#leadership

Every message from leadership sounds like a template written by someone who never met a real employee. They keep talking about strategic focus and long-term vision while people pack their desks quietly. Talk about a disconnect.

Can somebody name one thing that improved since the last reorg that cost so many people their jobs?

From 2023 to today, the stock has went from $5 to 1.60. They ain't even insider buying the stock at these lows. What is the board doing?

Thinking about Dan’s fireside chat on Friday I’ve come to the conclusion it boils down to whether people will trust him or not and if they believe him or not.

Let’s be honest he’s not big on details…so it feels like a leap of faith right now and can people move on from 15000 layoffs and that effectively the same people are in charge as a year ago

Think about it. The man is a fraud, the board of ATT is a fraud.
Fastow, Skilling, Lay, Stankey

And the meter is still running........

Poor Raises, Poor Severance, No Upward Mobility, Cafeteria Style Seating for Your Workday, Garbage Stock Price

Job Well Done John Stankey
Recent Warner Brother Sale to Netflix is another glaring Bat Signal, Exclamation Point, Nail in the Coffin at your utter buffoonery in running an Organization.
At a bare bones lowball minimum(aka what you sell assets for Stankey Style) you have cost shareholders $100B in equity value. At an absolute ceiling(what you buy assets for Stankey Style) you have cost shareholders $250B in your career as an Executive at ATT. You get played like a fiddle at the poker table time and time again but of course it is with other people's money and lives. Total failure in the business world.

Right after the layoffs wrapped up, my LinkedIn turned into a wall of inspirational posts, most from managers who said nothing to their own teams. To say the timing is tone-deaf is an understatement. How can you post cr-p like that when so many people under you are suddenly jobless?

We heard this week that there is a hiring freeze on field leaders - DM and up. It seems obviously we’re about to see a big realignment and layoffs. Wondering what everyone is hearing?

In Tampa, It is wild how managers suddenly disappear right before review time. They ghost you for weeks, then magically reappear with some cooked-up rating. This place doesn’t have a performance problem — it has a leadership problem. Especially with Indian managers who support people who speak their own native language. If an outsider comes to your team they are done unless the manager has a foreign degree, there is no respect. Some people sit in the same office space for years simply because they’re scared, comfortable, and stuck — no ambition, no growth, no risk-taking, just repeating the same tasks every day until they become part of the furniture.

I get that losing the WB bid shouldn't technically touch us, but with this leadership I can't shake the feeling they'll react by doubling down on cost cutting and trimming more people than they originally meant to. Maybe it's paranoia, but when big egos take a hit, they usually find someone else to pay for it.

If this wasn't so serious and affected so many employees livelihoods, it would be funny. Why are this bunch of clowns still at the controls? I afraid it's now too late to do anything about this. The plane is too close to the mountain to take evasive action.
I'm lucky, I managed to jump ship in 2024 after 36.5 years and don't regret it one bit. I met so many good people at Xerox in that time and can remember when the staff were seen as the most highly prized asset the company had. To hear the CEO now suggesting the lack of success is down to those same employees and that they need to prioritise the company over their own well-being, clearly shows he has no idea of what it meant to be a Xeroid. The bulk of those he has insulted would have previously, (I've no doubt) worked unpaid hours to fix a customer machine or pulled out all stops to make sure equipment is delivered and installed before month/quarter/year-end. They would have been to ones working at weekends, putting their customer and the company before their families. So how have the suddenly become a lot of work-shy slackers? The answer, Steve B, is that they haven't, they have not been lead by a competent SLT for years. To all my ex-colleagues I say, I hope you have as good a Christmas as you can and that 2026 is kind to you. To Steve B I say, you had the golden goose and you and your fellow clowns have fu---d it up. I hope you have trouble sleeping at night.

I ’ve read your posts, and I see a lot of pain, anger, and smart people struggling to land. Yes, the market is tough, and yes, offshore/H1B is a factor, but let's talk about the biggest hurdle: Your Wells Fargo Leadership Narrative.

You were trained and rewarded in a toxic, high-fear environment. Now, you’re inadvertently carrying that "WF ethos" into your interviews, and recruiters are seeing it as a massive risk.

Here is the truth: Your next employer doesn't just need your technical skills; they need assurance you aren't bringing the "poison" of an abusive, command-and-control culture with you.

