Poor management is ruining the company - Sales Unbabel Employee Review

The C-level is absent from the day-to-day operations and has become less and less involved with the teams. Being out of touch with the reality of the company as lead to poor management decisions, like hiring and promoting managers that have big egos but no leadership skills, are constantly micromanaging, are not open to feedback, have no ownership and accountability and always blame others for their mistakes or poor performance. Many times, promotions, especially within the leadership team, are used to mask poor hiring that is underperforming. Other times, management positions are used to reward employees with great technical skills, but no real leadership skills. Executives and the leadership team often come across as amateurs, with a lack of real vision and strategy, and unwilling to fix things. In some teams, especially within Sales, there is a culture of fear where people refrain from speaking up. Because of this, some managers are firing competent and talented people simply because they give feedback or show disagreement. However, people are being told that they are being let go on grounds of lack of performance or lack of team fit despite no real KPIs existing to measure this, the inexistence of previous feedback, and performance improvement plans not being used (even though is company policy to for everyone underperforming), or simply being set up with loosely decided criteria (thus always bound to fail). When letting people go, many time without a solid reason, some people responsible for it use intimidation tactics, engaging in borderline unprofessional behaviors, aimed at making people deemed inconvenient leave fast and without proper compensation. Also, there is no real commitment with career progression. Because most managers prefer avoiding hard conversations, they fail to manage people’s expectations about this topic. They favor overpromising or plain lying about the possibilities and next steps, they end up negatively impacting people’s lives, and pushing great talent out of the door. People feel that performers are constantly pushed back, while underperformers are the ones rewarded. There also is no real commitment with salary reviews, and often they skip the 1-year salary review they promise to everyone once you start. Moreover, some managers expect you to do more than one job position while earning the same. People spend too much time in pointless meetings (some managers are unreachable by their own team due to this) but no real communication exists most of the times – many people avoid confrontation, don’t bother giving visibility to other teams involved in the processes, and complicate situations that can be solve with a simple message or a 5 min conversation..Many times, this results in unnecessary conflict and in crisis escalation that could have been solved while it was still small. Communication is also hindered by a culture that doesn’t promote accountability, which many times leads to a lack of transparency. More often the choice is to hide information, to avoid facing questions and feedback, generating a culture of gossip, drama and misunderstandings. The dealignment between teams often leads to selling solutions to customers that can’t be operationalized and delivered, using quick fixes that damage the scalability of the product and operations, and most likely will end up in churn. This is further enhance by the pressure on the sales teams, which has to work unrealistic goals based on everything but real concrete data, and where showing off that you “work” long hours is more important than actually being good and productive at your job. Although they proud themselves in being customer centric and advising others on how to do it, the company is everything but that. More often decisions are made to please egos and as a result of office politics rather then for the real benefit of the customers. As a consequence, the focus of most people is side business instead of the real business.