Getting Your Career Back on Track (#271)

In this podcast episode, we discuss the decisions you can make to get your mid-life career back on track. Key points made are noted below.

The person making the request is having trouble jumping from a staff position into a management one, and is not sure what to do next. The general concept happens to a lot of us, and it certainly doesn’t just apply to the accounting profession.

Whether to Become a Manager

There’s no clear answer for how to make that critical move into a management position, but let’s work through some questions first, which might point us in the direction of an answer. First, am I a manager at all? Some people just slide right into the role, while a lot more people have trouble with it. It involves a lot of changes. You need to stop doing the hands-on work yourself, and spend lots of time convincing other people to do the work instead. And dealing with other managers. And planning, and budgeting, and helping everyone else do their jobs. Are you sure you want to do that? A great many people might not see any value in what they do as managers, so they – go off in a different direction. Such as – not trusting anyone else. They want to review everything, so they end up spending massive amounts of time in the office, they never hand off any work to subordinates, and they become the chief bottleneck in the department. And maybe in the entire company. Other evidence of not trusting people is installing all kinds of policies and procedures, tracking what everyone is doing all the time, and basically badgering people.

Are you one of these people? If so, making the leap into management could be a very bad idea, and one that you’d regret for a long time. Just as an observation, there’s this view in the accounting profession that you have to become a CFO, and preferably of a really large corporation. Or, an audit partner, preferably of a Big Four audit firm. Have you ever considered that almost no one makes it that far? And, that those people might be so overworked in those jobs that they’d rather not be in them? When I was a CFO, I almost always worked on Saturdays, because that’s what it took to do the job.

Probability of Becoming an Audit Partner

The latest number I’ve seen for CPAs is that there’re 665,000 of them just in the United States, and 2.1 million in the world. How many end up in those top positions? There are about 15,000 partners in the Big Four audit firms just in the United States. If you extrapolate that out for the world based on the proportion of CPAs in the US to the number of CPAs worldwide, then there’re maybe 47,000 partners in large audit firms. Throw in the CFO positions for the 10,000 largest firms in the world, and that’s still only 57,000 people, out of a base of 2.1 million CPAs. That means your odds of getting into a dream job are 37 to 1. And as I just pointed out, the job may not be that easy. There are a lot of audit partners who would agree with me on that. So, is it reasonable to aspire to that sort of position? I can’t answer that question for you, but it seems like kind of a long shot to me.

Exploratory Solutions

Maybe a better way to deal with that mid-life quagmire is not to look quite so far ahead. Instead, try for a lower-paying management position in a smaller firm, and see if you like it. And, just as important, do they like you? It’s quite possible that you think you’re doing a good job, but no one else thinks so.

It can be really hard to find out the opinions of other people on this – and it needs to be someone you work with – not your friends and certainly not your spouse. They haven’t seen you in action, so they don’t know if you’d be a great manager or a terrible one. Instead, you need to cultivate your co-workers, and gently probe for opinions. Which will not be easy to come by, because no one wants to tell you bad news. Ever. Only a really great friend – or, for that matter, an enemy – will really tell you the truth. It can help to talk to both. Sometimes it’s just the barest hint of a suggestion. When those come up, don’t ignore them. Pursue any hint you get, because that is gold.

You’re simply looking for the truth about how other people think you’re performing as a manager. If the feedback is good, and you like the work, then keep trying. If not, it really is acceptable not to be a manager. You might be much more comfortable in some other job, and maybe that’s what you should pursue – possibly for a long time.

Dealing with a Firing

What about those really uncomfortable situations where you’ve just gotten a management position for the first time – and then you were fired. Do you back off and never try for a management position again, or decide that your boss was a jerk and try again somewhere else? Again, no easy answer. The first step is figuring out why you were fired, which your old boss may not be too interested in talking about.

Instead, you may need to call up any remaining contacts at your old employer and ask them. There has to be some information lying around somewhere. But, if you don’t feel comfortable calling any former contacts, that could be your answer right there. A key part of being a manager is building up contacts all over the company, so if you didn’t do that, maybe a non-managerial position would be a better bet for you.

But, it could also be that your boss was a jerk. It does happen. Some people who are in management positions really don’t belong there, and especially when it’s a family-owned firm and they’re part of the family. Those people might not normally qualify as janitors, but – they’re vice presidents instead. If you think this is the case, then by all means – try again.

But, if you keep trying and failing in management positions, it’s more than likely that the main fault lies with you, not the employer. In which case, it’s time for some major soul searching to decide whether this big career leap is really for you.

When the Career Path is Not Working

Which brings up the question of whether you want to retreat into a non-management accounting position or try something else entirely. This is not uncommon. I’ve never seen any statistics for how many CPAs give up their certifications and leave accounting entirely, but it must be several times larger than the number of current CPAs.

A lot of them try consulting, some start up their own businesses – I know one person who bought a lawn care company. And of course, in my case, I went from being the CFO of a small public company to writing accounting books. Which most people would find incredibly dull, but it works for me.

Summary

In short, there’s no correct answer. Ending up in a powerful corporate or audit firm position sounds great, and it does pay well – but those positions are draining, and they’re very definitely not for everyone. If you’re stuck in that mid-career quagmire, it might take you a few years to figure out what really works for you, so take your time, gather information, and think about it.