Despite having a long list of open positions, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is little to no interest to promote from within for any leadership positions. Employee development is almost non existent. The emphasis is to clone the products and processes of our chief competitors, and the thought appears to be the best way to do this is to steal leadership talent from elsewhere. However when the bulk of the leadership has no idea of how things are actually done presently, changes are made with no understanding of downstream impact. Then your front line can either follow the new direction and fail, or disregard the direction and get flagged as insubordinate or unwilling to change.
Also, because the average life span of an exec is about three years, be prepared for constantly shifting direction, no follow through on in flight initiatives, leaving most wondering if they are meeting expectations or not. It’s incredibly hard on morale to work as hard as possible and never know if you are going to be praised or performance managed (a nice way to say written up). And it appears the executive playbook is to blame your predecessor for a year, then blame the employees for a year, and then move on.
Also, for anyone considering a job opportunity with Guardian, you better negotiate salary hard before accepting, as once you are hired the average raise is about 1.5% per year… if you have a stellar year, you might get 2.5%.
Lastly, be prepared for the constant stress of wondering when your job will be outsourced to Guardian’s India office. Yes, the dirty little secret is the company has a large contingent of employees in India, handling a wide variety of tasks. US employees are forbidden from disclosing this to the customers and even internal partners within the organization, and refer to things as having a support team or something similar… the leadership has went to great lengths to keep this a secret to anyone outside the organization.
