friend recently sent me her schedule for an in-person interview. She was supposed to meet with six people over the span of four hours. At that point, you almost need iced coffee for sustenance during a marathon interview session.

Iced coffee aside, what bothers me about the whole conversation is that it is just one more obstacle that job seekers need to overcome while looking for work.

It is no longer enough to look polished and professional, have a strong resume, and know how to answer key interview questions. You also need to know individual biases and company-specific cultural expectations before walking through the door.

I once worked at a place where we hired two people for the same job, back-to-back. They both had the same name, and neither one worked out. One actually left the company in spectacular fashion, but that’s a story for another post.

So when it came time to fill the position for the third time, you better believe that resumes with that name were immediately disqualified.

My boss would simply say: “not again.”

Some of those candidates had very good resumes, yet they were rejected for having the wrong name at the wrong time.

I’ve seen candidates dismissed for being unemployed three months after a layoff. For being too excited about the company. For touching their hair too much during the interview.

None of these things reveal anything about whether a candidate can or can’t perform the work, yet these biases persist.

I was once looking through resumes with my boss. We were adding one more member to the team. I pointed at an interesting candidate, and she quickly set it aside by saying: “I would never hire someone with a two-page resume.”

I was surprised because I had a two-page resume, and she had hired me.

I told her and she didn’t believe me. I had to dig a copy of my old resume from my files to prove it to her.

Job seekers are told to prepare, yet how can you prepare for biases that are arbitrary, inconsistent, and only sometimes enforced? The rules of interviewing are not even rules anymore. They are preferences that change depending on who is sitting across the table or on the other side of the Zoom.

Somewhere behind the wrong name and the two-page resume, there might be the right person for the job. Everything else is just iced coffee.

Performance Review Theatre

“I guess I am a two.”

That’s the comment from a friend I met for lunch recently. She was not talking about her looks. She was talking about her corporate review ranking.

My friend works at a large publicly traded company that didn’t have a review process. The company decided to finally set up one, and no one is happy about it.

The company developed a one-to-five ranking. From Outstanding at five to Unsatisfactory at one. Pretty standard. Each level has ten points that have to be met in order to receive that rating. Miss one of the ten and you are immediately downgraded to the level below.

My friend has worked at this company for almost a decade, was surprised by the two. She had received nothing but good feedback during her tenure, was promoted, and moved around teams as they needed her help. “Needs Improvement” was not what she expected.

Since this was the first time using the review process, the company started with a mid-year preliminary review, giving people the chance to “improve” their rankings by the final year-end review.

The consequences for anyone who failed to improve were unclear yet seemingly sinister.

My friend was left with little advice on how to improve besides: bring those numbers up by year end. Good luck.

Management seemed as clueless as everyone else. My friend’s manager started their conversation by admitting she had received little training on the process herself and couldn’t answer even basic questions.

My friend left the meeting feeling like it was just her. She had done something wrong and was being singled out for punishment.

Until she started talking to other colleagues.

It turned out everyone was a two, and no one was clear as to why.

How to not be a two was another unanswered question. Everyone was unhappy and on edge, assuming this was a way for the company to perform a stealth layoff by the end of the year.

I’ve learned over time that for feedback to be useful it needs to be timely, simple, and low stakes.

My friend got years of positive feedback followed by a two with no warning. That’s not timely. She was told to bring her numbers up without being told how. That’s not simple. And her job may depend on improving a score she doesn’t understand. That’s not low stakes.

All of this is the opposite of good feedback.

My friend’s company at least tried to build a review process, even if they failed. Some companies don’t even bother.

I once started a job where I was in my third month when layoffs happened. Two people from my department were let go. Me and this other guy who was hired a few days after me shared a look that said: did we join a sinking ship?

That afternoon, the Director of Accounting called us to her office to settle our minds. These layoffs were the way the company “cleansed” itself of underperformers. Instead of PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans) and write-ups, management just kept a list of people they wanted to let go. Once a year, these employees were included in the annual seasonal layoff.

According to the Director, me and the other new hire were safe since we were doing such good work.

“Until next year’s layoffs,” I said. The Director laughed and called me funny.

I was not joking.

