#leadership

Long ago MDT was all about patients and customers and everyone lined up to support that. Then they started to get functional leaders who thought their functions were more important than the mission.

HR used to be a support function with a generalist per dept or function that knew people, helped hire, fire, promote, set pay..... then HR decided they were too important to work that way and needed to specialize to be more efficient., so they pulled all the features apart and created leaders for each.

Now you have, maybe, a generalist who might know you but they are spread across many teams.

You also have recruiters, who are called "talent acquisition" with all their own rules.

You have job leveling experts who review individuals against the job family rubrics to decide if they agree someone can be promoted.

You have compensation experts who decided what people can be paid.

You have "human capital insights" who run the global voices survey.

You have the Org design experts who know how you should be structured, spans and layers and such.

You have data teams, HR systems teams, who hold all the info.

You have pay disparity teams that go through your organization and send you a mandate to change someones pay to make things more fair (though never with any incremental funding to implement, you need to find it in your own cost center)

And you of course have D&I considerations.

As a manager, this has made work so much more complicated and difficult, but its done in the name of excellence in HR?

Now you see it repeating in Operations, etc...... All at the expense of the mission, patients and customers.

Amongst all the doom and gloom I think leadership has finally started to talk about doing the basics right. 10 years wasted on trying to be a tech company and now that tech is ubiquitous thanks to AI, the leadership can finally focus on building decent cars again. Here's to hoping for better years after demise of phony leaders 🙏

It’s very evident that ConocoPhillips has created a real niche and is running on automatic. The companies top leadership and enforcement arm…HR has manufactured a false reality with pretty impressive results. What happens when timelines and realities converge and expose or challenge this fragile ecosystem? Is COP a quarterly darling or do real reality and fragility intersect?

Nike increased women in VP+ roles from 39% to 45% and minorities at Director+ level from 26% to 36% between 2021 and 2025. Considering how few senior leader roles open up each year, that’s a big change in a short time. Has the company become stronger because of it? Would Nike be in an even worse position if it hadn’t invested in DEI?

I've been in "corporate america" long enough to understand that the decision to surplus you often goes beyond just performance or willingness to improve, it often hinges on the fact if your supervisor or leadership chain like you. If they don't like you or you're always seeming to cause a problem, you're likely one of the first to be selected.

15 hour days and weekends. No breaks. Leadership does not care.

I wish I would have been in SVP or D level to not get axed. So far what I have seen only these levels are in decision panel and only vp avp getting cut. Which makes no sense though because they again hire new resources for those positions once the wave is crossed. They don't have any idea what are they doing (an ordinary VP has better understanding) just thinking themselves as king and cutting people they don't like not on merit.

He only cares about numbers. He ruins many people’s life. He destroys families.

“All managers are mandated to be in the office logged into the LAN 11 hours per day or they will be terminated.”

We can’t make this place rules up!

Bookmark it.

PNC Bank retains key leadership as 777 FirstBank employees face summer layoffs

Of the 777 FirstBank employees at 12345 West Colfax Ave. who will be laid off beginning on June 30, the company’s market presidents will not be among them.

https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2026/05/14/pnc-keeping-firstbank-presidents-amid-layoffs.html

Asking for a friend.

I can't remember the last time I was able to just sit down and do my job without thinking about performance rankings or future opportunities or whatever new process they've invented this month. Leadership seems obsessed with things that don't matter, and the constant distraction means nothing important ever gets done. It's counterproductive and it's ki-ling the little morale we've got left.

It makes HCSC look stupid. Just wow.
A healthcare company that doesn't sweat the details when communicating with 30 million people.
Stupid.

I think about all the talented people who have left this place not through layoffs but on their own. So many of them left because of ego clashes or small misunderstandings that could have been resolved if anyone had just acted like an adult. Treating people with respect works so much better than ruling through fear. EJ never figured that out.

Economic opportunity is one of the societal issues of our time, and Linkedin has been and will continue to be the platform that professionals and companies turn to as they navigate the changing world of work. For us to meet this moment, we must ready ourselves to deliver a step change in impact across our products, businesses, and platforms, while continuing to operate more profitably. We need to reinvent how we work, with agile teams focused on our highest priorities, and by shifting investments toward areas such as infrastructure to fulfill our mission and vision over the long term. This requires hard prioritization and tradeoffs.

