#leadership

APA needs fresh leadership and outside talent. Too many long-tenured life-long apaches filling the manager positions in critical business units, weak morale, and missed potential despite good people. Lot of talent from supporting fucntions, supply chain, accounting, IT etc. let go. Super talented Permain and Egypt employees quit or laid-off. RC manager in egypt finally let go. Good riddance- absolute dead weight. JC, MM etc have nothing to be proud of.

After the recent Fidelity layoffs, leadership mentioned moving toward larger consolidated teams starting in June. I haven’t seen any changes in my business yet.

Are others seeing team merges already?
Is this just taking longer than expected, or are additional organizational changes still being planned for lower level grades ?

Just saw this on LI, it's it true? What does this mean for GN&T?

The executives at this company are almost cartoonishly evil. I've never seen more people who are deluded into believing they are kind. Yes, I know and I've heard that leadership everywhere are snakes (that's how they end up where they are), but to see it up close is hard to digest.

Stank tried to spin the metric that 79% of the employees that did respond felt committed and engaged and used that number as support for his policies. He did not share the next metric that if only 79% of those who responded felt engaged/committed, then it is a easy assumption to make that really only about 60% of the total work force felt committed and engaged.
Remember, the C-Suite will ignore the responses that do not support their ideology and strategy, and outright lie about what the employees really feel is important.
499/600 and 875/900 are the real survey numbers.

If you’re with a vertical market like touchnet, greater giving, zego, mineral tree, heartland, etc

How are things going at your respective companies? How are earnings? How is morale? Or is the sales pipeline and sales leadership?

They can replace every single person in leadership, but there's no way anyone competent or with an actual vision is ever walking through that door. The culture is too far gone. There's no coming back from this.

I’ve noticed that leaders keep pushing for AI when we actually need more automation. AI is not deterministic and is a struggle to implement. If they want correct answers 100% of the time, why not implement automations instead? Makes no sense…

There are a lot of rumors that upper leadership has stated that SLC will be displacing the QA deptments end of June possibly the end of 3rd quarter in Sept. Its also been said that most of SLC will be gone before 2027. Any truth to this?

https://www.telecomtv.com/content/5g/abdu-mudesir-to-become-verizon-s-top-tech-exec-55594

Link --> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ibm-ceo-commits-to-reaching-quantum-computing-milestone-by-2029/ar-AA24GHxd?ocid=msedgntp&pc=W099&cvid=6a2049f56af74598af51294d8ec381d8&ei=9

If you believe this stuff will be available in 2029, then you'll believe anything and... I have bridge to sell you in London. No mention of Arvind's golden boy, Dario in this article.
BUT...
What happens if the fabled quantum computers fail to materialize in 2029 ? Where will Arvind and Dario be ? Basking in the sun somewhere in the Caribbean or hiding from the Italian Mafia underground ? After all, a billion dollars is a lot of $$$. ($10 billion is even more). LOL.

Would like to hear from any non-ELT GP on here. I assume those remaining support the culture changes. Do you? Is there something we aren’t getting?

Honestly curious.

T is like an enormous dinosaur lumbering through the telecom space. Had we cared for the aging dinosaur by making sure our fiber footprint and customer service were robust, we could have survived the times we are in now.

Instead we tried to weave ourselves into sectors we had no business in and come up with gimmicky BS to seem cutting edge.

Putting funding and focus into those pursuits made us quietly fall behind. Now we’re like a cringey guy in the throes of a midlife crisis trying to date 20 year olds and who have zero interest while neglecting his family that is rapidly falling apart.

Nothing is working and the company looks stupid as he-l flopping around trying to ensure everyone that things are going great and AT&T is cool.

Why is it Executive leader ship can’t give raises, but they can hire two more of their friends for VP positions we don’t need?

The Truist Championship did one thing for sure; it took money from raises, bonuses, and promotions. That is it. The rest is speculative and ignores the terrible work the executive leadership has done since the merger that undermines all of the claims.

