#management

Just saw that TEBG quality cut 4 of its managers/directors. I assume the plan is for that VP to bring in his own croonies to do the role. Meanwhile the rest of us are all waiting for someone to be announced to be able to get resources assigned and projects approved. What a joke.

For a company full of people climbing over themselves to push AI ideas - I have a challenge for you. Ask AI what the actual impact of forced low ratings in a major company. Not to steal the thunder here but - it’s a total failure - across the board!

It brings -

Terrible supervisor behavior
Crushes morale
Encourages disposable practices
Invites lawsuits
Extreme cost from turnover
Moreover - these impacts are worse at a company like P66 because of the annual cycles of cuts, the layoffs, outsourcing, and automation.

What’s so bad about it? Consider this situation:

You are in a group of 60 people, no supervisor has more than 6 people, some have only 3. Because of the continuous cutting of the “worst” since 2012 and the outsourcing or automation of many entry level jobs - your group is comprised of seasoned professionals. You supervise 4 people, all improve their work processes, find opportunities and add value. Through the year you stretch your people and have challenging targets. Almost all are hit. And - this is a big one - you have no reason for substantive performance conversations through the year.

At year end, as you “calibrate” you are asked for your bottom performer. You choose the person who missed 1 of his stretch goals - knowing that this person had a great year, they just happened to be at the bottom of your group. You know they don’t deserve a “3”.

Through calibration, your group of 60 must have three people to hang “3”’s on. Last year, you had 2 people in the larger group who were very deserving of “3l ratings and one more that made sense - they all left the company. Now, as calibration moves on, you realize that your employee is in the running for bottom 5 of the group.

Let’s pause here - because this whole process is built on the idea that each supervisor is as good, as active, as honest as the next. Surely each supervisor is as diligent in giving stretch goals to their employees - right? Surely none of them have employees who do the minimum but don’t mess up - thereby flying under the radar?

Back to calibration. At the end of the session, all of your peers and your people leader agree that your person is the third “3”. Now, after a successful year, you get to tell them they underperformed and are going to have negative impacts to their compensation as well as be put on a performance improvement plan.

This, in various forms, is what forced ratings look like. In every instance you must assume that people who did not earn a 3 will get them. And when that message is given - what will the supervisor say?

An honest comment would be “I believe you did a great job, however, in calibration the group determined you to be in the bottom 5%.” And what would you tell him to work on, exactly?

HR will say you need to “own the rating” and you cannot say they don’t deserve it - but pull all that apart for a moment. Your true feelings, the ones you expressed at calibration, is that this employee does not deserve a 3.

This process cannot exist at a company that claims to care about employees.

Impact

The forced 3 should motivate this employee to look for a job. There is a high probability the supervisor may also be more open to leaving - having seen the true character of our policy. If they leave, how do you know we get someone better, and, when? Many studies show that turnover costs as much as 1 year compensation! Seems pretty short sighted.

Add to this that we don’t have good pipelines for development unless you are hiring from CapGemni!

Legal risk

Why is there legal risk? Because we are rating people low not because of their actions. In many cases, there will have been no negative feedback in the year from the supervisor. When this occurs, especially against a protected class - bad things happen. Use AI to see how many companies have been sued for this practice and how many have stopped because of litigation threat - it’s a lot.

This is a terrible idea - a horrible idea - and it impacts all but the highest level employees.

My hope is that a rigid core of supervisors will ask themselves honestly if each person who is hung with a 3 deserves it. If they do, they should have been given ample notice through meaningful conversations which are documented. If, however, you are a supervisor who is tasked with hanging a 3 on an employee you know does not deserve it - my hope is you say NO, and you inform management you would rather have it assigned to yourself as neither of you have earned it

Seeing sudden manager calibrations and stack-ranking across ESG. Word is that notifications are hitting the first Wednesday of October to kick off Q4. Anyone else seeing this behavior or heard anything concrete from leadership?

What do you make of the latest exec management changes ?
Growing more pessimistic here

Running like headless chickens.

Any impact? I left last year and I heard about the cut today. Good luck to all of you. I hope it was not big but judging on number of views it does not look good. I went to Wells Fargo and it's the same sh-t over there, layoffs come in waves and they are trying to outsource as much as they can. Cannot trust management, they tell u one thign and then turn on a dime tomorrow. It's even worse because of all limitations that were imposed on the bank a few years back due to the scandal. Anyhow, good luck all

I was reading an article today that said the Refinery was still down. How hard is it to get it running again after a power outage? (Been there done that multiple times)

Is the local management just clueless as to how it works?

Has KL been advised? Hopefully they are all using PSMS onsite to prevent those LAI’s.

