Most heads of departments have been friends with management for years, so there’s a set way of thinking and doing things. If they don’t agree with a new idea/approach, they’ll cast you out quickly. They’re only impressed if you’re working weekends or sending emails at midnight. They literally praise people for emailing each other at midnight and emails were flying back and forth to put a a whole campaign together from scratch on Mother's Day.
HR has a formula for selling BHG: the “best places to work” culture awards, free health insurance, and a calculated speech about why BHG has a sound business model and you should feel totally safe leaving your current job during COVID to come work for them.
What they don’t tell you is there’s a lot of churn and they’re quick the fire people especially if you’re not in the elite club of having worked together for 10+ years and can read each other’s minds. Within 3 months, they’ve let 5-6 people go within my department all on different occasions (these are non sales roles so it’s not like you weren’t meeting a sales quota). Two people were for the official reason of COVID layoffs, but the rest were just because they didn’t think they served them anymore at any given time or they didn’t agree with differing approaches to projects/ideas. A couple of the people they let go were hired during COVID, so they didn’t even keep them 2-3 months. They’ll then use the salaries of the people the laid off to pay for the new people they just hired on the team.
Even though they toot innovation and they say they want to bring people in for fresh ideas, it’s more about reading their minds and learning their very particular way of doing things. If you try to suggest something they’re not sold on, they’ll give you a long winded reason of why they’re absolutely right and no other approach makes sense, and then they’ll eventually fire you.
As in all jobs, it probably depends on your direct manager, but I found my boss extremely stifling and controlling and even though she wants to “teach” you, it was all about learning her way because her way is the best most righteous way. Apparently, it takes 6 months to a year to learn her way of doing things because it's counter-intuitive to the industry standard and you have to unlearn everything you know is right. She thinks her team respects her when they all actually just roll their eyes at her and have lost all fight in them. So, they just do it her way even if they don't always agree.
