accounting – Real Thoughts

Green Flag

“Let me know if you are interested.”

That was the subject line. The email came from a recruiter I have been working with. I read the job description and burst out laughing.

We all know the universal red flags by now. The company that calls itself a “family,” the job that promises you’ll “work hard and play hard.” Those have been discussed to death.

The job description in question was for a Controller role. I received the email on Thursday. According to the recruiter’s email, the Controller had given notice the previous Friday, and her last day was going to be the following Tuesday.

Red flag number one.

The two weeks’ notice is standard. This person was just three days shy of that mark. This was the equivalent of holding your middle finger on your way out.

Someone who is happy with their current job but simply moving for better opportunities doesn’t do this.

Also, even though two weeks is considered standard, as you go up the ladder the expectation grows.

A President of an international division would probably be expected to give more than two weeks’ notice. Some transitions may last months. It is understood and an expected courtesy.

A Controller is not an executive, but it is the position in charge of the entire accounting function. In this case, the person was also guiding the company through an audit.

Someone in this position would be expected to give at least two weeks’ notice and maybe even offer to consult to help with the changeover.

Neither of these things happened.

The other, more important, red flag was that someone wrote it didn’t matter that there was not going to be any handover of responsibilities because the work was “easy.”

This one connects to a hard lesson I learned early on. No job is easy. Every job requires know-how and care. Especially if you want to achieve excellence.

What the hiring manager is really saying when calling a job “easy” is that the job is not respected or valued. Even if you outperform and deliver great results, those won’t count in your favor because, as an early employer told me, this is a job that “any monkey off the street can do.”

“Easy” is a toxic way to describe any job. Just run.

The red flags don’t stop at the job description.

A friend of mine was rushing to get a job ahead of a planned layoff. She finally got a verbal offer. As a professional, she did what she was supposed to do: negotiate the initial offer. The HR representative responded with a firm “no.”

The negotiation ended before it even started. The company pretty much told my friend: take it or leave it.

This was especially surprising after several rounds of interviews. The company used hours of my friend’s time. And the time of dozens of people already working in the organization. Yet they were willing to risk all of that on the bet that my friend needed the job too badly to walk away.

My friend took the job. I understand why, but this doesn’t show great promise.

My advice to her? It is okay to continue to look while you settle into the new role.

The hiring process is the ultimate red flag to never ignore. It provides a window into how working with the company is going to be. I’ve yet to meet a company where a chaotic, disrespectful hiring process opens the door to a disciplined and generous company.

Still, red flags are not an automatic rejection. I once interviewed at a company where a colleague described working until nearly 11 PM on New Year’s Eve the previous year. I still took that job. I made the calculation, and the long hours were outweighed by other aspects of the job and the company.

But always pay attention to red flags. And learn from them. Which ones are a dealbreaker for you?

For me, this role had too many unforgivable flags, and I’m in a position to wait, so I chose to wait for a possible green flag.

Of Love and Acquisitions

“It wasn’t meant to be. We were so different.”

That’s what a friend said to me at lunch the other day. She was talking about her marriage. She has been divorced for a few years, but she sometimes likes to go back in time and rethink what went wrong.

I’ve known my friend and her now ex-husband since they were dating. They always fought about even the smallest things. They thought it was passionate and raw, but as years ticked on it became exhausting and abusive.

This conversation got me thinking about Mergers and Acquisitions. I know, a weird train of thought, but stay with me on this one.

Last year I took a class on M&A. One of the main facts that the professor kept hammering in every class was that most M&A deals fail. Interesting point to bring up in a class teaching you how to structure and negotiate said deals.

In an M&A deal there are two parties: a buyer and a target. The buyer always pays more than the company is worth.

Why would anyone do that?

Because the buyer believes they can create more value with the target’s assets than the target is creating on its own. That belief is called synergies.

Maybe the combined company can negotiate better vendor deals because of its size, or eliminate redundant operations. The premium the buyer pays is a bet that those synergies will materialize.

Most of the time, they don’t. The belief that two things together will be greater than they were apart is a powerful one. It drives deals and relationships. And it is wrong more often than we like to admit.

The framework from The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen helped me understand why. According to the book, a company’s performance is based on three factors: resources, processes, and values.

An acquisition based on resources can be straightforward. You want a presence in the Southwest; you buy a company that’s already there.

But processes and values are more complicated.

The acquirer already has its own, and even if the target’s are superior, no one may understand how they came about or what invisible structures support them.

This is true of companies and of people.

You can buy a company, but you can’t buy its heart.

