You don’t know, what you don’t know. Hold that phrase in mind as I explain why one of the worst job listings I’ve ever seen was so terrible. The company, while not a traditional startup, had a founder—who built the company from the beginning into something that is certainly impressive. A lot of growing pains typically result from one person breathing life into a company. The skills and approach that allowed the founder to build, often complemented by delusional confidence and dumb luck, rarely scale with the organization. The Peter principle is the idea that employees are frequently promoted to a level of functional incompetence, where they can no longer be promoted. The skills and habits that served someone well in a previous job usually don’t allow someone to continue progressing. For founders, success is effectively promoting themselves, sometimes from the leader of a one-person company to having hundreds of employees. As an organization grows, coping mechanisms suddenly become less effective, up to the point of unfeasible. A founder can go from being able to do the jobs of every employee, to those of any employee and eventually must have employees with skillsets they are not qualified to evaluate. Being able to lead via direction with clear goal setting goes from a useful skill to one that makes or breaks the organization. The job listing I saw was for a CMO of a growing beauty brand. The job listing gave me pause, and not in a good way. The first major eyebrow…Learning From A Bad Job Listing