Based on my experience, about 1 in 4 managers are actually decent and this ratio has been declining over the years. The rest are manipulative, shady, politicking knuckleheads who have no clue about the teams they are supposedly "leading". This cluelessness coupled with self-serving empire building only leads to poor and ineffective decision making. We're buried under a huge mountains of burueacratic waste and grief as a result. If WF wants to trim some fat, they should look at their managers first.
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Flatten the org!
Principle Engeers are a joke in my area. They are glorified SMEs that can't code a Hello app. Very demoralizing for the real engineers.
No, no admin / back-office types should be in the office, regardless.
If you manage a function/process that you have never performed and you haven't spent considerable time job shadowing the front-line staff to understand the nature of the work, the systems they work in, and the written SOPs/job aids they follow.........you are probably more of a burden to them than a help. This place is littered with managers who have no idea whatsoever what is going on beneath them and cannot be counted on to help their staff overcome any challenges/obstacles as they are so incompetent about what they oversee. It wasn't always this way. In times past, before you could hire anyone around the globe to oversee anything, we used to have departments in certain locations and leaders/managers that worked their way up in those departments in those locations and were experts in the department/process. Now, this company just plugs in any warm body to manage anything anywhere in the world without any regard for whether they know what the heck they're even doing. So many teams are basically directionless in this company and 'fending for themselves', except when the manager needs a deck or some answer for their superior......then they're sure to come knocking and burden you with their incompetency. I can't recall the last time I got sound direction from my leadership that I felt was wise/value-add.
Managers in COO are known for throwing their employees under the bus.
In marketing there are entire layers of people who literally do nothing but go to meetings. I almost wrote that they do performance reviews, but they don’t. We do them ourselves. They don’t even read them. I know this because I have submitted the exact same one for 5-6 years. Nobody has noticed.
Start with all the remote and non-hub managers, directors, and executives. If we have to go into an office so should everyone single one of them.
"they should look at their managers first."
They won't. Here are the reasons:
Rating Managers: First, how are they going to rate the managers? You claim that 1 in 4 managers are decent, but you can bet the other three would argue you have no right to make such a judgment.
Psychological Abuse: I agree that the management is "manipulative, shady, politicking knuckleheads". They've honed and become addicted to the art of psychological abuse, a tool they learned during the "account scandal" which they've now redirected at their employees to build their "self-serving empire".
Agile Adaptation: They've also used this abusive tactic to transform the agile adaptation into a micro-management obsession.
This bank epitomizes a fearful organization. The current management will continue to obstruct any beneficial change to its structure. If you are a manager reading this, I highly suggest you educate yourself about workplace abuse and learn how to foster psychological safety.
I agree. I'm a manager and can't wait for my time to get laid off.
There have been horrible managers in the bank for years!!
(It felt good to hear when some got displaced....!!)
All the a and b string managers that had skills and knowledge are gone with the clueless Indians now running the show. God help us that are left in the sh-tshow bank.
We can sh*t can a bunch of principal engineers too.
You must be in Risk
I've been with WF a long time. In the past there were many highly intelligent managers who understood what their people do and why they do it. They themselves had been with the company long enough to understand things. Almost all of these managers are gone. They have been replaced by managers, mostly foreign born, who only took the job for step up in position, a step up their previous companies would never have given them. The only thing that WF seems to care about is business jargon and lack of empathy.