I have made plenty of mistakes running AP teams over the years, and the ones that stuck with me were never the small ones. The two that taught me the most both came from the same root cause, moving faster than my understanding of the business actually allowed.

The first happened early in a role where I had been brought in specifically to revamp the team. I came in with a clear sense of what had worked before, and I started putting those changes into place without taking the time to really earn my team's trust first. I do not think the changes themselves were wrong. The mistake was in the order of operations. I was asking people to follow a new way of doing things before they had any real reason to believe I understood their business well enough to be trusted with that kind of change. Not every industry runs the same way. Not every company's payables process carries the same quirks and history, and I had not spent enough time learning what made this one different before I started rewriting it. The resistance I ran into was not really about the changes. It was about trust I had not yet earned.

The second mistake was more expensive, and more public. I walked into a new role right after the company had implemented a new ERP system and was in the middle of rolling out a new AP solution on top of it. My CFO gave me a clear sense of where to focus, and I leaned into that completely, diving straight into the ERP and implementation issues without stepping back first to do what I would normally do on day one, which is pull the full picture. Who are our biggest suppliers. What is aging. Where are the real risks sitting right now. I had two people responsible for one of our largest accounts, and I took their word that things were a little behind but under control. About a month into the job, that supplier's CEO called my CEO directly to say we had not paid them in ninety days. That supplier represented roughly half of our business. It was not a small miss. It was the kind of call that changes how your entire leadership team sees you in your first month on the job.

Looking back, the lesson from both of these is really the same lesson told twice. New to a role does not mean you get to skip the fundamentals, even when someone senior hands you a clear mandate pointing somewhere else. Go get the full picture yourself before you commit your energy anywhere. Ask the uncomfortable questions early, about your biggest suppliers, your aging, your real exposure, even when someone has already told you it is handled. Taking a confident answer at face value is not the same as verifying it, and the gap between those two things is exactly where I got burned both times.

If you are stepping into a new AP leadership role right now, my advice is not complicated. Earn the trust before you ask for the change. Verify the picture before you trust the briefing. Both mistakes cost me something, but neither one cost me as much as it would have if I had made them twice.