Tag: corporate-culture

Breaking Glass

“A very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain.”

That was the quote that a director at McKinsey wrote to a female academic referencing her work on the glass cliff. The glass cliff is the idea that women are more likely to get the top job at companies once the company is in trouble.

This director lost his job quickly, but this is not a one-time mistake by one man. This is a symptom of a much larger problem.

That a smart man, and let’s be honest, a total idiot is not ascending to partner at McKinsey, feels comfortable putting something like that in writing is a sign that we have taken our foot off the gas pedal.

Just as we achieve some progress, we risk regressing because we lull ourselves into the belief that the problem is no longer a problem.

As a woman in the workforce, I can say with confidence: we have not solved the problem.

Women earn more than half of all college degrees, yet they make up roughly 10% of the top jobs at Fortune 500 companies. That is a problem. And it is not an accident.

Women are not behind because they are less capable or less ambitious. It is much more complicated.

Almost a decade ago, I found myself having a lively conversation with an older woman at a wedding. Her peak career years had been in the 80s and 90s, and she started talking about how hard it was to be a professional woman back in the day.

The conversation started with familiar details about always being asked to fetch the coffee, take meeting notes, or make copies, even after she was promoted to senior roles.

Then the conversation turned dark.

She shared how during a business trip, a male co-worker tried to assault her. She managed to escape before anything happened, locked herself in her hotel room, barricaded the door, and spent the rest of the night alert, terrified that he might come back and try to force his way in.

The next morning, the co-worker acted like nothing had happened. She reported his behavior to HR. Nothing came of it.

She concluded her story by saying that even though it had been awful, she was happy because it had paved the way for women today to have equality in the workforce.

I debated whether to nod in agreement, but I had to say it.

“Actually, we have not achieved equality just yet.”

I then shared my own story as a professional woman. My experience was nothing like hers. I have always felt physically safe at work, even in rooms full of men. But inequality has many forms.

I had been working at a company for a few years, waiting for a transfer. Year after year I was told to wait. Wait for the new budget to arrive. Wait for an open headcount. Wait until the new team is fully trained. Wait to complete the newest implementation.

I waited. And finally, years in, there was an actual opening at the department I wanted to transfer to. Someone had given his two-week notice. Within hours, the position was filled with an outside candidate.

I couldn’t even understand how this could happen. This was a company that took months to hire for even the most junior of roles.

The person who received my role was the accounting intern from the previous summer. While I had years of experience inside and outside this company, this kid was signing up for his first job out of college. I also had a master’s degree and a couple of certifications on him.

I was not going to take this without a fight. I marched to the department manager and asked him straight: how could he give away MY role.

Without hesitation, he simply said that the intern was a “really fun guy.” He even had a pilot’s license and had promised to take the whole team to Las Vegas and show them a really good time.

That’s it.

That’s why after years of hard work, patience, and loyalty, I was passed over for my dream job.

I related this story at the wedding. The woman sitting across from me said something like: “This happened to you? But you are so young.”

She couldn’t understand how this was still happening to women.

She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and I never talked to her again during the rest of the wedding.

She probably had enough of me challenging her worldview.

But it has to be said. Even though women have accomplished great things and won many battles when it comes to professional opportunity, we have not won the war.

I am the first person to admit that my professional journey has been much better than my mother’s. And if I had a daughter, I would like to believe that she would experience an even brighter future.

But we can’t fool ourselves into compliance.

The McKinsey director was punished, and there was universal condemnation of his comments. However, the real goal is to get to a point where we don’t have to.

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.

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.

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.

Mentorship, Metabolized

If you have a mentor, hold them tight and thank them for everything they have done. You are one of the lucky ones.

I’ve spent too much of my career hoping to be one of the lucky ones.

I blame Joseph Campbell and his Hero’s Journey for planting the idea: someone who would guide me, offer me tools and knowledge, and encourage me during my journey. I’ve even accepted jobs that were not the right choice because I thought I would be working with someone who might eventually become that person.

I’ve now learned that the odds are not in my favor, and finding a mentor is probably not where I should be putting all my energy.

To begin with, a mentor needs to be someone who actually has something to teach you.

An impressive title or background doesn’t guarantee that. You never know why someone has a title or a large bank account. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe they were at the right place at the right time. Or maybe they won the womb lottery. Just because someone has the outward trappings of success doesn’t mean they have something of substance to share.

I once went to an interview. Last round, with the CFO. And I found myself falling for my same trappings. This woman seemed impressive: Ivy League education, amazing company logos on her LinkedIn profile.

Even though I would not be reporting directly to her, I started imagining a world where I might learn something from this accomplished professional, even from a distance.

What a disappointment.

She was rude and aggressive the entire interview. A 45-minute humiliation ritual. She questioned my qualifications and belittled my experience. If you can’t treat people decently, especially those who might be below you on the org chart, you have nothing to teach me.

Secondly, even if you meet someone with real accomplishments and knowledge to share, that person also needs to have spent time looking back on what they’ve done. What worked. How they got there. What lessons they carried forward. Most people haven’t.

Most people spend every day jumping from fire to fire without ever tracing back how they got from point A to point B.

I was at a webinar recently and one of the panelists said that wisdom is “metabolized life experience.” Highlight on the metabolized part.