• Exxon Mobil said in a regulatory filing that floodwater overwhelmed a pump at its ~275,000-barrel-per-day Joliet, Illinois refinery.
• A containment bo-m was deployed as part of the cleanup.
• The refinery had already been taken offline on Sunday (September 13/14) after a power outage (on ComEd’s lines feeding the plant) that triggered the safety flare system. Power was later restored, but the facility remained offline.
• As of Thursday (Sept. 17), the refinery was still offline (per Wood Mackenzie). Industry monitors had expected a return to normal by the end of the week. It also flared again on Wednesday.
• Exxon declined to say whether the pump/floodwater issue was linked to the earlier power outage.

Imagine the mess coming.

IT&V is going to take much of Audit’s work. IT&V hired a large group of Big 4 leaders that do not know internal audit, do not know how to identify an issue, or how to navigate the bank. They effectively QA control documentation pretending to evaluate the control enviornment. IT&V is not built to find issues and is not finding issues. Risk is a bigger mess than it was 5 years ago with over reliance on RCSA.

We will back in a huge mess in less than 3 years. In the meantime, we shrink. We make questionable decisions.

These things take time. Grab the popcorn.

Recently several exec's have explained the importance of being well rounded in many aspects of the company. To do so they mentioned how they would make as many lateral moves in order to learn holistically. Do these same leaders support us if we have the same desire. Will management support us if we have the same desire? How to be well rounded the execs?

The AD was shaking, voice weard, eyes blinking when talking about the Pulse, going to crash under the loads.

With AI, who needs management, particularly SeniorManagement.
Ownership means nothing to AI

They are very cautious about who will be around them and when you by any chance happened to be in a such "Team" ( They always like to portray themself as a "FAMILY" ) you expect to be on a street in around 4-5 years, because they do not like you from the very beginning, like an adopted child, and will try to get rid of you as soon as possible. They use very many sophisticated techniques to justify their useless to IBM existence, hiring people for a short period of time ( 4 - 5 years ) to create a shield to protect their own existence. When a company wide layoffs get announced that shield ( first line of defense ) goes to the street and those bad people stay at IBM and continue doing nothing. Managers in such teams are very incompetent and stupidly execute commands from upper management. Here is a suggestion: to sweep any corner in IBM Silicon Valley LAB to get rid of all toxic managers, remember Intel did it 20 years ago and the company now is much of a better shape and health.

Just heard we got a new director and she is from there. Why is all senior management affiliated with this school?

Not OP of orginal post but that post maybe me realize:

IMAPS Corporation Award to IBM?

How? That department was completely destroyed and disbanded by the leadership of their last management chain. Their buffoonery bungled, fumbled, and mismanaged, driving the department straight into the ground by people who clearly had no idea what they were doing. In fact the only thing those guys were good at was destroying and ending other projects and programs. How can IBM win this when it literally no longer exists internally at IBM. How exactly does a team that's been wiped off the org chart win an award for work it can no longer even claim credit for?

We’re basically being told on the downlow by our managers that “they” can see how often we’re using CoPilot (AI). They forced it into our performance goals. So if we don’t use AI enough (no, “enough” has not been clearly defined of course), we won’t meet our performance objectives for the year.

Our screensavers are about AI.

Personally I would like to see them address how this objective isn’t causing yet another drain on our natural resources, but of course that’ll never happen.

Be careful about constantly taking on responsibilities that aren't part of your job. Once everyone gets used to you doing them, they will stop seeing them as extra and you'll be sc--wed. I'm talking from experience.

is it normal behavior for a director level POS to run around telling people they are jealous of a higher ranking person who has an office?

Got called on it and told to do 8 hours

So the people that said you can just do 6 hours or 7 hours. That was all BS

Is now laid off. Directs were stripped a few weeks ago. Did not see it coming. At all.

Workday is messed up org is all over the place

Just saw on LinkedIn that people are getting promoted to Associate Director without having a single person report to them.
I know this person, and let’s just say “brilliant” wouldn’t be the first word that comes to mind. He has been moving teams and now in marketing.

Associate Director is a title that should have been abolished by now. But apparently, we’re calling this a “transformation.”

Shoutout to whoever thought about having a company wide broadcast about leaning into Agentic AI that can do a lot of the workload. Even more so for doing it just days after announcing major cost cutting moves. This company really doesn’t have any sense of its employees sentiment right now.

New external hire CL level 29 here, haven’t got my first assessment yet will be for next year - How important is the PDS? Some say it’s more the story than PDS that your manager knows and wants to promote about you that matters. Others say it will stay with you for years so be careful what you put in there. Possible the reality is somewhere in between but wonder what y’all think. Also, does your manager or skip manager advise you how to write this, or are you pretty much on your own?

Although many layoffs occurred, there are still a lot of b-ms around. 1. The guy walking in circles and around the office all day (VP) making over 200k probably close to 300k along with the rest of his crisis management people. What do they do? I think we need to also look into lower salary people that don’t do anything as well. Or if we aren’t going to get rid of the non- workers, atleast increase compensation for those that are completely swamped with work.. important valuable work.