1. The Red Flags Recruiters See
   When you talk about why Agile failed, or how you led a team, we listen for these immediate flags:

"I monitored their tickets..." 🚩 (Translation: I micro-managed, I didn't trust my people.)

"We couldn't innovate because it was too risky..." 🚩 (Translation: I was risk-averse, I didn't create a safe learning environment.)

"Agile failed because management we-ponized the metrics..." 🚩 (While true, it signals: You don't know how to protect your team from bad leadership.)

"I had to stack rank them..." 🚩 (Translation: You were an enforcer of a toxic system.)

1. Your New Leadership Narrative: From Enforcer to Enabler
   You need to shift your identity from a manager who enforced toxic metrics to a Servant Leader who protected and enabled their team despite the toxicity. You must demonstrate that you were a student of the anti-patterns, not an advocate.

This shift is rooted in Psychological Safety (PS)—the belief that your team can speak up without fear of punishment. When PS is high, Agile works, Innovation works, teams work. When it's low (like at WF), everything fails.

Your Goal: Convince the interviewer that you know how to build a safe and empowered team that drives innovation and takes ownership.

1. The AI Chat Practice Prompt
   Use a tool like this (Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.) to practice your new answers. Paste the following prompt into your chat, and then answer the questions the AI poses. This forces you to recondition your answers and solidify your narrative:

[Copy and paste this into an AI Chat]

"I was a manager who was recently laid off from a large financial institution that suffered a failed Agile transformation due to a deeply toxic, high-fear culture. In my interviews, I am struggling to demonstrate that I have moved past that toxic environment. I need to establish a new leadership narrative based on Psychological Safety (PS) and Servant Leadership. Assume I am in an interview for a leadership role at a healthy organization.

Please ask me the following questions and critique my answers, looking for red flags that show I am still operating from a 'command-and-control' mindset:

How do you get others to trust in your leadership?

How did you approach performance reviews and development in that high-pressure environment?

How do you foster innovation and manage technical risk on your team?"

1. What the AI Will Teach You to Say
   When you practice, your answers should evolve to focus on systems, coaching, and protection, not control. For example:

Instead of: "I monitored their work."

Say: "I shifted my focus from monitoring tasks to coaching autonomy. I established clear, measurable team goals and ensured my team felt safe enough to immediately raise impediments, knowing I would remove them."

Use the AI to refine your story until you sound like a leader who learned from the fire and is now ready to build a healthy culture. Good luck—you are capable of this shift!

Because, after Andy departs....

Bandy the clown lectures us all about going faster in the last Town Hall. 5 months later we still don’t have a defined sales organization. It is not difficult to split a few accounts between team and then decide how manny sales peeps. Q1 2026 will just be another few months of uncertainty and disruption. Obviously going faster doesn’t apply to Bandy, JUG and whichever Lex monkey does the sales coverage.

Very often I kept warning of competition eating our cake - and leadership was deaf, or they laughed, or they were very arrogant.

Friday - Hatchet man said we cannot relay on network - “no kidding, Sherlock”

It tool the board to kick 13k+ folks to wake up?

🤬

Since we benchmark everything else, why don’t we benchmark our leaders as well? If we had, we likely wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in today.

Stank keeps talking about being a “market-based company,” but the market has already delivered its verdict, and it is absolutely brutal.

Just look at the scoreboard.

AT&T’s market cap today is around $180B.
Netflix, a company AT&T once thought it could compete with through the WarnerMedia empire, is sitting around $430B+. Netflix is worth more than double AT&T. That alone tells you everything about which company the market believes in.

And when you look at how we got here, it’s even worse.

AT&T bought Time Warner for roughly $85B, swallowed billions more in debt, tried to play Hollywood, mismanaged the integration, then spun it off in 2022 into Warner Bros Discovery wiping out over 50 of billion in value.
WBD stock fell as low as $7.50, and even now AT&T stock at roughly $25.46 is trading below WBD’s $25.80.
An $85B asset turned into a fraction of its worth, and now WBD is being shopped to Netflix for double compared to the sale and divestiture price.

Billions burned.

A strategic failure so large business schools literally teach it.
And the company has spent the last five years trying to claw its way back to where it was BEFORE all these “visionary decisions.”

So when Stankey and the leadership team brag about “market-based” strategy, it’s a joke the actual market doesn’t find funny. Wall Street sees right through it. Investors have no confidence. Employees have no confidence. The stock has gone nowhere during his tenure, and the company’s major bets have been disasters.

