Great peers, lousy leadership, failed business strategy
Pros
- Some of the peers I worked with were really sharp and experts in their area - Projects often were on latest tech in the web development area - great avenue to learn and develop yourself - I had great work life balance while working at ICF.
Cons
Before I get into the cons, This is exclusively focused on the digital business within ICF. - The digital business came to life as ICF began to diversify and derisk itself from the heavy government dependent revenue stream they were straddled with. How they went about it was by acquiring some smaller agencies and tech firms across the world. Each of the companies had their own cultures, leaders, customers. It is very easy to acquire, but far harder to integrate all these into one cohesive company. ICF has learnt it the hard way. There were customers that different businesses were working with but each other had no idea of that! Management had different guidelines every year and they tried to change things massively to get to the targets destabilizing everything, every year! - ICF wanted to make money from this, really quickly. They didn't realize that there are significant investments of time, money, training, resources etc. needed. Just throwing in targets and restructuring every year, including annual layoffs was not going to help. Niche skilled employees were laid off, only for projects in those skills to come up within a month. Headless chickens would aptly describe the leadership, the hiring and the retention practices. Retention was a big challenge, the revolving door kept destabilizing the company. Every week you would learn that someone left. - Beyond strategic and operational issues, there were issues with some people - especially as it pertains to working with women and taking orders from them. Women of color weren't happy there. The diversity and inclusion aspects were a bit poor at this company.
