Because good roles aren’t just offered, they’re built.

You can only be surprised so many times before it stops being a surprise.

The role looked promising. Impressive title. The salary’s solid. The projects sound compelling. But something feels... vague.

You can’t quite see the shape of the role underneath it.

What exactly will you own?
What will success look like?
Will you be trusted or tasked?

Somewhere between signing the offer and sitting in the chair, the shine wears off. You inherit a team with no clear direction. Project priorities are vague. Accountability is political. And every decision you try to make needs a dozen other people's approval.

It doesn’t fall apart loudly.
It just… never quite comes together.

And then, slowly, you start to wonder if it’s you.
Maybe you’re not adapting fast enough.
Maybe you misunderstood what the job was.
Maybe you’ve just hit your ceiling.

You haven’t.
You’re not the problem.

The truth is, many roles in our industry, particularly at mid-senior level, are structurally unsound from the start. They’re created to respond to urgent gaps, internal politics, or external optics. 

They’re shaped by committee, sold with optimism, but built without alignment. And once you’re in, you're left to reconcile the contradictions.

It’s more common than most people will admit.

The quiet failure of roles that looked great on paper

According to PwC’s 2024 Workforce Turnover Study, 34% of mid-senior professionals in Australia leave new roles within 18 months. The most cited reason?

“Misalignment between the role’s scope and actual authority.”

This isn’t just about job satisfaction. It’s about structural design.

And for professionals in the built environment, engineers, architects, project managers, design leads, it’s often worse. These roles don’t exist in isolation. They live inside complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems with blurry lines of influence, layered reporting, legacy politics and budgets that get decided three levels up.

So why do smart, experienced people keep walking into roles that underdeliver?

Because most people are only taught how to assess the surface.

The job description doesn’t tell you the truth

It tells you what the business wants from you.
It doesn’t tell you what you’re inheriting.

It won’t say if the last three people in the role left in frustration.
It won’t tell you if the team you’re managing doesn’t want change.
It won’t say that key decisions are made offshore, or by legacy partners with no official remit.
It definitely won’t tell you who really has influence, or what risks you’re being brought in to absorb.

But these are the things that determine whether you thrive or stagnate.

When ambition masks dysfunction

High-performing professionals are conditioned to view challenges as a test of their capability.

So when a role starts to feel stuck, vague mandates, shifting priorities, limited access to senior leadership, many interpret it as a personal failing.

But often, these aren’t tests.
They’re symptoms of a role that was never truly designed to succeed.

Korn Ferry’s 2024 leadership trends study found that 72% of underperformance in senior hires stemmed from “misaligned success metrics and unclear structural authority.”
https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/the-challenges-of-first-time-managers

What you're really inheriting (and why no one talks about it)

Every role has a backstory. But you rarely hear it.

Maybe the last person was promoted too early and struggled.
Maybe the role has bounced between departments during multiple restructures.
Maybe it was created to satisfy a client, but never given internal priority.
Maybe it’s a political patch, a buffer between two decision-makers who don’t see eye to eye.

If you don’t know the history of the role, you can’t properly assess what you’re walking into.

And if the company avoids that conversation, it’s often because they know the story doesn’t support the pitch.

Influence is not the same as authority

Many mid-tier firms offer autonomy, in theory.

In practice, you might find:

• Final sign-off sits with founders who are “hands-off” but deeply embedded.
• Budget control is split across three cost centres.
• Project delivery requires cross-functional sign-off, but no one owns the friction points.
  
  

It’s no accident.

Influence in these environments is often informal, unspoken and relationship-dependent.
The job may look senior. But the real decisions are made in corridors you haven’t been invited into.

The Australian Institute of Project Management notes that one in five major projects now fail to meet original objectives or budget expectations, often due to “unclear leadership, poorly defined roles, and misaligned authority across stakeholders.”

That’s not a talent issue. It’s a structural one.

Silence is your biggest red flag

What doesn't come up in the interview process is often more important than what does.

If you haven’t heard anything about:

• Past role holders and their tenure
• Internal blockers or risks
• Budget parameters
• Org dynamics across offices or regions
• Who defines success
  
  

Then it’s worth asking: why not?

A role without context is like a project without site data. You’re making decisions on an empty grid, and you’ll pay for the assumptions later.

You can’t redesign the job once you’re in it

That’s the hard truth.

You can influence a lot.
You can build great teams.
You can negotiate scope and culture and relationships.

But the structural DNA of a role, its reporting lines, its remit, its internal politics, is often locked in before you arrive.

Trying to change it after you’ve started almost always puts you on the back foot. You’re perceived as pushing boundaries. Asking for too much. Not being a team player.

And then you’re managing optics instead of outcomes.

So what can you do?

You ask different questions, before you say yes.

Not about perks, or culture, or team size.
But about accountability. Access. History. Friction.

You ask:

• What happened to the last person in this role?
• Who shaped the KPIs?
• Who defines success?
• Who controls the budget?
• What decisions will I own?
• What challenges has this role faced internally?
  
  

You don’t ask because you’re difficult.
You ask because your time, energy, and career are worth protecting.

Final thought: It's not you

If you’ve walked into a role that underdelivered, you’re not alone.

But you don’t have to repeat the pattern.

You can start to recognise the signs, not just of good jobs, but of well-built roles. The ones where your skill and effort are matched by the structure beneath them. Where you’re not just given a title, but a mandate. Not just a team, but alignment. Not just responsibility, but the ability to lead.

That’s what you’re looking for.

Not a job that looks good on LinkedIn.
A role that actually works from the inside out.