I once worked at a company well versed in M&A. For years, they would acquire smaller competitors, strip them for parts, keep their physical assets, client lists, and certain key employees, and get rid of the rest.

That plan worked for a while until they decided to acquire a massive competitor. After the deal, the company almost doubled.

I remember that everyone in the company received T-shirts that read: us vs them, with our logo and the target’s logo.

Someone pointed out that the “versus” made it seem more like a boxing match and less like a friendly merger.

Still, the CEO boasted that the new company would be so much greater because it would only include the best parts and processes of both companies.

I didn’t know that much about M&A at the time, but I remember questioning even then: how was he going to make sure that only the best parts stayed?

He didn’t. And he lost his job within two years of that deal.

Like with any human institution, the best is often supported by the less. You can’t have one without the other. Pick one and the whole structure unravels.

I’m not bullish on M&A. You would think that something with a failure rate of almost 90% wouldn’t be commonplace, but we confuse size and scale with success.

Still, some deals work. Some marriages work too. Not because the differences disappear, but because both sides stop trying to eliminate them.

My friend’s marriage didn’t fail because they were different. It failed because they spent years trying to fix each other instead of understanding each other. The CEO didn’t fail because the two companies were different. He failed because he thought he could keep the parts he liked and throw away the rest.

The mergers that work, at the conference table and at the dinner table, are the ones where both sides walk in knowing they are joining with something whole.

The 10% that survive, in business and in life, are the ones that fall in love with what’s actually there.

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.

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.

It’s Not You

Don’t worry, even with a CPA employers don’t want to hire you.

That was my reply to a LinkedIn post from an accountant struggling to find a job because employers were “obsessed” with the CPA certification. I have my CPA, so trust me, I know.

Everyone forgets one thing: market dynamics will always win against personal effort. People are not finding jobs because companies are not hiring. It is not you. It is the market.

People talk about how we are living through unprecedented times. As someone who was unemployed for almost two years during the Great Recession, I can tell you, these times are very precedented.

When I was first laid off during the Great Recession, so many people mobilized around me. Colleagues, classmates, friends, professors, academic staff. I was pursuing my MBA at the time. It was like a village sprung up around me.

Everyone was cheering me on and offering to help however they could. People would send me job postings, introduce me to contacts, and check in regularly.

After a year of unemployment, I could sense the shift.

People would ask how the job hunt was going, and when I said it wasn’t, silence would follow. I had zero interviews in year one of unemployment and three in year two.

Finally, a “friend” said the quiet part out loud: I had been unemployed for so long, I had to be the problem.

I tried to dismiss her comment, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to question myself. Was she right? What was wrong with me?

I tried to quiet that voice by pouring myself into volunteering. Maybe if people saw that I could work for free, they could eventually pay me to work.

In a culture where we base so much of our value on work, if you are not working, you are not valued. And there is so much that is out of a job hunter’s hands.

After two years, I found a job. And then found another. I was working seven days a week. I would have worked more if the week had moredays.

I didn’t change. I didn’t get an additional certification that made me more employable. I didn’t all of a sudden develop work ethic. I found a job when companies started hiring again.

A friend shared recently how she is struggling to find a job because employers keep discounting her years of experience as an entrepreneur. She built a business from scratch and wore far more hats than she ever did in her corporate jobs. Yet none of those skills are being recognized.

I joked with her that she had tasted freedom, and maybe hiring managers were afraid she had become unmanageable. Maybe only half-joked.

Hours later, I stumbled over an article written by a professional in her 50s. She was struggling to find a job too. She had cut decades of experience from her resume and removed her graduation dates, yet employers still labeled her as “too overqualified” and “too expensive.”

What do all these concerns have in common? They put the blame of unemployment on the unemployed.

A single individual cannot fight market dynamicsalone. A single individual cannot fight inflation, trade wars, wars-wars, interest rate hikes, and corporate hiring freezes alone.

So if you are hitting a wall while looking for work right now, remember what I learned the hard way. I didn’t become a better candidate. I didn’t unlock some secret. The market shifted, and the phone started ringing again.

Unfortunately, this’s not a motivational story. That’s just how it works.

Be kind to yourself. This is not your fault.

A Record of Your Accomplishments

I opened it and my heart dropped.

A former report reached out asking for help revamping his resume.I had worked with this guy. He is hardworking, smart, and dependable. Yet nothing on his resume showed that. His resume introduced someone who had “participated” and “supported” instead of “led” and “managed.”