Today I'm sharing the difficult decision that I, along with our leadership team, have made to reduce roles across GBO, Marketing, Engineering and Product. If you are impacted, or proposed to be impacted in EMEA & APAC, by these changes, you will receive a calendar invite to a notification meeting within the next hour. For impacted teams, you'll learn more about your org-specific information from your leaders shortly, and updates will be added to go/CompanyExchange throughout today.

In addition to role reductions, we are scaling back investments in some areas including marketing campaigns, vendor spend, customer events, and underutilized office space, so we can focus teams on priorities that have the broadest impact with the highest ROl. You will receive details about these changes from respective functional leaders.

I want to acknowledge and thank those who will be leaving Linkedin. You have helped build LinkedIn's culture and platform into what it is today, and I hope you are proud of the lasting impact your work will continue to have on our members, customers, and colleagues.
For those staying, first and foremost, I would like to invite you to support our impacted colleagues. We will move forward together with focus and clear priorities to reach our potential as the platform that the world's professionals and companies increasingly turn to.

Thank you, again, to our teammates who are departing, and to everyone across LinkedIn who continues to show up and support each other.

Dan

BCC: All Global Employees

Good bye Mahmoud to Optum Insight under Candyman100x

Incoming Hari who worked for WiPro and Cognizant as your SVP

Get ready ready!

Just wait until the AI bubble bursts and companies realize it can’t do half the things they expected it to do, and that in a lot of cases it’s actually slowing people down instead of helping. I don’t know if this leadership is capable of that kind of reflection, but maybe then they’ll think about all the talent and institutional knowledge they pushed out in the rush to chase AI.

I just started my career at Nike and I think I made a huge mistake joining. My manager is impossible. Every week he either ki-ls our ideas, adds random nonsense to our projects, or just criticizes for no reason depending on his mood. He doesn't understand the technical work but tells us how to do it anyway. Then later he asks why we did it that way. He interrupts everyone constantly and yells at least three days a week. I'm so tired. Is this the norm when it comes to managers here?

Salim will hit his 2 year mark at Vanguard in a few months. I left the organization mid-2025 and had already noticed a lot of change since he joined, especially in leadership and organizational initiatives. From a Crew perspective, do you think Salim is an improvement over Tim? Do you think his outsider status could make him more likely to go after benefits, partnership, etc.?

My own perspective: Over my years at Vanguard there seemed to be less of an emphasis of developing and promoting from within. This accelerated massively over my last year.

Some one tell him stop with the navi hoodies and high tops. I am embarrassed for all of you

Just announced at tier meeting , effective immediately no more overtime for R&O , unless approved by leadership.
I wonder if RIF’s are next?

Today is a reminder that job cuts do not just happen to struggling employees or people doing the bare minimum. Some of the smartest and most respected people I know here were affected too, including people with years of experience and records most teams would want to keep. Not sure how this is supposed to benefit Cisco in the long run, but the leadership seems to think it will.

It has now been over a year since I left State Farm. I know people rant and rave on here about toxic environments, dysfunctional leaders, etc etc etc. But one thing I've discovered over the past 12 months is that the State Farm environment can truly damage a person's well being and self confidence. I was in leadership when at SF, not in Claims. When I started at my new company, in a senior leadership role, it became clear to me right away the stark difference in work environment and leadership health. State Farm subtly pushes you down, questions everything you do, and makes you feel that anything you do is just not good enough.

I didn't realize, even as a leader, just how oppressive and damaging that is to an individual. There is no loyalty, support, appreciation for the workforce from executive leadership. State Farm leadership will praise you one minute and then turn around and make you feel an inch high because something wasn't done according to their expectations.

Instead of complaining, make the decision to leave, if you can. The subtle mental harm that State Farm propagates is worse than you believe.

Cheaper workers, offshoring, AI - whatever works. If they could charge us for the privilege of working here, they would.