How is never telling someone what they are doing wrong and never giving them the opportunity to improve the way to go?

I’ve also worked at companies, big companies, where the annual review was just a box everyone checked. Not an actual conversation between manager and report about career direction and performance. Just a form to fill out and a meeting to get through.

And even when companies take the process seriously, there is rarely a connection between your review and your reward. As someone who works in accounting, I know that by the time review season comes, next year’s budget has already been approved and locked.

Reminding your manager of that great project you did at the end of the year is not changing your bonus or your compensation at this point.

The review process was supposed to be a contract. The company provided feedback on your work. Your effort was recognized. Both sides of that contract are broken. And yet we all go through the motions because the calendar says it’s time.

Companies, if you’re not willing to do reviews right, don’t do them at all. Let people keep doing their jobs in peace. And save the performances for the theatre folks.

Should You Trust Your Doubt?

What if the thing you’ve been told is your biggest weakness is actually your greatest advantage? I didn’t believe it either. Then I spent four days in a classroom at Columbia.

The course was called Quantitative Intuition, and it tackled the challenges of decision-making in a world of big data. There is so much information available to us, yet it has not led to better decisions.

I didn’t know what to expect.

I walked in as someone who had spent an entire career being told she asked too many questions and relied too much on instinct. I walked out as someone who learned that both of those things were strengths.

After a career of being told that I ask too many questions, you can imagine my surprise when we started discussing the most powerful tool of decision-making: asking questions.

Specifically, precision questioning. A technique that helps clarify priorities, define outcomes, and identify knowledge gaps.

One of my favorite sayings from the class: “The smartest person in the room asks questions. They do not have the answers.”

I’ve had the misfortune of having worked with some leaders who saw questions as weaknesses or fighting words. I couldn’t ask clarifying questions without being told that I should just know. How? Questioning the viability of any plan was seen as negative and unproductive.

But here it was seen as an essential skill.

And that was day one.

On day two, we discussed the backward approach, where the problem is formulated first.

Decisions usually follow a simple script. The course called out five steps: defining the problem, data discovery, data analysis, insights, and implementation. In that order.

But what if you start at the end? Begin with the desired outcome, figure out what analysis you would need and what data would feed it, and then, and only then, go collect it.

Almost like traveling forward in time. You start with the ultimate outcome and trace back through the possible branches of decisions that got you there. Choose a branch and start your process from that point.

I never thought of problems that way. After being introduced to the concept, I sat in the classroom thinking of all the time wasted looking for data that simply doesn’t matter.

All the reports that no one read. The emails no one opened because they answered questions that no one had asked.

We also talked about guesstimating. I thought guesstimating was a shortcut you used when you didn’t know anything. It’s actually a legitimate technique to operate with limited information.

Rough estimation and back-of-the-envelope calculations to approximate an answer. Not an end result, but a way to move forward when enough data is not available.

In a way, accounting is full of estimation. Non-accountants think that we are strict and that our numbers are set in stone. In reality, so much of our work is guesstimating.

Accruals are nothing but a guesstimate of how much the company earns and owes. There might be contracts, emails, and purchase orders, but at the end of the day, until that invoice or bill is received with a total amount and a due date, we are just guesstimating.

Financial statements are built on that concept. So it can’t be too wrong.

Then we got to biases. The one that hit me hardest was overconfidence. I didn’t think I had a problem with overconfidence… I was wrong.

We did one exercise that truly opened my eyes. We had 10 questions on a sheet of paper. The challenge was to provide ranges that would contain the answer to each question. For example, what is the length of the Nile River (*4,130 miles), and how many books are in the Old Testament (*39).

There was no limit on the ranges. I could have answered zero to infinity for every single question and gotten all 10 right. But I didn’t. Because I was sure I knew better.

A little humility about what I didn’t know would have produced a win.

On day three, we did a simulation.

Teams of five played characters who were climbing Mount Everest. The exercise lasted 90 minutes with five rounds of decisions. In each round, we were given a choice: advance to the next camp on our way to the peak, stay put, or go back. The group had a shared goal of reaching the mountaintop, and each participant had their own personal goals as well.