I did a revision that more closely resembled the good work I saw him do. He found a great new opportunity shortly after.

I thought it was a one-off when just a few weeks later I got another call. This time from a former colleague. Her company had been acquired, and she was going to be out of a job by the end of the year. She had been looking but had not landed a single interview in months. I told her to send me the resume.

Same story.

I called her back immediately. I had been part of the team that hired her almost a decade ago. I asked her: how is it possible that your resume was better then, than it is now?

The resume is a tough document. In a world where so much of our identity is tied to our work, the resume becomes the record of our accomplishments. People want it to be faithful to their job descriptions, but they end up with a document that undersells their actual impact.

I offered to rewrite my colleague’s resume. I started with one question: what is your value proposition? What is the one thing you can do better than anyone else?

She was surprised by the question. She had not thought about it.

If you don’t know what you’re bringing to the table, you end up with a list of tasks that go from one to the next with no cohesive thread. A resume without a value proposition is an inventory not a story.

The core premise was not forthcoming, so I asked more questions. What projects did you oversee, and how did you contribute to their success? What are you proudest of from this experience? Did you make any changes that improved the processes, the company, or the team?

This is value creation. Most people have it. You just need to uncover it.

As important as what to include is what to exclude. Faulkner called it killing your darlings: removing the parts of the story that you love but that don’t serve the narrative.

My colleague had repetitive bullet points describing junior tasks that didn’t feed the pictureof an accounting professional with the power to automate manual systems and improve processes. She had done that work. It was real. But it was pulling the story in the wrong direction.

As we continued working, my colleague raised a concern that a lot of accountants share: how do you include numbers on a resume?

Salespeople have performance dashboards. They can say things like: increased revenue by $10M in my first year. Cost centers, accountants and other support roles usually have a hard time pointing to initiatives that made the company money. Success means getting the job done on time and as expected. Nothing flashy.

But you can add numbers in other ways. I asked my colleague to think about the number of accounts, countries, vendors, invoices, and entities she managed. These provide a sense of scope. Hours or days saved each month through process improvements, increases in accuracy, reductions in errors. These tell a story of continuing improvement.

After working on her story, I rewrote my colleague’s resume. She used it to apply for a few roles and started getting calls back almost immediately.

We spend so much time optimizing our resumes for the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) that we forget a human will eventually read it. Your resume still needs to tell a story that is compelling, specific, and that truly represents what you bring. The algorithm gets you through the door. The story is what makes someone want to meet you.

I think that sometimes a poor resume is connected to a poor sense of self. So when writing that record of your professional accomplishments, be kind to yourself. You are more qualified than you think. Your work matters. Let’s tell the story of why.

On Budget, On Time, Almost Never

Most projects don’t fail at the end. They fail at the beginning. The people involved just don’t know it yet.

How bad is it? From a database of 16,000 projects, only 0.5% were completed on budget, on time, and on benefit.

These numbers come from a book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. I just read it, and it should be required reading for anyone starting any project. The authors focus on big infrastructure projects, yet the lessons apply to projects of any size.

The book reminded me of all the failed projects I’ve witnessed in my career and how they were doomed from the beginning.

It starts with a question most teams never ask: why are we doing this project? Is it mission critical, or are we just following a trend? AI strategy projects come to mind. Everyone wants one. No one is asking the hard question of why.

Then comes planning. How much will the project cost and how long will it take? Usually the answer is a number pulled out of thin air without so much as a benchmark. People tend to assume that their project is unique, that it will somehow take less time, cost less money, and produce better results than similar projects undertaken in the past.

Who has not heard that story before?

And once the project starts moving, there is rarely a system in place to alert anyone that it’s running off course from the beginning.

I took a job with a company that was implementing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system due to go live a few months after my first day. This project was one of the reasons I took the job. It pointed to a company that was serious about process improvement and growth.

Two months after I joined, the project was cancelled.

It was not a total surprise. After onboarding, I hit the ground running participating in the testing phase and quickly noticed that the project was not where it should be. I was not the only one with that thought, so leadership hired a consulting firm to audit the progress.

The project was already a year behind schedule and a million dollars over budget. The consulting firm confirmed that there was no way it could go live in a few months. Their estimate: one additional year and one more million to complete. That would have put the project at three years and three million dollars, as long as everything went right from that point on.

The project was dead.

I was full of questions, so I reached out to the most senior person in the department.

Question: Who from the accounting department was part of the implementation team?

Answer: Why would the accounting team be part of that?

The problems started to become clear. No one from the accounting team had participated in any aspect of the project. The very expensive consultants were supposed to deliver a turnkey solution.