You could have achieved greatness, but if you have not sat and mulled it over, you end up with advice that is little more than: work hard. Working hard is table stakes.

I need more wisdom, please.

And finally, even if you find someone with the knowledge and self-awareness, they also have to be willing and able to spend the time sharing it with you.

I once accepted a job primarily to work under a Controller who was everything I wanted to be. Sophisticated, smart, and capable.

During my time working with her, we had exactly two one-on-ones: one on the day I started, and one on the day I gave her my notice.

She was surprised by my departure and asked why I hadn’t reached out sooner. I reminded her of all the meetings I had put on her calendar over the past couple of months that she had rescheduled and eventually cancelled.

I know this sounds negative on mentorship. It’s not. The idea of a mentor is amazing. The reality is just rare.

What I’m optimistic about is self-mentorship.

If you can’t find someone to guide you, guide yourself. We live in a world with more access to knowledge than any generation before us. Any technical or soft skill you want to develop is a book, a podcast, a class, a video, or a micro-credential away. Career coaching, interview preparation, resume writing. The resources exist.

But self-mentorship is more than a reading list. It’s the habit of looking at your own career the way a mentor would. Asking yourself the hard questions. What am I learning here? What should I do differently? Where am I headed, and is it where I want to go? It’s doing the metabolizing that you wish someone else would help you with.

I decided I can be my own mentor. Not because I don’t want guidance, but because waiting for it cost me years.

The Hiring Process Was Broken Before You Found It

The hiring process is broken.

People can’t find jobs. Companies can’t find the talent they say they need. Jobs sites are full of open positions, yet no one is being hired.

Maybe it was always broken.

In What Color Is Your Parachute?, the author cites a Financial Times survey that found the hiring process was only 3% more effective at picking a good employee than random chance.

That stuck with me. Decades later, after going through hundreds of interviews and hiring dozens of people myself, I see what the problem is.

And it is everything.

Companies fail to figure out what they actually need before they start looking. They evaluate candidates against criteria that doesn’t exist, and then the role changes because it was never defined to begin with.

It all starts with the job description.

I’ve seen companies dust off an old job description even when they haven’t hired for the role in years and the role has changed materially in that time.

Recently, I interviewed at a company where it felt like they were workshopping the role as the interviews went along. I was sitting with the controller on a Zoom and asked how she envisioned this position interacting with the rest of the team. She responded that maybe they didn’t need this role after all. Maybe they were looking at things wrong. Maybe they needed to split the work along duties instead of business units.

While she was talking to herself, I was questioning why I was even in this meeting. They didn’t even know what they were interviewing for.

A week later, I got a polite email from HR closing the loop. Two days after that, I got a message from LinkedIn saying that I was a great fit for a new role at the same company.

The role wasn’t even that different. Same department, same level, a few key differences. Instead of going back to the candidates they already interviewed and asking if they would be interested in a slightly different role, they cleared the slate and started a new search.

I’m surprised that a company that seems so far behind has the time to have their employees interview candidates over and over as they figure out what they need.

A friend was telling me about a failed hire by one of his clients. The client was looking to fill a Senior Accountant role, a highly independent position. She hired a young guy who had graduated two years prior. He had gone to a great school and passed the CPA exams.

He turned out to be a terrible hire, and the company let him go before his 90-day trial period ended.

My friend was wondering what went wrong. I told him the answer was there all along. His client needed an individual contributor who could function with drive and independence. Instead, she hired a junior accountant with two years of experience in a large, highly automated company that was probably still figuring things out.

The problem was not the candidate. It was the candidate-role relationship.

Then there is the fact that the role you hire someone for often changes, sometimes shortly after the candidate starts. A candidate who could have been great at the original role might struggle with the new expectations.

I once started a job where I was told the company was “a mess” and that the team needed a lot of help. I debated whether to walk away, but I was offered a lot of autonomy and independence on how to deal with the issues. I decided to accept.

Five months passed between my first interview and my first day. That alone said a lot about the “mess.”

On my second day, the controller set up a meeting with me. I thought it was a simple welcome to the team. It wasn’t.

She told me that since we had last spoken, months prior, she had gotten approval for another hire at my level. She had just started the search but didn’t want to assign me a specific role until “all the pieces were on the board.” She asked for my patience and told me to observe and help around until my colleague was hired.

I declined politely. I told her that if there wasn’t a clear role for me, I was happy to leave. I had left a position where I was leading a team to take a role where I was going to lead a larger team, not to sit around and help like a junior staff member. If they couldn’t provide what was promised, I would leave and look for a better opportunity.

The controller quickly changed her tune and gave me a team and a somewhat defined role.

What would have happened if I had agreed to just wait?

Colleagues would have started wondering what I did. Questions about my competence would have surfaced. And I would have probably been quietly escorted out of the company while the controller wondered why this hire didn’t work out.

Roles are not well defined. Every member of the hiring committee is looking for something different. After the candidate is hired, the role morphs into something unrecognizable. And then we wonder what went wrong.

Slow, invisible systemic failures that are ultimately blamed on the hire who doesn’t stay, and that hurt the team left behind, understaffed, and starting the same failed process all over again.

Behind every resume is a person. Someone who prepared for the job interview, showed up, and trusted that the company knew what it was looking for. It would be nice if the process remembered that.

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.