Enthusiastic troops held back by dinosaur leaders - IT Specialist XMA Employee Review

XMA doesn’t understand its overall structure or purpose. There’s no official guidance about team and individual responsibility. You’ll find a top-down blame culture, made worse by the encouragement of a “not my job” mentality which makes it really hard to build new relationships between teams. Company direction is vague (we’re going to sell more stuff) and rarely translates into specific actions. Expect limited guidance about your future because your boss will be too busy dodging fire from above. If you’re good (or pretty) you can expect to be offered new roles, especially by senior managers that don’t understand why their teams are failing. But don’t expect support to pass your old role onto somebody else. Chances are you’ll end up doing both jobs in the end. Recent staff development and training initiatives have been delivered well, but are undermined by a lack of buy-in from senior management. Expect training and development to be considered less important than disrupting your director’s diary, especially if he wants his regular Friday meetings completed by 10am to get to the golf. Your promotion is more likely to be based on appearance than ability (not a con if you look good in snapshots with the directors) Senior management is out of touch with what goes on at the front line. Poor sales performance normally results in shouting, not trying to understand why targets aren’t being hit. The impact of declining product availability and quality aren’t reflected in performance targets. There’s a growing trend of sharing staff between multiple teams. Individuals become unable to help because one manager monopolises their time while the other is too uninvolved. There has always been too much middle management with inflated job titles but no accountability. Account management will be done above your head and you’ll be expected to deliver, often without knowing what has been promised or why. Growth by acquisition over the past few years hides very ordinary sales performance and a lack of innovation.