"It's you, not me" - Anonymous employee BetterUp Employee Review

We are losing our way. It astounds me how out-of-touch some of the responses I have heard from ELT are - the surprise that things are as bad as they are on the ground when I have been hearing about this for more than 2 years (and I promise, people did try to speak up), the tone-deafness answering a retention issue that is driven by trauma around frameworked mindsets with more reading on mindsets. It says something that the company is only now responding because of how bad attrition has become, even though the reviews flagging the culture go back for at least 2 years. Then again, it comes at no surprise to me: upward feedback is being stifled at the frontline, so there is no way ELT or anyone Director or above would be aware of the dynamics below. Sometimes I feel as if our company lives in two completely separate sets of realities: the realities at Director and above, and the realities below. TL;DR - I feel as if I am in a narcissistic relationship with my employer, where the problem is ALWAYS ME. Company culture is toxic because I can’t seem to communicate my reality without being slapped with an 'objective' black-and-white label from some misapplied framework we use ("not comfortable with ambiguity" "not an Extreme Owner" "Victim, not Impact Player") that requires no readjustment from BetterUp but instead implicitly messages that I just need to fix my mindset and normalize whatever it is I’m experiencing. I believe the entire experience is driven by three main issues: - Normalization of strategic whiplash and lack of public acknowledgment of and accountability from BetterUp management for business failures: We ask people to sprint and ‘move with urgency.’ This in itself would likely be fine if the speed and urgency were Action not Motion, but compounded with changing directions at a frenetic pace that is unsustainable past a year or two, people burn out. There are only so many times I can justify sprinting with no outcome. Why sprint if my work is going to be churned anyway? I am asked to normalize the level of strategic whiplash under the guise of this being an “agile” startup. We need acknowledgement that Alexi and ELT have made a number of decisions that have not panned out and resulted in churned work and the current state of panic, with the corresponding accountability. At leadership’s direction, we spent years of resources building products without the requisite market readiness or user value to see traction, and invested, then divested, then invested, then divested again in the same GTM segments without ever creating a repeatable motion. I understand there will be churned work and strategic pivots when you are doing something as new as what we are trying. At the same time, blanket responses like "we're a startup, you have to be comfortable with ambiguity and change" completely shirk responsibility for the fact that leadership has not made prudent decisions with investments, and were not wise enough to realize the importance of repeatability, continuity, and focus. While everyone makes mistakes, we need equal accountability: if ICs are going to be held accountable to their individual performance and let go when business performance goes south, so then should leadership for putting the wrong people in seat or making choices to invest resources in a way that have not enabled us to hit our targets (not how hard they tried and whether they exhibited "Extreme Ownership"). - Lack of emphasis on people management, managers not given enough time to build trust and solicit upward feedback: Leaders often have so much on their plate that they struggle to make the time to meet with and get to know their reports. I have gone entire months without a 1:1. Their prioritization of time is a reflection of how our company treats people management: they are not being evaluated on their performance managing their team - they are being evaluated on other aspects of their job (e.g. how well they perform as ICs, not as managers). We talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. We host elaborate, time-intensive leadership and manager trainings, but then don’t make time for our managers to actually manage (or don’t evaluate them on how they manage). There is incongruence between our words and actions, and it shows. Worst of all, I have rarely heard management actively solicit upward feedback from the frontlines, or acknowledge feedback in a way that makes the employee feel safe. The feedback seems to flow unidirectionally - always down, never up. This phenomenon creates a deep sense of power imbalance and lack of psychological safety. - The use of high-impact behaviors and mindsets without appropriate checks and balances: The root cause of so much pain is that the use of "high-impact behaviors" (especially "Extreme Ownership" and "Bias to Action" and "comfort with ambiguity") and mindset readings is never checked by the use of Conscious Commitments (see the concept from Fred Kofman, one of our basic readings in onboarding). Here is the most basic “Conscious Commitment” between employer and employee: I pay you X to do Y. The line, of course, can