Question: Was there anyone from the company who functioned as the bridge between the company and the consulting firm?

Answer: The IT Director.

Question: And was the IT Director removed from his day-to-day duties and allowed to focus on the project?

Answer: Of course not.

This project was never going to happen.

No one had asked whether the original budget and timeline were even realistic. In my experience, any transformation project that doesn’t plan for at least three years is setting itself up for failure. No internal team had been assigned to the project. The very expensive consultants were trusted to deliver a solution for a business they didn’t understand. And the one person designated as the bridge between the company and the consultants was doing it as a side project on top of their actual job.

The real cost wasn’t just the money or the time. For people like me, who took the job because the project signaled ambition and seriousness, the company went from forward-looking to stuck in the past overnight. The project didn’t just fail. It told everyone paying attention what kind of company this actually was.

A million things can go wrong during a project. But it is usually just a few things early on, the questions nobody ask, the resources nobody commits, the warnings nobody builds a system to catch, that decide whether it fails or succeeds.

DOE (Depends on Experience)

DOE. Depends on Experience.

They showed up on a recruiter’s LinkedIn post advertising opportunities at an “amazing” company. Senior Accountant or Manager, DOE. Senior Accounting Manager or Controller, DOE. Salary ranges also DOE.

Why?

Title and salary should not depend on the experience of the candidate. They should depend on the nature and requirements of the job. I have discussed title inflation before, so I will try not to repeat myself.

There is a moat the size of an ocean between a Senior Accounting Manager and a Controller. So which is it? Is the role a Senior Manager job or a Controller job?

If you need a Controller, hire a Controller, and pay for a Controller. Hiring a Senior Accounting Manager and expecting them to somehow do the job of a Controller is setting both the candidate and the company up for failure.

You’ll get Senior Accounting Manager output, and everything else will fall through the cracks.

But the candidate can grow into the role, right? Someone might argue.

How? I ask.

A company that can’t tell the difference between a Senior Accounting Manager and a Controller doesn’t have the accounting leadership to develop one into the other. So who exactly is going to grow this candidate into the role?

A recruiter reached out to me the other day for a “Controller track, Accounting Manager” role.

I laughed. Where is the track?

These imaginary tracks sound less like a well-defined road and more like a self-guided tour through a forest. No map, no compass. Good luck getting to the other side.

I used to work with a woman whose title was Senior Manager, Fixed Assets. Fixed assets, for the non-accountants, are the physical assets of a company. Think equipment, land, buildings, vehicles. Things the company uses to create value.

She was six years away from retirement and wanted to hire her replacement. The role she was really hiring for was Junior Accountant.

Her pitch to new hires: work hard and in six years you can sit in my chair and have my job. She hired two young people who quit in quick succession, unimpressed with what she had to offer.

She then hired an older, and as she put it, more “mature” candidate who would have the patience to wait his turn.

I pointed out that a forty-year-old with over a decade in accounting accepting a Junior Accountant position was possibly a red flag.

She had to terminate him after a week because after five days he still had not managed to learn how to turn on his computer.

She couldn’t understand why there were no qualified takers for this great opportunity. Why weren’t more people willing to take a junior role with low pay that would eventually transition into a middle manager role with possibly still low pay?

This sounds like a joke, but it gets worse. Even that laughable opportunity didn’t actually exist.

Six years is an eternity in corporate America. The company could have been bought and sold many times over. Her department could have been outsourced to a third-party firm, which I saw happen to other teams during my tenure. Or the company could have decided to move the whole function upstream to corporate.

This was not her company, soit was not her track to promise.

It’s time to stop. Stop advertising two roles as one. Stop posting senior roles at junior prices. Stop promising career paths that don’t exist and that aren’t yours to offer.

This is the role. This is the pay. We hope you grow with us, but right now we need this job filled and we need the right person to fill it.

That’s not cold. That’s honest. And honest is what candidates deserve.

Embrace the Chaos

“Embrace the chaos.”

This was the advice my friend didn’t expect to receive.

She called me asking for help updating her resume and preparing for interviews. She told the story of many toxic workplaces. Vague and ever-changing strategies. Lack of resources. Poor communication. High achievers leaving with their institutional knowledge, and managers whose only competency seemed to be delegating work.

She was done with her job.

To her surprise, my advice was to embrace the chaos instead.

I told her to prepare a vision for how things should be done, with her in charge, and present it to the CFO. After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen? The CFO could simply say no. And in that case, I would help her update her resume and look for another job as planned.

