- Senior Leadership is primarily clueless on how to lead their function - almost all Senior Leaders and some Executive Leaders have little to no direct, functional experience. Sometimes, it’s the leader’s first time being within their role.
- There are currently probably over 40-50 VPs and above, and the number continues to grow while hiring people on the ground to fix things gets postponed because of a lack of budget. Ironically, Senior Leadership continually gets frustrated when milestones are missed.
- 100% reactive "HR" who sees their job as a therapist for Senior Leadership - one person for the entire company, inaccessible to staff with no transparent sphere of influence because they are not empowering and are more often ignored by Senior Leadership.
- None of the high performers at the company want their boss’s jobs. The day-to-day tone is very transactional, and no one is looking at the long-term strategy, which is framed as okay 'because there's enough to do right now’ but because no one plans anything here. The term OKR is very abnormal across Senior Leadership, which is very telling and descriptive of the lack of strategic planning here.
- Certain team members across the company are known problems or non-contributors but are allowed to remain despite repeatedly documented poor performance and behavior and what’s worse is that they often forgo formally documenting their performance and behavior to protect themselves.
- Stifling focus on "values" and occasional "public high fives” via Slack, which is a mask for the truly toxic culture of gaslighting and overworking - Senior Leaders often start yelling at their equals and, even more commonly, those below them when they don’t like what they are hearing as a result of being tone-deaf and clueless of how the Company is performing.
- Most of the above can be explained by the Executive hires that the CEO brought on and continues to bring on. The main problem with this is that no one around him can say no, so if you’re in his inner circle, you’re good, but if you’re not, good luck getting anywhere.
