Constant criticism, impossible expectations, managers who seem to enjoy making people feel small, and the list goes on. It isn't just unpleasant, it's psychologically damaging. I'm now questioning my own competence, my value, and my sanity. This place is something else.
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Whoaaaa there now, @e0! Waaaait!!
::insert awkward chuckle::
Seriously, tho. Your post articulates & illustrates a very familiar path that I am sad to say I know quite well. It also kinda provides some context & insight I have never been privy to, especially since both the truths & lies that are perpetually circling around the proverbial water-cooler never seem to reach my cup.
Sincerely appreciate you for giving words, clarity, and freeeedom to sooo many repressed thoughts and suppressed feelings. I Always KNEW I wasn't the only one & that I wasn't "imagining" the same things that I should also, somehow, just get over" lol. I saw retaliation very early into the game, so I knew that was out, and I never even bothered to try seeking an "inside" source I could trust to break it all down for me without them running back to the cooler with an update. So, for all these years I've been on my own trying to piece together wtf I've been going through since the first time I walked thru these doors...and WHY!
But ::rereads your post:: how sure are we that EYE didn't write that, because...? Wow.
Thanks again!
I thought I was the only one who felt that way. When I first started at Nike, there’s an industry way of things and there’s a Nike way of doing things. If it’s not done in the Nike way, you create a firestorm for yourself, and there’s no one to train you. However, I feel if you leave and go someone else, you’re both a stronger candidate and employee.
It was the hardest thing to leave and the best decision ever made. when Employee Relations is seeking you out so that you can help investigate and get rid of toxic managers above you... while still doing your job for said manager.... that says a lot.
What is incredibly disheartening is getting in trouble for simply telling the truth, for caring that things work, that Customers are served, and product moves through the logistics process and gets to point of sale. Are days when I know the smart & healthy thing to do is to stop caring - but the ‘dog’ in me vehemently resists that because I feel like that is so against what I believe In that it’d ki-l me. There is only one option now, and that’s to move on. 80-90% of everyday is reacting to some else’s bad process, bad design, and lack of ownership. So many people don’t care all that’s going on is spinning things in circles and being busy doing so, but not actually getting anything done, fixed, enhanced, etc. Not wired like that, these wings were meant to sore, not cower in the corner and accept ineptitude
You aren’t alone my friend. Get out now. It’s toxic and around every corner is a leader full of ego and no desire to actually make their employees feel empowered and valued. Shout out to SB who is hands down the worst leader of all time. You know, the kind of leader that nobody can stand but everyone has to be nice to their face. Let’s go now before the ship sinks and then speak up.
Reading this took me straight back. I was somewhere like it for years, and I'm well out the other side now.
Nothing in it is reportable on its own. Nobody shouts. You get taken apart in a big meeting and it's called a fair challenge. A decision about your own team gets made and you hear it from someone else. You're left off the invite for something you'd normally be running. Any one of those, you'd feel stupid raising. It's the repetition that does the damage.
Here's the part I only understood afterwards. The business wasn't going well, and it wasn't mine to carry. That number was never on my name. But whenever the results came up, the conversation turned into an examination of me and my work, in front of everyone. It took me years to see what that was for. A room busy watching someone get picked apart is a room that isn't asking why the plan isn't working. I was useful as the thing to look at.
What it did to me was physical before it was anything else. Sleep went first. Then my health went, properly, and I was still logging on at midnight because stopping felt more dangerous than carrying on. I was good at that job for a long time before I got there. By the end I couldn't tell any more whether I was.
Two things I wish someone had told me earlier.
Delivering doesn't save you. I did some of the best work of my career during the worst of it, in front of the most senior people in the company, and it changed nothing about how I was treated the following week. Once the story about you has been decided, output just becomes more material for it.
And don't wait for the process to sort it out. I used the official channels. It didn't help me. HR is neutral the way a company can afford to be neutral. Assume that from the start, get advice from outside the building, and see a doctor earlier than you think you need to.
The self-doubt is manufactured. It's what being publicly second-guessed for long enough does to anyone. It fades. Slower than you'd like, but it fades, and how ordinary a normal workplace feels afterwards is hard to describe.
You're not imagining it, and you're not the problem.
In other organizations, at least criticizm is done in the spirit of coaching conversations! Here criticizm is in the mode of insecure So called leaders unable to handle anyone remotely competent who make them look bad. Talk about performative snowflakes
If you read The Phantom Tollbooth it describes WHQ perfectly lol
I feel you. I worked there for 7 years ... never before and never since have I felt so unsure of my own competence. I felt judged, minimized, bullied, dismissed. By the time I quit, my confidence in my abilities and expertise was at an all-time low. It took YEARS to overcome the damage that place did to my psyche. But I'll say this: Once you leave and start working with people who have lives outside of work, normal-sized egos and less of an eat-or-be-eaten mentality in the workplace, you realize just how effed up the culture really is at the Swoosh. To anyone considering leaving, I say: JUST DO IT. Life on the outside is better than you could imagine.