leadership – Real Thoughts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Worst Job in Accounting

Believe it or not, becoming an accounting manager was aspirational when I started out.

Being a manager meant making more money, having more freedom and flexibility, and having real power and autonomy. There used to be a clear distinction between managers and working managers. Managers oversaw teams: onboarding, training, reviewing, and assigning work. Working managers did all of that plus carried a full load of their own deliverables.

That distinction no longer exists. Now all managers are working managers, juggling workloads sometimes heavier than their direct reports’ while also being expected to manage their teams in their downtime.

Devaluing the title destroyed what made the job aspirational.

The worst part is that we did it on purpose.

In a recent episode of the Optimist Economy podcast (recommended listen), titled “No Overtime for the Supervisor of Sandwiches,” economist Kathryn Anne Edwards discusses overtime. Midway through, my ears perked up. She puts words to something I’ve observed for years but couldn’t quite articulate.

Edwards discusses how in 2004 Congress raised the salary cap for overtime eligibility. In response, businesses did what she calls the “systematic managerial titling of workers.” To avoid paying overtime, companies took employees who had just become eligible and gave them managerial titles. Managers are exempt. Problem solved. One of the most outrageous examples: hostesses becoming Directors of First Impressions.

I am not an economist, but this clarifies so much of what I’ve seen in my career.

Early in my career, I reached a breaking point waiting for a promotion. I was ready to quit when the company’s CFO called me to his office. He argued that the problem was not the lack of a promotion, but my attachment to a title. His words: we all know what you do for this company and we value it, so what does it matter what your title is?

I looked at the nameplate on his desk. It read: Cofounder / Chief Financial Officer.

I said: so we can change that to Janitor, and you wouldn’t mind, right? I mean, we all know this company wouldn’t be what it is without you.

He paused. Then he smiled. You’re right, he said.

Titles matter. They matter to the people doing the work. They matter when you’re looking for your next opportunity. A title is one of the few data points a potential employer uses to understand the scope of what you did. And it matters on the other side too: when a candidate evaluates a role, the title is how they gauge what the job is and what fair compensation should look like.

By overusing and outright abusing managerial titles, companies broke the compass. Accounting Manager has become the single worst job in accounting.

And things are getting worse.

In recent months, recruiters keep reaching out to me about Accounting Manager and Senior Accounting Manager roles. Their opening line is always the same: this role is expected to run the entire accounting function.

They outline the responsibilities. I listen. Then I let them know that what they’re describing is a Controller, not a Manager, and I advise them to go back to their hiring team and rethink the title and the compensation package.

The title inflation that started as a way to avoid paying overtime has now become something else entirely. It’s a way to get senior-level work at mid-level prices. That’s not a broken system. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

When Everything is a Priority

In a sea of “tell me about yourself,” someone asked an interesting question at an interview the other day.

The hiring manager asked me how I prioritize when everything is a priority. In this era of doing more with less and fast-moving environments, it is a fair question, and it started a meaningful conversation about how we work. It’s a question most people answer with instinct. There’s a better way.

When prioritizing, I use three pillars: risk, visibility, and materiality.

Risk.

In accounting, there are areas of the financials that have a higher propensity to cause harm if things are missed or not kept under control. Revenue recognition and accruals at reporting period ends are common examples. These areas tend to be the focus of compliance efforts. A useful signal: if an area comes up time and time again during audits, it is probably high risk. The question to ask: what happens if I get this wrong? If the answer scares you, that’s where you start.

Visibility.

Leadership will always have one or two KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they track closely while monitoring growth or the lack of it. Maybe it is a metric that once caused a major issue in a senior leader’s career, and they’ve learned to watch it closely ever since. You’ll know what these are quickly. They will be the first or second thing asked about during review meetings. It keeps you from getting caught off guard. When leadership asks, and they will, you need to have the answer. The people who advance prioritize based on what leadership is actually measuring.

Materiality.

Materiality is the accounting concept that only information significant enough to influence stakeholder decisions needs to be highlighted in financial reports. Most companies set a quantitative materiality threshold, a minimum dollar amount that triggers further review or action. If an issue falls below that threshold, it won’t necessarily be ignored, but it won’t be prioritized either. In accounting terms, “it is not material.” This is the pillar that gives you permission to say: this can wait. Most people never give themselves that permission.

These three pillars often overlap. When something is risky, visible, and material, that is where you focus first. No debate needed.

But here is what I find interesting: these are accounting concepts, but the logic behind them applies far beyond accounting.

When choosing what to prioritize in any context, ask yourself: What is the risk of not doing this? Do the people who matter, your team, your boss, your family, consider this important? And will this decision meaningfully change the outcome, or is it noise?

Those three questions can cut through most of the paralysis that comes with competing priorities. Not everything that feels urgent is risky. Not everything that is visible is material. And not everything that is material is visible. Knowing the difference is where good prioritization starts. And in a sea where everything feels urgent, that might be the only thing that keeps you afloat.