Unfortunately, this company bears all the hallmarks of a family run SME. It is a very emotionally charged workplace where there are tensions at every turn. The owners - a married couple - keep favourites. For a while. And then the wind changes, someone else is on top and you fall to the bottom of the pile.
I was advised a few weeks into my role that whatever I said would always be wrong. Whatever executive decision I made would be the wrong one. This proved to be true very quickly.
The CEO is highly changeable, with a selective memory. Not a good combination. There is little sense and logic to her working style; what is acceptable one day is heinous the next. She is governed by her feelings, which she sees as an asset. But what she doesn't see is the amount of staff she has reduced to tears after they've made it out of her office with just a shred of dignity in tact.
The blame culture is real, but responsibility never lies with the senior team. They have learned from the CEO and COO. They are too quick to dob their most junior staff in for mistakes. They are scared their own tenuous positions will be jeopardised.
Leadership is weak here. Managers are managers because they have been around the longest, not because they are leaders. Effective managers can be born or made: with one exception, the managers here are neither one.
Staff turnover is high. They expect a certain level of churn as they hire recent graduates, largely Europeans looking for a job to get them to London. Because of this, they never look deeper and try and understand why everyone leaves.
But what really gets to me is their refusal to see their own weaknesses, personal or business. They are very quick to critique (rarely constructively) but they will never learn from what their staff say. If we propose something new, they're so risk averse they'd rather do it the old way. If we complain about treatment, its because we're weak, not because they're bullies. If we say we're underpaid, it's because we're entitled millennials, not because they're exploitative.
The absolute worst thing? Some highly skilled, very bright people have been churned up and spat out of this company with rockbottom confidence. In new jobs they have prospered. Wine Intelligence would doubtlessly say that's because they have high standards and demand excellence and they were too weak to survive. I would argue that no one can prosper in the conditions they make.
