A Survival Guide for My Replacement

Dear whoever takes over my department here in Denver, if you are reading this letter, I have already safely escaped to my new role in Seattle and left these corporate headaches behind. Let me give you a quick orientation so that you do not repeat my mistakes over the next twelve months. First of all, you were supposed to receive a comprehensive budget report on your very first Monday, but do not hold your breath because accounting operates in a parallel universe of eternal delays. I spent the last six months dealing with a dreadful maintenance backlog that my predecessor pretended did not exist. You needn't have worried about updating the legacy CRM system immediately, although upper management will certainly nag you about it every single Tuesday morning. Instead, focus on the hidden costs buried deep inside our vendor contracts, because someone ought to have audited those ridiculous subscription fees years ago. I could have saved us thousands of dollars if I had just bitten the bullet and renegotiated with our primary cloud supplier last spring. As it stands, we are stuck throwing good money after bad into a platform that constantly threatens to collapse under peak loads. You might find yourself tempted to initiate a massive structural overhaul right away, but trust me on this, that would be a complete false economy. Most of the apparent problems are just symptoms of underinvestment, and a quick patch-up job will only store up worse problems for the autumn. Throughout my tenure, I tried to scale up our operational capacity without securing the proper scalability first, which was a classic false start. You should have seen the chaos when our main server crashed during the busiest week of the fourth quarter. It took days of frantic work just to paper over the cracks and keep our key enterprise clients reasonably satisfied. Looking back, I could have handled the crisis much better if I had not tried to control every single detail myself. You need to embrace empowerment and let go of control if you want your team to actually solve problems independently. Finally, despite all the organizational friction, there are three things in this department that run like absolute clockwork and should never, under any circumstances, be touched. Our weekly Friday sync is surprisingly efficient, the automated invoice processing pipeline is rock-solid, and the coffee machine in the third-floor breakout room is genuinely magnificent.

Read again and choose the right answer

What did the author say about the budget report on the first Monday?

• It was waiting on the new manager's desk.
• Accounting had delayed it indefinitely.
• It had already been fully audited by finance.

According to the letter, what should the new manager focus on instead of updating the CRM immediately?

• Hidden costs inside vendor contracts
• Firing the entire customer support team
• Organizing a team-building trip to Seattle

What did the author say about the weekly Friday sync in the final paragraph?

• It is completely inefficient and should be cancelled.
• It runs like clockwork and should never be touched.
• It takes too long and frustrates the team.

Where has the author gone after leaving the department in Denver?

• To a new role in Austin
• To a competitor in Chicago
• To a new role in Seattle

Sources: photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels