Why is Verizon not giving the chance for the right people with skills to move up?
When I talk about right people, it’s about people who are not getting any inherited wealth and are not relying on a cushion of being lazy in management. Why isn’t there an audit happening before promoting such people to see if they’re actually performing consistently. With a tangible metric assigned to it.
12 replies (most recent on top)
Being qualified? I was laid off right when I had earned a promotion!
Are you new here?
@aq ok, "lighten up wigwam"
Avivek’s leadership playbook seems to get a fresh edition every couple of years: another favorite gets promoted, chiefs of staff move up under the convenient banner of “DEI,” another reorg arrives, and yet another tech stack somehow ends up favoring the same inner circle. At this point, the org chart changes more often than the strategy.
Then there’s the Chatbot vs. GPT saga. A simple decision—what platform are we actually investing in?—apparently requires months of suspense. So teams burn enormous human effort building essentially the same features on both platforms, only to eventually discover that one may be shut down. People aren’t interchangeable compute. Every duplicated feature represents somebody’s nights, weekends, meetings and energy that could have gone toward something useful.
And now the POD model. Ask Business what exactly the POD operating model is and you get one interpretation. Ask IT and you get another. Ask how ownership, funding, architecture and accountability actually work and the answer seems to be: “We’ll figure it out along the way.”
That’s not an operating model. That’s assembling the airplane after takeoff.
Millions poured into Pega, overlapping technology investments, repeated reorgs, layoffs presented as strategy, and now PODs where seemingly nobody has the complete instruction manual. Sometimes it feels less like running one of America’s largest enterprises and more like running a corner bakery: “Start baking, we’ll figure out the recipe on the way.”
Sacking Shank may have hurt some sentiments, but bruised egos aren’t the biggest risk. Arrogance combined with unclear accountability and questionable decision-making eventually becomes expensive.
If Ethics ever conducted a genuinely transparent review of this leadership model—decision trails, conflicts or favoritism concerns, duplicated investments, technology choices, reorg rationale and accountability—the outcome could be ironic: leadership might find themselves in the front row of the next ethics and governance workshop.
Vz doesn’t need another transformation slogan or PowerPoint masterpiece. It needs boring, basic leadership fundamentals: make a decision, explain it, own it, measure it, and be accountable when it doesn’t work.
Because “we’ll figure it out along the way” is fine for a weekend road trip.
It’s a pretty expensive operating model for an enterprise.
Definitely an issue, plus you are in a shrinking company.
DEI is still the law of the land. The right people don't get the opportunity.
Why ? because you are not an indian. That's why !
@a7 *couldn't care less
Because more than ever, the system seems to value cronyism and nepotism over merit. The job market is atrocious, and when opportunities become scarce, friends, family, and personal connections tend to come first. Meritocracy hasn’t disappeared, but every day it feels like being qualified matters less than who you know and who is willing to advocate for you.
Happens maybe 5% of the time. Else, especially in GTS, it's about 'yes' people and location. Else, you could be a rock star, and they could care less. If you're not a ki----s and not in BR, forget about it....
I'm not sure who the right people are anymore. I've seen various number of people who were peers promoted to different roles or given opportunities to work on high focus projects. Only a small handful did I consider either smart or talented or hard working. And then those people only leave when there's a RIF.
There's no accountability outside of front line scorecard based roles.
@OP The right people aren’t interested in playing the game or dealing with the BS.