In my years at Istonish I have heard of and watched a revolving door of amazing, motivating, and experienced leadership individuals walk away from our company for one reason: the CEO.
Sales, Operations, and Marketing have seen significant leadership turnover in the past 10 years. I always follow up with departed employees - even going back a decade or more they all point to a CEO who was, and is, unwilling to listen to reasonable advice based on objective data from experienced individuals.
I can attest to their frustration - without the buffer of a robust leadership team we have all begun to interact much more closely with our CEO. She runs our company with fear and disrespect. She is quick to point fingers and blame others for the company’s situation but, ultimately, that responsibility lies with her. When warned about the risks of moving, or not moving, forward with certain initiatives she has ignored the advice from Istonish leaders (all with 10-20 years of experience in IT). Whether it deals with overall strategic direction, tactical data and statistics, or basic accounting we have been met with derision and distrust.
Our company direction and strategy is also at the discretion of the CEO and her strategic model is built on opinions from outside consultants that don’t understand our business and act as yes-(wo)men to collect a paycheck. For the past year, I have watched our CEO completely disconnect from every member of our internal leadership team and hire a handful of sales and industry consultants that have produced no tangible results. We haven’t seen raises in two years but we have managed to afford three consultants (one industry, two sales) with no deliverables or changes in departmental or company direction.
Overall we still lack a communicable strategy despite the efforts of our leadership team. I have watched our team spend several years pitching logical, well-planned strategies to our CEO - not only were they ignored but she presented roadblock after roadblock. On top of that, we continue to squander money pursuing “the next big thing” whilst ignoring the people who are the lifeblood of Istonish. The morale at our company is tangibly dark. We have been called lazy, incompetent, and subordinate. We have poured ourselves into a company that had a promising future. Now we are looking at a future with no promise. I hope our CEO realizes that the only thing keeping our company afloat is the people with in-depth tribal knowledge who, strangely, continue to attempt to save what we used to have.