be negotiated and renegotiated (as it will need to be given we are in a fast-paced, category-creating business). But make no mistake: it needs to be articulated so that we can agree we are looking at the same line. BetterUp violates this concept again and again by refusing to articulate explicit expectations for roles or promotions while reserving the power to give feedback and performance evaluations based on implicit expectations. I won’t give you clear, measurable expectations for your role or for this project (I will just give you a set of arbitrary “mindsets” to follow) because we are a “startup” and you need to be comfortable with ambiguity and tolerate any amount of strategic whiplash coming from the top (see how this fits with my first point), and at the same time you can absolutely still be dinged for not meeting expectations. The imbalance of power in negotiating realities is crushing. At any time, the narrative simply reflects whatever is more convenient for BetterUp. ICs are entirely accountable for failures to execute, BetterUp is never accountable for setting them up to a Sisphyean task with constantly changing goal posts, because it’s a “startup!” To make matters worse, we have equipped management with language to dismiss any pushback on lack of expectations or lack of strategic clarity with “Extreme Ownership,” “Bias to Action,” “Your Job is Not Your Job,” “Impact Player,” and so many more exploitable frameworks. Well-meaning (but sometimes inexperienced) new managers who are still drinking the Koolaid continue to use this language on an already-traumatized employee base. This deeply entrenched, mindset-based “coaching” proliferates BU culture. It is cloak-and-dagger binary thinking masquerading as virtue: labels that are often up to someone’s subjective interpretation are applied as an objective identity and which leave women and minorities especially vulnerable to abuse. People are called “Extreme Owners” as if they just are, never mind the vast (and I mean vast) differences in bias, trust, visibility, and context given to people close to the C-suite that enables them to be interpreted as Impact Players or Extreme Owners. BetterUp conflates outcome and behavior and mindset, choosing to coach ICs on their mindsets when they fail to deliver outcomes while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge or take responsibility to improve the climate they are operating within, and how that climate is different for every single person here depending on their manager, their proximity to C-suite, their function, and more. Extreme Ownership, without the check of Conscious Commitments, is a concept ripe for abuse. If X can be an Extreme Owner, you can, too! If you can’t… that’s YOUR problem. I cannot tell you how disheartening and hopeless it is to be told over and over again that there are two types of people, and you are not the right kind. Or to be told that you need to exhibit more of some "high-impact behavior" or mindset without being allowed to ask for the conditions that would enable it (clear promotion path, clear expectations). - How this all comes together: The experience is a bit like repeatedly yelling into a void, or being yelled at by someone over and over again to "just do better." At a certain point, after all of this, you feel like giving up. You will never win. There is no way to say, I can only physically and emotionally sustain working so many hours in a day or week, and I can’t seem to get a sense from anyone where that scope starts and where it ends, or trust that my work will not be suddenly churned, or understand how this affects my compensation and career trajectory. I know only if I fail to address some business problem I knew about but did not have the capacity to handle, I will probably be told that I was not an Extreme Owner, or that I didn’t exhibit Bias towards Action, or that I need to be more comfortable with ambiguity. Why bother engaging if the problem is always you and BetterUp never needs to change? Take a look at our Glassdoor and you will see the same phrase over and over again: “I feel gaslit.” It is even hard for me to write this without even wondering, am I being a Victim instead of an Impact Player? Would I be compared to [X person] who works hours I myself would never be able to sustain, who has context and visibility into the constantly changing business that I do not? At some point I stopped myself to ask: is this amount of self-doubt I experience before I raise a single shred of upward feedback healthy or sustainable? I feel as if I am in a narcissistic relationship with my employer, where there is only space for one reality: that I am wrong, or that I am not doing enough, or that I am not comfortable with ambiguity, or that I am being a Victim, or that I am not being an Extreme Owner. I don’t think that managers here are malicious, but I think they are often inexperienced, terrified of failure, and missing context and proper enablement from HR, and therefore have trouble seeing IC reality. We are a coaching company, and I have definitely learned that coaching can only take you so far when the people in power are not interested in change.