Are all areas facing issues with complete chaos in their depts because they lost the good leadership (and valuable associates) they had with VSP? My area is crumbling and the management we have been left with is relatively new with not enough knowledge to properly manage. I’m not sure her skillset has even included managing people before. It’s become a free-for-all with some associates logging on barely 4 hours a day doing pretty much nothing. We were swept under a new director who also had no experience with our departments responsibilities so he exists but has been 100% absent. We were already understaffed before VSP but the past 6 months we are sinking fast. Is this just my area’s reality or is this being felt across the company ?

Sometimes their expectations are truly ridiculous. Maybe we can let them do our jobs for a while, just so they could get some perspective (even though I firmly believe none of them would last for more than a day.)

Sounds like another round of layoffs. Couple hundred from engineering side. Feel for those affected. I guess the strategy remains you can fix leadership problems by laying off experienced engineers.

Does anybody here trust this leadership? If the answer is yes, why? What have they done to warrant that trust? I can't think of a single thing.

Does the new cohort of managers know that fear-based management is not the only one in existence, and that it certainly isn't the one to result in highest productivity? I swear, the more somebody yells at me, the slower I do my job. Intentionally. These "leaders" need some lessons in people skills.

In the current climate of layoffs, no one wants to speak up, even when senior management is demonstrably wrong about the root cause of an issue. But hey, we told the regulators before we did any work, ergo it must be true right?

DL mentioned on the Global Solutions all team call that apparently Claude Code access was only meant for him and a few others at AVP/SVP level - instead, everyone that ultimately report to them globally got access. I wonder what the actualy budget was?

We have been losing AUM in Wisconsin hand over fist. Minneapolis has experienced similar losses after their two top teams walked out the door. Texas is losing money hand over fist. Kansas City is losing assets and advisors. When is someone going to look at "leadership," and finally make some changes? I don't know if it's possible, but I am guessing they will find someone even worse to take over for DF. On BL's call, she repeated talked about the $2BN in assets that has left. What do they think is going to happen here? You cannot simply rely on mortgages to carry the day.

Smells like something is on the stove.

Innovation - the process of creating, improving, or applying ideas, products, services, technologies, methods, or business models in a way that produces meaningful value.

If I worked there I'd be angry at how many top admins make twice the salary of similar admins at other regional colleges. No way should they be doing layoffs of lower paid staff when they have 8 people making $200K-300K at a college of only 1600 students.

Expect there to be layoffs June/July in Member Protection aka Fraud, Disputes, and AML first like operations.

Rumor has it most will be in the Fraud space as they over hired when the old guard went out and the new guard came in 2023/2024. I imagine it won’t be the overpaid cronies they brought with them from BofA, Citi and the like.

The senior leadership team (Bashore and his directs) is very clique-y. There is no loyalty if you aren’t part of their in crowd.

This trimester update shows how pathetic she is. She is literally just reading off of an ipad. She sounds like a teenager reading a story book to a toddler. I just can't with this...

Wells Fargo is quietly rebranding some Senior Manager titles to Senior Leads, possibly signaling middle-management elimination. Let's use this thread to consolidate what we know and what expect. Please be polite as the mods tend to nuke threads that go bananas.

The first 18 years, working as part of VUE, were great. I was valued, respected, and my contributions meant something. The along comes Omar, and VUE largely gets absorbed into corporate, the Azure migration occurred, and the culture changed dramatically. Dave Treat really likes to listen to himself talk, Omar and the rest of senior leadership are too busy jet-setting to set a clear strategy. The cherry on top came in May when I was unexpectedly laid off after 20 years, with a whopping 8 weeks of severance. Hello early retirement, goodbye toxic workplace.

After 6.5 years of successful remote and hybrid work, leadership decided employees must return to the office more than half the time. Despite years of strong performance, increased productivity, and record results, management couldn't even provide a basic explanation for the decision.

The announcement itself perfectly reflected the company's culture. After months of rumors and speculation, employees were informed through a Teams meeting while many of us were already sitting in the office. Cameras were off. Employees were muted. Questions were not answered. Instead, we were told to ask our managers for information that leadership should have communicated directly.

The return-to-office rollout has been just as poorly executed. Some employees have been separated from their managers, collaboration has become more difficult, and basic equipment and workspace issues remain unresolved. Apparently, requiring people to commute was a higher priority than ensuring they had functional tools to do their jobs.
What makes this especially frustrating is that employees spent years proving that remote and hybrid work could be successful. The company benefited from our flexibility, commitment, and results. Now we're expected to accept a major change without transparency, accountability, or even the courtesy of a meaningful conversation.