Some groups prioritized staying together instead of reaching the top. My team, where I played the leader, decided that it was better to split and allow at least some of us to attain our goals. Two team members, the environmentalist and the physician, were left together at an early campground. The remaining three players reached the summit.

Afterwards, I questioned if we made the right decision. We scored the most points, but did we win?

There were no right or wrong answers. Each team took the same information and used it in very different ways and achieved very different results. No different from real life.

And that was the lesson.

On our last day, classmates kept going back to the simulation, highlighting it as their favorite part of the class.

But for me, the best part wasn’t the simulation. It was learning alongside my classmates in real time, watching how the same ideas reached each of us differently.

I think about this class often. Not the frameworks or the vocabulary, though those stayed too. What stayed most was the permission it gave me. Permission to question, to estimate, to act without certainty, and to trust that doubt is not the enemy of good decisions.

It is the beginning of them.

The Devil Says You’re Not Ready

“You don’t have what it takes.”

Those are the devastating words that Miranda, played by Meryl Streep, delivers in The Devil Wears Prada 2. The head of Runway telling Emily, played by Emily Blunt, that she should never run the magazine.

It sounded very familiar.

Leaders telling the people under them that somehow and for some reason they are not ready.

No leader truly knows what their people are capable of, and they shouldn’t pretend to. Just because you are successful and in a position of power doesn’t mean you know anyone’s true potential, what is in their heart, what they have gone through, or what they can accomplish.

You only know your story, and when you make assumptions, you are just projecting your story onto others.

It may seem like you are sharing wisdom or sound advice, but it can be a crippling put-down.

It reminds me of when I started at a company that was four years past its IPO. Nearly all of the accounting department had been hired after the IPO. When I joined, I was told that if I had any questions, I should reach out to this person. Let’s call her Claire. Claire had started long before the IPO and had moved around to different departments within accounting. She knew where the bodies were buried. She was also nice and helpful, per everyone who spoke highly of her.

She was on vacation during my first week, so I looked her up on the company directory. You can’t imagine my surprise when I saw that Claire’s title was “Staff Accountant.”

Miles below most of the people who had sent me in her direction for guidance. What had happened?

I got my answer about Claire when I dealt with the same issue. It was the Controller.

The Controller took the company public in her mid-thirties, after working there for several years. This was her second job out of college, so she had obviously been given opportunities long before she was ready. Yet she didn’t pay that forward.

She was the leader who would tell everyone they were not ready. Not in a mean way, but worse… in a hushed voice while leaning forward with concern. The form might have been soft. The results were prickly.

If I had been more experienced when dealing with her, I would have pushed back. Why? What in my current experience made her think I was not ready? What did “ready” mean? What did I need to achieve before I would be ready? These were all important questions that she never answered.

She would just deliver those words, “you’re not ready,” and call it a day.

After the Controller moved on, Claire finally had the chance to be promoted. She moved quickly and was a manager within a year, doing a great job.

I left the company to look for my next move. As I started working at my new company in my new role, the one that had been long denied, I wondered: what exactly wasn’t I ready for?

I’ve also been on the other side. Misjudging someone who worked for me.

He was a Senior Accountant who delivered quality work but always late. I remember getting really frustrated with his chronic delays. In accounting, there are so many dependencies that one late entry creates a ripple effect throughout the entire close.

I included him in setting the deadlines, to make sure I wasn’t creating unrealistic expectations. Nothing worked. He would promise to deliver by a certain time, and he would miss it. Every time.

I had to confront him. What was going on? What was he missing?

I found out that for months he had been providing ad hoc reports and deliverables to an executive.

I told him to forward her next request to me and that I would handle it. Once he was free from this extra work, he was able to start delivering on time. But for a minute there, I thought he was underperforming when in reality he was working harder than the rest of the team.

Not everyone who wants a promotion should get one. But people should be allowed to find out for themselves if they are ready or not.

Just like with investments, past human performance, good or bad, is a poor predictor of future results. Instead of playing the all-knowing leader, I prefer to give people a chance. Maybe not the full job, but an assignment or a piece of the work they want. If they are not ready, most people are smart enough to realize it.

On the other hand, there is a good chance that people, when given the opportunity, will impress and surprise you.