There are many examples of mis-management. Let’s list them out.

You can keep threatening people, but eventually the threats lose their effect. Once employees stop believing they have anything left to lose, motivation goes with it. My entire team is now completely checked out. Find better managers, Solventum, or you'll lose all of us.

So what is the over and under on how long it takes Brinks to clean house on the VP level and up at Atleos? Is it worth starting a pool?

Some of the choices coming from management are genuinely hard to understand. I've worked in this industry for years and I've never felt this disconnected from the people making the decisions.

You'd rather lay people off instead of putting them in the much needed CS Phone position. You'd rather pull other teams to work phones while their primary work gets behind. You'd rather pay out time and a half for overtime (more money out) instead of hiring a phone team. You'd rather keep GR and LG as supervisors who run people away and doesn't know the first thing about integrity or professionalism, or is that it? Is it easier to make things so unbearable that employees quit instead of looking like the bad guy and laying off. Interesting!

So we have Smiles Week and looks like lots of effort going in to make this a good event, but wait who is actually doing work? The same folks that always are busy and those who have spare time ie no work are organizing. They are not admin staff they are university graduates being paid to make PepsiCo better. Come on Snr Leads open your eyes and get some work for these that have no work or get them out. You now want us these people in the office more so please monitor their output.

Does this make sense. In this specific order... I think they are following this logic when deciding who to cut. Feel free to add or correct me.

• HR issues, complaints, conflcts, or employees seen as "problems"
• Low perormersperformance
• employees hated by their manager
• Duplicate / redundant positions
• Teams or functions being consolidated / merged
• Mgmt layers (cut during reorgs)
• Managers with low direct-report counts (always a target)
• Employees on sh-t/canceled/deprioritized projects
• Role not aligned to corp strategy
• Remote folks
• High-cost areas / highly comped peeps
• Older / highly compensated employees
• Recent hires (especially if their teams overhired)
• Employees w/no skills aligned with newer priority (hey AI)
• %-based cuts applied across orgs or mgmt hierarchies
• Some get selected because canning them through a RIF is easier than managing a performance exit
• Remaining selections needed to meet the final number needed

We can’t staff the projects that management wants to go fast yet there is pressure to reduce headcount in Houston! The Horizon challenge will only get worse. Even the teams that are staffed are full of people who don’t know how to get things done.

If you ask two managers the same question, you will never get the same answer. Never. Not only that, the answers are usually completely opposite. So basically, if you need guidance, just ask one and pray that person knows what they're doing, because trying to reach a consensus will only leave you more confused.

You can have a strong record here and still find yourself on the wrong side of management. It seems far more important to stay in someone's good graces than to actually do good work.

There have been so many examples of Nike losing the exact thing that made us good. It always seems to start with decisions that look harmless on their own, then suddenly you're wondering what happened. We have plenty of experience and resources, so watching this happen over and over is pretty frustrating. You'd think we'd eventually learn from it.

Hahaha! Left nike a couple years ago - nike was easily the worst managed company ever. Best decision ever.. sold my stocks at 75, my cool aid friends are still holding they have 50-150k worth stock.. they have sneaker collection rooms filled with Nike Junks.. I’m happy nike is suffering. NKE will soon hit 20s. EH is a clown’

Stocks will go down

The tremendous weight of very high paid upper management added to the company in the last year has added so much to expense that the only alternative is to cut a few thousand people who actually do the work. You can count the new SVPs and higher. Mike, Dhyvia, and Takis all a part of adding to the glut. Unfortunate but continuously repeated leadership mistake in some companies. Starts with a justifying rally cry for transformation. Leadership uses it to hire all new and unnecessary, high paid execs. Those execs become significant expense, but have added nothing in the way of revenue improvement or efficiency gains. As usual the middle management and working ranks of the company carry the majority of the execution burden in the company through all of this. The only answer is to cut deep in those ranks along with a few senior execs to get on better labor expense footing. People become demoralized, and the main result is a less productive company that still has all the new top level management to carry. In a normal company, some level of layoff or cut should be expected and predictable yearly based on performance management effectiveness and as a result of business performance cycles. This isn't that. This is mismanagement and shows that we are still paying for past and current poor decisions by people at the helm here. They just don’t think we are smart enough to actually figure that out.

Research estimates vary, suggesting 8–12% of CEOs may be highly narcissistic, while many others display milder traits along a spectrum.

Below is a URL to a recent article that goes into detail as research done on CEOs who exhibit narcissistic traits.

Article Published 9/7/2026:

https://thebalance.clinic/resources/mental-health/narcissism/ceos-and-narcissism/

how many people’s bosses does this describe? how many of these bosses are perceived as likable despite being rotten to the core?