The vast majority of the problems in the business are ultimately the root cause of an extremely poor senior management team that demonstrates a total lack of leadership, possesses no vision or strategy, and seems to spend most of their time on very low-value activities, rather than high leverage ones. The upshot of this is that:
- People are generally not empowered to make any meaningful decisions. This results in a culture of decision by committee, or usually no decision at all, and everything being escalated. It also means an expensive meeting culture where meetings discussing specific client issues containing 8+ people occur on an often daily basis. In my time I bore witness to people saying the rejection of a single review disputed by a client should be escalated to the CEO.
- Years of operating as a deal-driven sales culture (as in, “we need to get this next deal regardless of cost/tech required”) has resulted in the company being crippled by its technical debt, with most clients essentially on a different version of the product, thereby creating a business unable to scale technically, with a proposition difficult to make coherent.
- Wide-reaching staff policies and organisational change initiatives are introduced seemingly without much thought or critical thinking applied, then changed, abandoned or rescinded soon after. Much time and energy is wasted on such initiatives with little, if any, value gained. Management tend to restructure every 3-6 months.
- Nobody is really accountable for anything at a task or strategic level. Failure to perform tasks at all or to acceptable levels is routine and ignored, while failure at a more strategic level is tolerated, especially if the employee is long-standing.
Others include:
- High staff turnover rate (>30%?) often meaning people who stay become critical to the business by mere longevity through understanding the overly, and unnecessarily, complex products, and manual interventions required to keep the cogs turning.
- Lower than average salaries for industry in many departments result in an over-indexing on junior staff and interns.
The amalgamation of all of the above make the company a highly frustrating environment to work in, though not unpleasant.
