In Need of Leadership - Anonymous employee Rosetta Stone Employee Review

The pros above are really just the benefits, because the work environment can be rather negative. A quick list of the many hurdles you may encounter at Rosetta Stone: -Product and Business Strategy: This changes every few months, and is rarely a unified strategy for more than a year. It's been this way for quite a long time now. Management simply doesn't know what to pursue, and has taken many failed leaps at opportunities that didn't exist (such as trying to win big in a very particular country like Japan, trying to corner a crowded Kids market, or trying to make money in a mobile space that generates little revenue.) The company is now going hard at institutional and educational customers, which are a great source of revenue. They're also a very difficult customer to please, as getting renewals requires meeting new and growing customer expectations. So while lucrative, it might be tough to please everyone and really grow this customer base. -Leadership: This group has gone through so much churn in the past few years, from the removal of the original CEO Tom Adams to the revolving door of executives and Product, Marketing, and Sales leads that it's tough to blame any single person for the struggles the company has had. But if you mass them together in a general "leadership" category, they've not been the best. And that's being generous. They simply can't make their minds up about anything, and spend quite a bit of time arguing about what their direction should be. This may be similar at many companies, but the territorial behavior and infighting can be quite discouraging. Further, many of the people they've recently put into leadership roles are quite out of touch with those that actually do the work, and are reticent to take any criticism of our direction, processes, decisions or the like. Some get borderline defensive when you inquire about their decisions, or outright ignore your concerns about the company. Good leadership should acknowledge flaws and areas for improvement, not simply try to hide them in the hopes of keeping morale up. Morale would be higher if they actually listened and seemed to care. -Line management: Some line managers really do care about seeing you succeed, and I can say I've had a few like that. Others, however, have been put in a management position simply because of their seniority or expertise, but have been mediocre at best when it comes to helping people develop their skills and careers, or even providing day to day guidance about their work. Some have never managed people before in their careers, and probably shouldn't be, given their own self-interest in their own tasks and projects. -Colleagues: There have been a lot of really great and collaborative and caring people that have worked here during my time. But recently the company has seemingly brought in a more competitive crowd, where it's no longer about the success of the company as a whole, but of the success of one person's sale, or one person's new project. This seems to be enhanced by the fact that management itself is highly competitive, and frequently trying to undermine each others' roles and power, simply to maintain their own status. It's quite sad, as they do have a huge talent resource here that's crumbling due to bad hires, poor leadership, and a complete inability to foster team work. -Technology: During the recent layoffs we lost a good portion of IT, and it's already starting to show. For a technology company, they seem to be investing less and less in their infrastructure as sales is now the number one goal. -Culture: There really isn't one anymore. Most of your colleagues will be in different offices, and you'll likely never have met many of them face to face. HR attempts to create little events to bolster team spirit, but no one really cares to participate. Again, it's a real shame because their are some talented people here, but management has largely let culture fall by the wayside, or tried to dictate it from the top down (they occasionally send emails or little cards with what your "values" should be...) -HR: They're pretty unresponsive overall, and don't seem to really be here for the employees any longer, just for management.