Here’s the thing about chaos: in a well-run organization, every problem already has an owner. There is no gap to fill. In a chaotic one, problems are orphaned. Nobody is in charge of fixing them because nobody has been asked to.

So my friend spent a few weeks documenting what was broken and wrote up a practical plan for how she would fix it. Nothing elaborate. Just a clear assessment and a path forward.

What people forget is that if you hate your job and feel like you are drowning, you are probably not alone. Your colleagues are feeling the same way. So is your boss. So is your boss’s boss. Everyone is waiting for someone to arrive with a plan to fix things.

If you are willing to be that person, to own the mess and bring the plan, you can turn a bad situation into the biggest career opportunity you’ve had.

My friend followed my advice. She got a promotion and a salary increase that would have taken a typical accountant many years to reach.

I would never suggest joining a toxic workplace on purpose. A toxic workplace can burn you out and make you question your own worth. I know from experience. But if you are already working in chaos and can’t leave for whatever reason, don’t just survive it.

Use it.

The Math is Not Mathing

Accounting Manager is the single worst job in accounting.

That was my comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post about what Accounting Managers do. It received thousands of impressions. Apparently, I’m not alone in my belief.

What I didn’t say in that comment is why. Not just why the job is bad, but why it matters. Because the damage isn’t limited to the people in the role. It reaches everyone around them.

There is a concept in organizational development called the Leadership Pipeline. The idea is simple: manager roles are linchpin positions. Without them, organizations can’t sustain themselves long-term.

The literature is clear that the most difficult career transition is the one from Managing the Self to Managing Others. The people who get promoted are the ones with the strongest technical skills. The ones with the interpersonal and relationship skills needed to succeed as a manager get left behind. What makes you good at the first job is not what makes you good at the next one.

Still, this is not an insurmountable obstacle. Training can go a long way.

But of course, that’s where the real failure happens.

I remember being a first-time manager and having my Director reprimand me for scheduling too many training sessions with my team. They should know, she would say. My response: how? Who taught them?

She didn’t have an answer because there wasn’t one. Nobody had taught them. Nobody had taught me either. The company expected people to become managers overnight and then blamed them when they struggled. The training budget was zero. The patience was less than that.

A less experienced person would have taken that feedback and stopped the sessions. I doubled down.

But most new managers don’t push back. They absorb the message: training is a waste of time, your team should already know, figure it out. And then they spend the next several years managing by instinct instead of by skill, burning out, and wondering why the job feels impossible.

Over the years, I’ve had friends take steps back in their careers because they didn’t want to ‘babysit’ a team. I’ve never liked that comparison, but I understand where it comes from. When you’re given a team with no training on how to lead them, managing starts to feel like supervising instead of leading.

But here’s what people miss: the team feels it too. Nobody wants to be managed by someone who is clearly overwhelmed, clearly untrained, and clearly just trying to survive until the next close. Reports can tell the difference between a leader who is developing them and a manager who is just keeping track of them. When both sides feel like the relationship is broken, it transforms from a people problem to a design problem.

And the math confirms it. The increase in pay from individual contributor to manager is rarely proportional to the increase in stress and responsibility. You take on twice the workload, lose your overtime eligibility, become accountable for other people’s output, and get a raise that barely covers the difference. The math is not mathing.

This is the first consequence that people feel in their careers, long before the pipeline runs dry. The job stops being worth it.

And young people have noticed.

A little more than a year ago, I was having lunch with a group of junior and staff accountants from another team. The conversation turned to the career ladder, and every single young person at the table said they didn’t want to ever become managers.

They saw their own manager and thought: too much work for not enough money.

Gen Z is choosing to stay in individual contributor roles. The more entrepreneurial ones are pursuing side hustles and their own path. The famous 5-9 after their 9-5.

They are not wrong.

The real question is what happens 10 years from now when there isn’t a pipeline of experienced managers who know how to build and lead a team. What happens when we forget how to get things done through others? What awaits us when the institutional knowledge of how to develop people, run a close with a team of varying skill levels, and turn a group of individuals into a functioning unit has simply disappeared because nobody wanted the job?

The optimist in me thinks that when faced with that crisis, companies will finally invest in real managerial training and build compensation structures that make the role worth taking.

The pessimist in me looks at current leadership, at how they’re letting things deteriorate in real time, and thinks that by the time anyone notices the pipeline is empty, it will already be too late to fill it. And when that happens, we won’t just be missing managers. We’ll be missing the people who know how to fix the problem.