If AT&T truly wants to operate like a modern, market-led company, then start acting like one beginning with ending his latest “visionary decision” - the outdated RTO obsession that adds cost, crushes morale, pushes out top talent, and delivers zero measurable business benefit. Wait too long and you’ll never recover from that too.

Real market-based companies reduce overhead, increase flexibility, retain talent, and innovate.
AT&T is doing the opposite and the market has priced that in loud and clear.

Leadership can keep talking about culture, presence, and “the plan,” but the numbers don’t lie.
The strategy isn’t working.
And the market knows it.
And so do we.

BK?

Being one minute late to a meeting is “disrespectful,” apparently. But him slurping coffee into the mic like he’s doing a Folgers ASMR? That’s “leadership excellence,” I guess.

He swears email is a letter because, his words, not mine - he’s “old.” And he responds to every single one of those letters with pride… but Slack? Oh no. That’s where he draws the line. Technology has gone too far.

And when the layoffs, sorry, the “carnage” are finally done, he says those of us who remain will be… delighted. Yes, delighted. Because nothing screams delight like survivor’s guilt and three people doing the work of twelve.

If you missed the all-hands, don’t waste your time watching the replay.

He said ALL of this in 33 minutes… a meeting that absolutely could’ve been an email.

A truth from John Stankey.

https://www.businessinsider.com/att-ceo-john-stankey-career-advice-young-people-college-tech-2025-12

I am watching the Big XII championship game right now presented by Edward Jones. In a first quarter commercial break here pops up our beloved Penny Pennington with her dyed hair (when you see her in person she has plenty of gray). She talks about Edward Jones standing beside people helping them achieve their dreams and find their “rich”. She forgot to tell the football fans that she will help you achieve your dreams unless she can offshore your position for cheap Indian labor. If that is the case then you are on your own. Penny is such a blatant liar!

Wow! Now with CW now gone, Aapla will finally sunset to combine into three geos to simple fy the structure for EH!

SUBSEQUENTLY the roles will be elevated to president level.

Tp
President of America's

Cg
President of EMEA

And
President of APAC

MY BIG concern is what role will then Cs take on or are her days numbered? Allbirds needs some more failures!

Be honest.

Get ready folks, here comes another round... Pipeline is crawling, lots of folks on the bench... But wait, we spent a lot of money on SalesForce!! Just helps to show how bad it is, quicker and more efficiently. Can't fire people quick enough to save $$$. Let's fire more hard working Americans and move those roles offshore, stat! AAR please! Cause none of us have served in the military, but we did this really cool thing at West Point and like to believe that we really are tough, like rugged man tough and we got a T-shirt and love to add it to our linkedin profile, cause you know, it makes us look tough. Did I mention how rough and tough we are?

Solutions Integrator <---- Failed
VAR <---- Abandoned the back bone to chase a field of dreams
AI Super Star <---- Not really, but it sounds cool, like cool cool
Dud <---- Current state of affairs

All the execs are trying to get their buddies into the CEO role to save their behinds. Hey, I know let's hire more of the Lequin family to come and help out.. cause as you know, they crush quota! Hahahahah

If you invested funds in Insight five years ago, you only got a 17% return. Wow, those are some stats to brag about around the Christmas dinner table. Hey, we salvaged 1/3 rd of market cap to boot in only 2 years. Man, I can't wait to tell the kids. He-l, I think that I will be writing a book, doing a podcast, a vlog and well just telling the world how awesome we are. I just bought 20 more pieces of that awesome Fuchsia clothing to show just how much I love this place.

Make sure that you kiss a lot of behind to not get the boot on January 5th. Or just call yourself a CTO or CISO, since we have unlimited number of those around here and you'll be safe.

What happened to going back to basics? Our cars are filthy, skeleton staff to run locations, declining market share but hey lets explore autonomous vehicles and be known more for selling cars. Almost 2 years into Gilly Wi--y Westy’s tenure and the flywheel continues to turn in the wrong direction. I can’t believe this is what became of my Hertz!

I had worked for Ericsson and Hans was a wrecking ball. Layoffs all over. I moved to AT&T and that wasn’t better. So… I went to VZ. And what the he-l, they hired Hans. Then the cuts started. What I want to know is who is going to be held responsible for VZ loosing the top spot in wireless? So give 20 million for failure? For his departure! BS in my opinion!

