If half of all upper management was removed, would anyone notice? Would work actually improve?
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Cost of business plus is most of contracts in Greenville. Its free money eh? But corporate, when you get FAT in mgmt, you are no longer competitive. Additionally, They are using Boeings failed business model. Do not let the engineers hold the top positions in the company, let the financial warlocks hold those positions. This did not work out for Boeing. We have a ways to go before we are in the toilet like them, and our CEOs have to answer to capital hill because innocent people died at the poor decisions made by the power in the company to save money and cut corners. Just wait and see.
Some directors have only two reports. Their reports have zero!
I think the statement could apply to all management. Anyone in a manager position gets to call a coin flip and stay or go. The company would function fine.
My dept. Has four managers and fifteen engineers/techs. 5 years ago we had one manager and eighteen engineers/techs. The only thing that changed was ugh.....nothing!
With each merger or acquisition, the company got more and more top heavy. And when it's time to "return value to the stakeholders", they cut jobs from the rank and file, and they cut benefits. Upper management still gets their bonuses and stock options.
After the last round of layoffs happened, people who were not laid off in Clifton continued to leave on their own. Now they are short handed. They are advertising for help. They are even audacious enough to reach out to those of us who have moved on to come back. They've got to be kidding. I have a better idea: If you're a glutton for punishment, have a trusted friend kick you in the ba--s.
The problem is I don’t even know what level of management you’re talking about. You have the people managers who basically handle day-to-day personnel issues but otherwise perform technical work. You have the program managers who do cost/schedule and make decisions. You have the functional managers who oversee the different engineering disciplines. You have the project managers who do something else that I’m not even sure how it’s different from the program managers. You have the corporate managers who oversee everyone.
There’s so much “make work” bureaucracy that it takes 6 levels of management to do “the work”. IMO, the “make work” imposed on the departments from corporate is the root of the problem, the multiple layers of people to deal with it at the working level is the symptom.
During the pandemic I was a technician at clifton. I was part of the essential workforce and had to come to work every day. This was before the vaccines
Virtually every management person above the level of supervisor was staying home. Everyone else was working remotely. But, most of the supervision including my own elected to stay home. I and a small group of technicians assumed the roles of the people who are absent. I took the role of onboarding new hires as they were walked in by our manager who also elected to work on site. We got the work done. We did the inspections, we did the assemblies, we did the testings, and we did the shipping. We stayed ahead of schedule and remarkably under budget during that time. Things did not start to bog down with red tape until after management people started coming back to work. This went on for several months. I saw this theory work in real time. I'm retired now, and I am still proud of the work we did during that time. It was a true test of character, and I am privileged to have a witnessed it.
go look up holocracy, it works but you need strong people. The people management at L3 basically just approves timecards, they have no authority to really do anything. They are just actors playing a role. The farther removed you are from hard skills the less the actual contribution and understanding of the roles their people perform, IT is a good example, full of weak management that never really did the work they supervise. That is why they buy all those garbage tools they are sold and push them on us. You end up with a box of hammers.
These sound like they're rhetorical questions to you.
But the first thing I noticed when I got hired was how many layers the onion does have. L3Harris has a large numbers of programs and maybe this is typical for a big defense contractor. It's certainly not what I'm used to.
I'm not sure I guess is my answer for both questions.