Teaching Lab reviews

Be prepared for textbook examples of gaslighting. The culture of the Teaching Lab organization is extremely toxic. Gaslighting means you're being made to doubt your own feelings, thoughts, intuition, and judgment. In my multi-year long tenure at Teaching Lab, there is a palatable lack of trust between the executive team and the rest of the organization. While simultaneously lauding employees for being leaders in their respective fields, Teaching Lab puts little stock in what their employees can bring to the organization relying mostly on outward appearances of “ equity”. Additionally, speak up at your own risk. Speaking up about the organization and highlighting room for improvement will put your job in jeopardy. I and many of my colleagues were so saddened to see this play out over and over again. Openly asking for feedback, the executive team makes the majority if not all of their decisions without consulting folks across the organization who may be directly influenced or impacted by their decisions. The executive team expresses the desire to become an anti-racist organization and asserts that the organization is on a "journey" to become anti-racist while Black women employees leave in droves. If you were dazzled by the anti-racist rhetoric on the website don’t feel bad, they are good at talking the talk, but as far as walking the walk, I suggest you walk elsewhere. I caution anyone who decides to pursue a career at this organization to do your research. Take the time to reach out to current and former employees to inform your decision as I personally wouldn't recommend anyone I know to join this organization.

There’s a big culture of micromanagement stemming from the c-suite, which means that everyone at every level (directors and above included) are often undermined in some really public, overt ways. This also means that innovation and decision making authority lives solely with the three chiefs and no one else, which you can see really discourages people at all levels of the org (myself included). There’s the illusion of distributive leadership (they’ve fleshed out middle management in the last year) but the issues still persist. Team members talk directly to the c-suite about issues instead of their directors, nearly every external meeting has to include a chief or will be rescheduled, and proposals, emails, etc. are screened by one if not more chiefs as well, and there’s only three total members of our c-suite. It’s too much authority over ever single thing that happens at the organization, and it makes a very hectic portfolio of projects even more chaotic and unorganized. An example of how the deep the micromanagement issue is: after no one responded to my resignation letter for four days, they finally provided an exit checklist. They had the audacity to include “talking points” that I could use to discuss my parting with my colleagues. One line included the verbiage “I enjoyed my time at Teaching Lab,” even though no one ever even asked me why I was leaving…it was so odd. Additionally, the organization is still rooted in startup-style operations. They have to contract a lot of their work out (HR and accounting especially) so there aren’t people to go to about some really major things that are affecting the staff. It’s a growing organization but they don’t operate like a true business just yet.