NIKE reviews

One of the drawbacks to a company culture so rooted in the team mentality is that nothing gets done without a meeting. Any decision, no matter how mundane, cannot be acted upon without at least one meeting. When you make everyone a stakeholder, it becomes very difficult to move quickly or to simply get anything done without a lot of leg work. Most managers spend their day at the office in meetings and their evenings at home working on everything else. Not only does this slow things down, it can create roadblocks where stakeholders (or those who feel they should be stakeholders) hold decisions or projects hostage. This leads to the greatest "Con" about working at Nike. If you're no good at politics, then you won't go far in the company. Every stakeholder (and every person who thinks they are or wants to be) must be appeased to get anything done. If you move to quick, toes can be stepped on and you can find yourself on the outside-looking-in on your own project, as those with more company connections, better political skills, or more social savy push you out. This is the dark side of team-centric organizations. On a sports team there are hard numbers and clear ways of measuring impact, performance, and success. In the company cultural setting, these are more fuzzy and harder to define. Thusly, it comes down to perception. Be prepared to work more on company politics and your social reputation than on actual projects. Remember all those amazing benefits? Well, they come with a price. Nike pays significantly less than other companies of comparable size and wealth for the same jobs. It's not uncommon for HR or recruiting staff to inflate salary ranges by including all those great benefits in a quote or offer. The reason is simple. Nike believes that simply having the chance to work them should be reward enough. In some cases, I've seen as much as $10,000 difference in salaries. When this is combined with a work/life balance that is non-existent (because coworkers are expected to be friends in their personal life and all those meetings make for typically ten hour days), the convenience of all the great benefits offered in place loses much of its charm.

It seems it's #TimesUp and #MeToo at Nike this week, with the "retirement" of the brand president and firing of another VP. I don't know what went down, but the fact that the company is now going to open up an anonymous hotline for complaints and is promising some soul-searching about the culture there indicates to me that upper management is aware of a company-wide issue -- one that's pervasive, systemic, and stretches far beyond the C-Suite. Good. It's about time. Nike HQ is toxic for women. It has been for a long time. And not in the ways that are easily identifiable -- not everyone is getting Matt Lauer'ed or brushing off lewd comments at an office happy hour. It's far more insidious than that-- and it's not just the entitled, overpaid white men who are responsible. Here are some ways the environment is toxic for women: - Getting ignored, marginalized or talked over when trying to present in a meeting. (The standard-issue white male Senior Director will be checking his phone, trust me). Toxic. - Leaving early to pick up a sick baby at daycare, feeling the resentment of the rest of your team (particularly childless women) following you out the door. Toxic. - Being passed over for promotions as a woman, doomed to tread water in middle-manager-land forever, because you've been deemed either too aggressive or not committed enough because you leave early to pick up said sick baby (see above). Toxic. - Checking your email at 3 a.m. because you're up and dealing with a kid with an ear infection, only to discover a brusque, frustrated note from your boss sent at 11:53 pm asking why you haven't turned in a project yet. Toxic. - Standing around at an office function, watching the lads and bros (all Senior Directors) shmooze with the VP as you stand off with the other women (managers, "specialists") and wait your turn to try and make an impression on said VP (white, male, usually British) and hope he remembers your name. Toxic. Look - some of this probably sounds like standard corporate-America griping, and perhaps it is. But having worked for other Fortune 500 companies, I can tell you that the environment at Nike is unique. Politics, backstabbing, strict adherence to hierarchical, patriarchal norms, and frat-boy/lad culture all conspire to make it a fairly awful place for women, particularly moms. The only women I know who ever made it up the ranks (a double-edged sword, as the job will then consume your every waking moment) are the ones who acted like men to get there -- swaggering about, doling out sports-talk, ingratiating themselves with the right people while stepping on others to get up the ladder, and routinely placing work as the highest priority over family time and/or anything else. Of all the painful circumstances of working there, the woman-on-woman warfare was the worst. Women at Nike HQ are forced to squabble, scheme and bully each other to fight for position and influence at a company that gives out precious little of either. Toxic. I'll leave it at that. #TimesUp, Nike, and not a moment too soon.