The insidious, toxic, political environment that exists below the surface has been so disappointing. It’s hard to see until it’s too late. If you speak up and have strong convictions for the sake of doing good work and pushing for collective success, you become blood in the water and the sharks come for you. You become the scapegoat for dysfunction at a much higher level. Top down toxicity. The quality of People managers vary, with some who are only thinking about keeping their job and not about the success of their direct reports, which is…literally their job. Not to take credit for their directs work, but to support them, unblock them, and help them succeed. Instead it’s a “sink or swim” mentality and any support is seen as a burden.
The stacked ranking is the core of this toxicity. Favoritism, dysfunction, selfishness, and low morale are the symptoms.
In my LOB, it was the most dysfunctional product team I’ve ever worked with. They couldn’t even agree on how to write a PRD, and often they wouldn’t even write them until we begged for it, or wrote it ourselves so we could DO THE WORK.
Those that you work with and think are on your side will throw you under the bus to look better at performance reviews. Feedback is not shared early enough to improve on, and often if you are newer and not set up for success, those with more tenure (who have succeeded at favoritism with senior leaders) and those who have projects that have bigger impact and structure will always be kept. Hire to fire culture. What’s a waste of money, morale at an all time low, and I could count on one hand the days I actually felt good or confident about my place at this company from DAY ONE.
I have seen many people who do a great job speak up about any issues and how they can be improved and get pushed out.
Senior leaders cannot align on a clear vision, expect everyone else to create it, and then get frustrated when no one can align (because each person is fighting for their own success which relies on others’ failures in this environment). We literally had a quarterly off site where 90% of our planned sessions were cancelled so senior leadership could sit in a room for 3 days and align on things they should have aligned on 8 months ago, while we twiddled our fingers. And they were angry at everyone else for not being able to align.
Giving jazz hands and shouting “we are a team we are great” means nothing at this point, as words do not align with actions here. Extremely inauthentic, two-faced culture, which results in betrayal, and broken hearts of those who have the biggest hearts.
