This company lacks strategic vision that trickles down into day to day work. Leadership espouses values, but then fails to back them up with action.
Everyone is too nice to a fault, with no one willing to push back, fight and defend their team members, or say no when things aren't a priority and there's already too much work.
The company is filled with life-long employees who have never worked anywhere else, and think Edward Jones is some magical, wonderful place of work that's different and special compared to other employers. It's almost cult-like and brain-washing. Because of this, they refused to listen to seasoned employees who have worked at other large corporations and seen other, more effective and efficient ways of working. They're very much stuck in their old ways. And despite claiming they want to change, they take a very narrow approach to this - attempting to change one small cultural element and expecting significant changes - completely obtuse to the fact that there are many cultural and process improvements that comprise a system that all need to be considered and change to successfully create large-scale impact and success. They always think that some singular solution will be the mythical magic bullet that solves all problems. They keep chasing from one solution idea to another, and trying variations of the same thing over and over and hoping for different results - the definition of insanity. They are entirely incompetent.
Further, leaders lead areas over which they have no understanding, background, experience, or expertise which leads to a lack of effective strategy and poor, uninformed decision making. This also means they are unable to actually assist their team members and help them grow, or provide them with feedback. It also means they completely ill-equipped to assess their team members during trimester and annual reviews. Instead they rely on the feedback from other external partner teams who also aren't experts in each given field of the employee.
Additionally there is little opportunity for career advancement within a domain. Though, they often promote cross-domain movement that is more lateral in nature. Where there should be principal roles, for example, there's not.
Further, they've hired a lot of people who have no business being in the roles they are - their hiring process is completely inadequate.
And this is all before the recent layoffs and reorganization, which has been an unprecedented disaster. There was no rhyme or reason to their reorganization decisions. They did not stick like functionalities together like they claimed they were. They said it was to address speed of delivery, but it's hard to see how this actually will without, as this "solution" does not solve the inherent root causes of slow work - mainly red tape, lack of role clarity and decision rights, and decisions by committee, and not bringing the right people to the right conversations. Further, they made decisions about who to keep and who to let go, and who to place where seemingly based on no cohesive strategy. We've been reorganized for 2 months now, and been told that they weren't sure what our team is supposed to do. How could they possibly know this team was needed, that it was the right group of people with the right knowledge and talent, if they didn't even know what the team would do. Their decision making is illogical, backwards, not strategic, irresponsible, and incompetent. They put the cart before the horse on this one. It's so bad even that now, 2 months later, the majority of my team is now moving to other teams, and a whole slew of new people are joining our team. Seriously, I've been through layoffs at much larger, international companies that went 100x smoother than this. Though they claim this is their first time, it was so far off the mark that any grace given is simply not sufficient to make up for the absolutely terrible way in which they executed this "Enterprise Reimagined".
