Glass cliff or breakthrough: four questions that tell you which one you're looking at

It's a Sunday phone call from the board chair. The division has been bleeding money for six straight quarters, the previous two presidents were both women, and each was gone within eighteen months. The job is now yours if you say yes: a larger title, a $90,000 salary bump, a place on the executive committee, and a directive that, read closely, amounts to "repair what two leaders before you could not, with the same funding and the same board." You're 53. You've been prepared for a role this size for five years, and you understand precisely why it's coming to you at this moment. The chair needs a decision by Friday.

Whether you have the ability is not really what matters here. What counts is if this job is a dead end or a turning point, and viewed from the outside, those two possibilities are indistinguishable.

Option one. Accept it as presented

Its drawbacks are obvious enough. Should the division remain unsalvageable, you would be the third leader in succession to fail, and it's that run of failures people will recall. Organizations seldom ask why three presidents in succession struggled. They ask who the fourth should be, and that person typically arrives with a larger budget and more room to act. Russell Reynolds found, in a limited sample that should be read as a hint rather than a proof, that women CEOs averaged 5.2 years in the role compared with 8.1 for men. Short tenures follow a pattern, not coincidence.

Option two. Refuse

The costs here are equally plain to see. Opportunities at this level don't surface every year, and "she passed on it" becomes a story that spreads through the Indy business community. Your track record stays clean, yet you could be passing up the single chance to show you can steer something under strain. Now and then, a dead end is exactly what it appears to be. Other times it's the hard assignment nobody else wanted, and whoever takes it earns the recognition.

Option three. Accept on your own terms

Agreement is possible, though only on terms you spell out in writing before anything is signed. A defined runway, a named board sponsor, a budget line that didn't exist for your predecessors, and a success measure at eighteen months that isn't simply "profitable." The risk is that you might hear no, and a no to reasonable conditions is the most valuable answer you'll get all year. It shows they wanted a name on the door, not an actual turnaround.

What seasoned Indianapolis executives advise

Executives who have accepted a troubled assignment and emerged successful usually start by posing four key questions.

1. What did the previous two leaders say, in their own words, about why they walked away from the role in Indianapolis? Call them. They'll tell you.

2. What has changed since then? Should the answer turn out to be that the problem was them, treat that as praise rather than a strategy.

3. Which members of the board are equally accountable for how this turns out alongside you? If nobody can name a person, nobody will back you when the first quarter disappoints.

4. Put in writing, what would a successful result look like eighteen months from now? Without that written standard, no one can evaluate you fairly, yet they will form a verdict regardless.

The verdict

Question one is the deciding factor for everything else. If the last two were set up to fail and only the title has changed, refuse, or renegotiate until something real shifts. If something substantive has changed, accept, on paper and with a sponsor. A real breakthrough often resembles a dead end that happens to come with funding.

Your vote

What would you do? You can take the job as offered, turn it down, or take it under conditions you set. Cast your vote below. Next week we'll release the findings, together with the question so many of you said you would raise first.