This experience has made it clear that employees are viewed as resources to manage, not people to respect!

Leadership seems to need a decoder to comprehend the results, so here it is.

The negative survey results are not about healthcare perks or wellness programs no one uses, they are only about RTO and the lack of flexibility.

“I am proud to work at AT&T”


Once true. No longer. Public perception has deteriorated, and when people outside the company hear about the five-day RTO policy, the lack of any real collaboration, and the absence of assigned seating or co-located teams, the reaction is disbelief. Pride erodes when policies feel performative instead of purposeful.

“I would recommend AT&T as a great place to work”


That answer is now clearly no. A mandatory five-day RTO policy for roles that historically had been remote before COVID and can be done more effectively remotely is an immediate dealbreaker for modern workers. The policy alone makes the company undesirable and uncompetitive as an employer.

“We trust the leadership decisions”


Trust is broken. Loyalty is dead. Employees do not support the financial decisions that destroyed value, nor the RTO mandate that ignored clear employee feedback. Trust cannot survive when leadership consistently doubles down instead of course-correcting.

“The company provides opportunities to support career growth”


Opportunities are narrowly concentrated in Dallas, with limited mobility elsewhere. For a national company, that is a self-inflicted constraint that unnecessarily caps growth and retention.

“Our policies and systems support me doing my best work”


They do the opposite. The five-day RTO policy actively reduces productivity, and many internal systems remain outdated and inefficient. Physical presence does not compensate for structural friction.

“The company cares about my health and well-being”


Employees feel burned out, mentally and physically, largely due to excessive commuting and rigid mandates that add stress without any benefit to the company or the employees. Well-being is not addressed by pushing unused benefits or wellness messaging while ignoring the root cause repeatedly identified in feedback.

“Do you feel changes have been made as a result of prior surveys”


No. In fact, the opposite. Employees explicitly opposed three-day RTO in the last survey, and leadership responded by increasing it to five. Feedback was not just ignored, it was contradicted. The disappearance of the prior third-party McKinsey survey results only reinforces that perception.

Did I miss anything else?

The pattern is now set and clear. Instead of addressing the core RTO issue employees are raising, leadership deflects with ancillary benefits and BS messaging. That approach feels like gaslighting, and not listening. So why should I even bother taking this next one?

If leadership truly wants different survey results, the solution is not another email, benefit rollout, or talking point. It is addressing the one issue employees are consistently, overwhelmingly, and clearly raising.

Flexibility. Trust. Results over “presence”.

That is the message of the survey, whether leadership wants to hear it or not.

Portfolio leadership is directly responsible for the failures in losing market share. My Heartland Gulf Operation OD is an example of this. He blames everyone else and wants people fired on our teams and our specialists but never holds himself accountable. Tells everyone to do their job but does not do his. He does not even reside in the operation. This is the type of leadership that loses market share.

I've been doing this work for a very, very long time, and the best managers I ever had were the ones who listened more than they talked. They cared about their people and helped us succeed. These days, it's all talk and no substance. I don't even bother with all hands meetings anymore because there's never any real information or direction.

If you request a meeting that includes an executive leader, then confirm their availability and you send the invite! Don’t turn around to my admin assistant and ask them to send the invite. It’s your meeting you own it and my assistant is very busy doing other things that I have asked them to handle (plus, I don’t want all the invites coming from my calendar).

When I say I'm drowning in work, everyone tells me to work smarter instead of harder, but how can I do that when nobody here actually removes the obstacles that make work harder than it needs to be? Until leadership starts fixing the broken processes, smarter isn't really an option.

PEP stock is sitting right in the middle of 2021's range - well below 2021's year-end close of ~$159 - Can doomed PepsiCo turn things around? How much Ramon has left in the role? Is this a real business value of our Strategy & Transformation over the last 5 years?

Chief Transformation Officer - gone. Head of Future Forward rollout - gone.

No doubt Stephanie will tell us that future forward has been a roaring success and the transformation of our business is complete - so nothing left to do for the bold leaders of the future forward program as they ride triumphantly into the sunset.