Sonar reviews

Since the current CEO took over, the company culture has deteriorated significantly. Leadership is driven by fear, favoritism, and outdated management tactics rather than trust, collaboration, or innovation. Unless you are part of the CEO’s inner circle, your voice and experience are largely ignored. There is little respect for employees, especially experienced professionals who bring fresh ideas or challenge the status quo. Innovation seems to be valued only in certain departments, while others are expected to simply comply and stay quiet. Micromanagement is extreme. Attendance and time tracking appear to be prioritized over actual business growth, employee engagement, or strategic leadership. Employees often feel watched rather than supported. Managers are routinely excluded from decisions and conversations they should rightfully be part of, only to learn about changes involving their own teams, projects, initiatives, or people after everyone else does. It is embarrassing, degrading, and blatantly disrespectful to those expected to lead without being informed. The current leadership team is one of the most condescending, incompetent, and disrespectful groups I have ever worked with. It is genuinely surprising that basic validation of leadership capability and competence seemed to be overlooked during the hiring process. Leadership turnover has been especially telling. Some of the most capable, experienced, and professional leaders (women), particularly those who advocated for fairness, stronger policies, employee rights, and challenged outdated thinking, were pushed out. They were replaced by individuals more willing to comply than lead. This has created an environment where independent thought is discouraged and loyalty is valued over competence. The CEO appears to want complete control, leaving little room for other leaders to make meaningful improvements or do what is right for employees. As a result, morale is low, motivation is lacking, and there is a clear absence of integrity, trust, and accountability across senior leadership. For prospective candidates: be very cautious. If you value a healthy culture, respect, autonomy, collaboration, and the ability to make an impact, this is not be the right place. I could write a novel of examples, but Glassdoor’s character limit won’t allow it.

Before you think about interviewing at Sonar, read the book "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and how to fix it)" by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Better yet, watch the TED talk on YouTube under the same name. The executive team takes absolutely no ownership. The CEO has demonstrated his ineffectiveness as a leader by the steady hiring of sycophants to insulate him from any accountability. Every single replacement hire for ELT has been less equipped to support the organization than the person they replaced. Those who were replaced were often trying to support the business, culture, and the employees, only to find themselves ousted with little ceremony. Sonar's leadership team is ineffective. Regardless of any financial strength or product positioning, their overall lack of emotional intelligence is putting the company at significant risk, as well as the livelihoods of the employees who are trying to work under increasingly constrained and demanding conditions. I have personally witnessed public shaming and blaming of individual contributors for the failures of leadership to "meet our objectives." Blaming single people? Really? What is even more dangerous is the levels of insulation that ELT are creating. Many of them have direct subordinates who are empowered to dictate the livelihoods of individual contributors based on their own poor understanding of what these people do on a daily basis. This is how toxicity festers. When I joined Sonar, there was a culture. People loved working here. The culture was not perfect, but it was intentional in its design. It has been replaced by a personality-driven culture that - in many levels of leadership - smacks of narcissistic personality disorder. Promotions are nonexistent. Growth is no longer possible here. When experienced people leave, the organization tries to backfill them with less qualified individuals who are undermarket, and then held to the output expectations of those experienced predecessors. In many groups, the expectation is to work at all hours of the day, even on holidays and weekends. In the countries where they have employment laws, the leadership is implicitly pushing certain employees not to full report their time worked - and then trying to single out and remove individuals who are working their 40 hours because they are not giving more of their time for free.