I’ve been trying to wait out the correction for the people hired as “leaders” during the pandemic. I’m not sure if it’s just my BU or others were put in roles way beyond their skill set. It’s infuriating for me to have to sit in “coaching” and have my manager explain things they would have learned in the first semester of college, had they gone.

Why is my only opportunity for development wasted listening to someone who is twice my age and trying to explain a simple concept but still needs my guidance? WHY IS THIS PERSON HIGHER RANKED THAN ME?!

I don’t know how much more I can take of this. Will there be a correction for unskilled management?

Sometimes things aren’t the same when your bestie leaves. It is in-fact confusing to be a girl. let’s have some compassion and hold space for leadership during these unprecedented times

The new head of strategy was supposed to retire after the Hess integration. Why didn’t he? Is it because we don’t have anyone else capable?

Every time leadership reshuffles the org chart, employees do not feel alignment. They feel a wave of anxiety that another round of layoffs is coming. That feeling does not disappear after the new chart is published. It settles into the background and quietly consumes attention, focus, and energy. People start working two jobs. Their actual job, and the job of managing their own fear. On top of that, we are paying a massive tax on context switching. Teams barely get comfortable with new priorities or new leaders or new workflows before leadership announces another reset. It is impossible to build real momentum when you are constantly starting over, constantly reintroducing yourself, constantly trying to remember what the mission was supposed to be this quarter versus last quarter. I would argue that stability is not just nice to have. It is a genuine competitive advantage. But you cannot demand world class creativity and execution from people who are always bracing for impact. What the company actually needs is not another reorg. What we need is a resilient long term plan, a consistent direction, and a culture where people feel safe enough to do their best work. That is how you win, whether you are playing for now or for later.

Let me break down why most of the employees are unhappy. First, forced ranking. Everyone is fighting for survival, taking credit for others' work just to avoid a PIP. Second, false ranking. People on the fast track get top ratings even when they cause major problems. Third, location bias. An expert here gets rated lower than someone in a cheaper country who makes constant errors. Fourth, promoting incompetent people. Industry experts end up reporting to managers who don't understand the work. These problems could be solved, but leadership chooses not to.

Everyone has an opinion and a certificate on the wall, but nobody seems to know how to actually run anything anymore. Where is the management that has done the job before and can make a call? Because I am not seeing it. What I see is vague suggestions, meetings that end with no clear decision, and then people just doing whatever they think is right. Give me a real leader over a room full of advisors any day.

If you were in a war zone, how would you feel about having your division head with you in a fox hole? I would have been happy to have certain previous division heads with me. Not my current one. Would anyone want to be with their current divsion head in a fox hole during a war?

I’m sure there is a plan and it seems the first rule of Dan’s plan is not to talk about Dan’s plan

I’m just guessing but it would make sense if the plan is so unpalatable to existing employees that the leadership cannot be open about it

AT&T‘s leadership has been complete and utter failure under John Stankey. we continue to roll up debt, including spending $1.5 billion on an elaborate and lavish corporate headquarters in Plano Texas. Meanwhile, the company continues to lay off hard-working employees. They force employees to unnecessarily relocate in order to keep their jobs or commute, long distances entirely in an effort to force employees to quit and move off the payroll. This

This company lacks any kind of effective and moral leadership

It’s the next level leadership . What have they ever accomplished? All they have learnt is you are rewarded if you keep cutting cost.

I saw today that Vena is now asking people to contact their elected government representatives and ask them to approve/support his buyout of NS. This guy is so desperate for this to happen it is sickening.

Honestly, it feels like there’s some next-level scam going on between Deloitte and Kroger leadership. Half the time it feels like I work for Deloitte instead of Kroger.

They hire one senior person and fill the rest of the team with clueless recent grads, then expect everything to run smoothly. The leadership is weak, disconnected, and completely out of touch with how much extra burden that creates.

Better to find another job than keep working under incompetent leadership.

Looks like the Ford family just handed out a few more years of free money, proving that "d-mb" is a relative term when you've got $19 billion to burn. Sure, he was an arrogant id--t who took a job he definitely didn't qualify for, but let's be real: that's on the genius who thought hiring him was a good idea. At this point, the only one actually leaving is the rest of us.