The Year-End I Took the Work Back
I believed I needed to do the work to know the work. Someone else paid for that.
He came into my office during year-end and told me he couldn't get it done.
He'd been with us about 10 months. Good hire, and he asked the kind of questions that told me he was paying attention. We'd been through 3 quarterly closes together and he'd handled his pieces of them without trouble. Year-end provision is a different animal, and he was standing in front of me saying he was in over his head and didn't know what he was supposed to be doing.
My first thought was that I'd misjudged his experience when I hired him.
That wasn't what happened. I'd spent 10 months keeping the harder work on my own desk.
I had a belief back then that I needed to do the work to know the work. If I stopped touching it, I'd lose my feel for it, and then I'd be one of those managers who asks questions that reveal how far from the details they've drifted. I was a fairly new people manager and that outcome scared me more than being overworked did.
That belief wasn't stupid. A tax leader who stops touching the technical work does lose fluency. That loss is real and it has costs. I wasn't wrong about the mechanics. I was wrong about what I was actually buying with it.
And on top of the belief I'd built a story that made it feel generous. He was new. He was learning the company and the systems. Why throw him into the deepest water in his first year? I told myself I was easing him in.
Those 2 things are the same decision wearing different clothes. Every piece of work I kept because I needed it was a piece of work he didn't get to learn on. Three quarterly closes had taught him quarterly closes. Part of what year-end asks for never comes up in a quarter at all, and I had 10 months to walk him through it and never did. The rest, the harder calculations that did come up during the year, I kept. He got to his first year-end having seen the easier half of the job.
So he came to me in the worst week of the year, and I did what I'd been doing all along.
I told him not to worry, that we'd get through it together, and then I took his work and did it myself. A week and a half, head down, my desk and his. We made the deadline.
I felt like I was rescuing him. To be honest, there was no other option that week. The filing date doesn't move for anybody's development plan. But the instinct that made it feel like the obvious call was the same instinct that created the problem. Under pressure I reached for the thing I'd always reached for, and it looked like kindness both times.
We sat down afterward and built him a real plan. What he'd get exposure to, what he'd own at the next quarter, where the gaps were and how we'd close them. I meant it and I followed through on it. He did more at the next close than he'd done at any before it.
Six months later he gave his notice.
He didn't tell me year-end had anything to do with it. He may have had 5 reasons that had nothing to do with me. What I saw in the months between was a person who judged himself hard for what had happened, harder than anyone else did, and who didn't seem to hear it when I told him it wasn't his failing. I don't know what he carried out of that week. I've never known.
What I think about now is the shape of what I did to him. I held the work because I was protecting something in myself. He paid for it in the one week where there was nowhere to hide. And then I stepped in and finished his job in front of him, which might have said more clearly than anything I could have told him afterward that I didn't believe he could have done it.
I don't know if that's what he heard. That's the part that stays with me.
It's a strange thing to realize the most generous-feeling moment of that whole year was probably the most damaging one.
Who on your team has never seen the hard part of the work?
Greg Crossan spent 30 years in corporate tax, most recently as Global Tax Director at Bose. He's now an executive coach working with tax and accounting professionals on the leadership side of the job. More on his one-on-one coaching.