According to leadership, 2021 is a “growth year”, which is basically their scapegoat for the mess NBQ has become. Employees are burnt out, and most of them have been given outrageously unattainable goals far outside of industry/market norms, with no real resources to achieve these goals.
The most glaring issues :
-Lack of recognition, regardless of how hard you work and how well you perform. Feeling unappreciated is demotivating.
- The “rules of engagement” between retention-focused teams vs. new business make no sense. These rules essentially “pit” the two teams against each other fighting over deals, instead of promoting a “one team” mindset. It was also extremely confusing for the customer.
- Unattainable quotas and goals. Attainment expectations at NBQ are well beyond metrics you’d see at companies who sell “need to have” products. Neither NetBase nor Quid are “need to have” tools, they are “nice to have”. For that reason alone, the attainment goal numbers are senseless. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone at NBQ who can logically explain how anyone came up with the numbers in the comp plans. Throw into the mix extremely limited and ineffective resources for success + understaffed, overloaded teams, and you have the perfect recipe for setting your people up to fail.
-Lack of growth opportunities, and growth opportunities based on favoritism/ internal politics. There are people who have been promoted into leadership roles, who are now managing people who have previously outperformed them, and who have significantly more career experience than them
-Speaking of leadership, the main reason I left NBQ was the way I was managed over the last 6 months. The odd combination of somehow being both micromanaged, yet completely unsupported at the same time was baffling. My time was never respected, and I would constantly be ambushed with “urgent” ad-hoc meetings about something that should have been an email, or basic questions about how to do our job. These meetings would consistently run overtime by 30 minutes or more, causing me to miss important customer meetings or be well past normal working hours. Any feedback from direct reports was either dismissed entirely, or stolen and framed as “their idea” to look good in leadership meetings. They would insist on being involved in a deal, only to micromanage to the point of missing the expiration deadline, causing us to miss quarterly goals, or lose the deal entirely. The most frustrating part for me, was the hypocrisy. Part of my job was to obtain solid product knowledge of both NetBase and Quid. It felt very hypocritical when my manager had absolutely no product knowledge of either platform, and overall just no clue how to use technology (example: did not know how to do simple things like share their screen, use salesforce, or lookup customer usage stats). It was truly infuriating to watch them get by, by repeatedly asking their direct reports to answer all technical questions for them, instead of learning it themselves. I’m sad to say I learned absolutely nothing during my last 6 months at NBQ, besides how to NOT treat employees.