Hearing him make jokes at the time when so many have lost their livelihood and the rest of us are still uncertain if we'll have a job in a month or two completely disillusioned me. That shows how much he truly "cares" for employees.

What a “B” rated speech by the new CEO. States so many issues with where Verizon is now as if he wasn’t part of the, DAN YOU WERE ON THE BOARD.

It is astonishing how far Chevron has fallen under MW. The culture is absolutely toxic. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing what ive done to so many people, but then again I still have a soul. LC is almost worse than MW as he not only doesn't care but is completely ignorant. This company is headed for disaster. What others are saying about taking an MW is the new word, sadly this company is not going to be Wirth an MW in the near future...

Unbelievable - JW has become a laughing stock .... tone deaf and unrelatable to 99% of IOL staff across the board. Did y'all see his interview emailed - felt like a replay of his announcement on 30th Sep (exact same words too) - must be practicing them every night in sleep too! What a joker - worst CEO ever awardee! No leadership skills. He looks weak and incapable of ushering IOL to rebuild from here.

Not a single person I know in company is willing to trust this JW joker. Forget the transformation - people mostly in all stages of career - near retirement/Mid-career/Early career - everyone is looking to bail out of this sinking ship over next 2 years. Purely based on the lack of trust of the CEO. I wish HR understands this soon enough.

Not that anyone is asking, but perhaps here is an advise - EM could fire this joker CEO because of all the ill will he has earned in such a short time & replace him with a more trustable person to take the company forward into transition - someone who is actually capable of doing the job and not just a bootlicker.

BILL ROGERS

*. DAN LIKES TO SIP COFFEE LOUDLY INTO HIS MIC

*. DON'T BE LATE TO DAN'S MEETING BY EVEN 1 MINUTE. BUT EXPECT HIM TO HAVE AWKWARD LONG PAUSES DURING HIS MEETING CAUSING HIM TO GO OVER BY THREE MINUTES.

*. AI AND ROBOTS WILL TAKE OUR JOBS.

*. DAN WANTS TO REVOLUTIONIZE VZ WITH AI. BUT HE DOESN'T DON SLACK AND HE PREFERS LETTERS.

*. EVERYTHING ABOUT HAN'S VERIZON WAS HORRIBLE INCLUDING PERFORMANCE, CULTURE, EMPLOYEES. THE BOARD MEMBERS WERE EXCELLENT HOWEVER.

*. AI IS

L3s and the rest of the C level just need to stop with the BS. Just say you are coming in the office, that's it, if you want to get a paycheck get your A$$ in the office. This fake caring how we feel or how we work is more annoying than anything. We already know Hadji is in the office for like 3 hours then he heads home. Who really wants to work with there team in neighbor hoods ugh.

ha can we point out the ghetto neighbor hoods?

Just say it, I'm tired of all the playacting BS C level is doing, grow a pair of ba--s and get your @$$ in the office as well.

We know you are in here watching these threads, much like you sit and watch your minimally staffed teams struggle and break under workloads. If you have a shred of humanity in you, we are PEOPLE, not machines. While labor laws are pretty sh-t in this country, they do exist. Also, your job will not last forever either and we hope the people you burn while you sit and watch people struggle helps to keep you warm when you attempt to get your next job.

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I'm telling you why...
Stankey Claus is coming to destroy your town!

He's making a list,
And cutting it twice,
Gonna find out,
Who's naughty or nice.
Stankey Claus is coming to destroy your town!

He sees you when you're in less than 8 hours,
He knows when you’re giving bad Employee surveys.
He knows if you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake- cause he just wants to control you.

Cause Stankey Claus, the worst CEO in America, is coming… TO TOWN….. to sc--w up your location with ridiculous demands.

Have a merry Xmas everyone! Except the Grinch that is.

Brian Roberts refuses to humble himself. He is turning Comcast into Blockbuster 2.0. He won’t go down with the ship though. He doesn’t have the moral or ethical framework.

That is why he might just go down as the most hated businessman in the country.

I would love to see an article on experiences external leaders had in the berm prior to their departure - what promises were made, how they were treated by leadership and their peers, experiences they had and careers after leaving the Swoosh. It will be a very telling reflection of the reality of Nike.