When I joined this company, I was very hopeful and probably naive. I really, truly wanted to make a difference and was lured in by the chance to contribute to a growing company that was experiencing some pains. Unfortunately, I spent two years banging my head against the wall as things just continued to deteriorate. It’s almost hard to start where things are wrong, so seems impossible that all the broken parts can somehow be assemble into a functional company. Procurement is in complete shambles. There are no policies. No controls. No processes. Poor vendor relationships. No reports. Jumbled information. Not enough people to manage anything or do things right. It is hard to imagine how a company this size doesn’t have the basic things in place that you would expect from a company 100x smaller. You cannot have good relationships when you are so disorganized you don’t pay suppliers since you can’t monitor, receive and process invoices. There are good people here who have talent. Unfortunately, many just keep walking out the door because of all the frustrations and poor leadership. That often results in people handling more than one job which just exacerbates an already bad situation. At the end of the day it is just plain bad leadership. There is talent willing to jump in, fix things and drive growth, but the ever-changing C-level suites just seem to be at a loss or often times make things a lot worse. I’m not sure I have enough fingers and toes to count how many CFOs, CIOs, HR heads, etc. we’ve had in the past several years. It is a structural problem and not going away. The ELT it just too far removed, uncommunicative, aloof and disinterested in collaborating with team members. So I concluded that no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t matter. Without a major shakeup in the ELT, removal of the CEO, and some uncommon visionary taking reigns, the only direction was down. And that is too bad. Because I really, truly wanted to make a difference.
