Quite Possibly The Most Clueless Leadership In Residential Homebuilding
Pros
When we had leadership under two managers in the Warranty Department, everyone wanted to work under one of them- and for good reason. He was a great manager: attentive, understanding, pro-active, solution-oriented, focused on customer satisfaction, and fair to vendors. This manager had valuable experience as he came from a construction background as a homebuilder, he always did his best to put homeowners first and our vendors second.
Cons
As always, there are middle managers and parasitic opportunists throughout this company. In particular, there were two who were truly the least qualified to lead, the least competent, and least understanding. One of these managers, in particular, would lie to homeowners and vendors, lie to other managers, and lie straight to the faces of the top performing warranty reps in this company. They created false incentives for us by offering to pay $50 per Welcome Home visit (which is a post-closing introduction that warranty reps would give homeowners to introduce themselves, explain some warranty related things, and address anything that was missed by their builder). We worked weekends, stayed late, went in early, everything- just to make sure every homeowner was attended to for Welcome Home visits on top of our obligations dealing with warranty cases. When bonuses were issued, not a single rep was paid the money they had earned and worked outside of business hours for. When confronted, these managers said to us "would you have come in early or stayed late if there were not incentives in place?" as if to suggest that our team were so lazy that the only way they could get us to perform these tasks was to lie to our faces with a bait-and-switch. Truly an embodiment of everything that is wrong with management in big corporations like Meritage. In an ideal world, individuals who do this would be summarily terminated as they are a brand risk. Also, there are no feedback mechanisms in place to hold managers in this company accountable. These individuals displays passive-aggressive and verbally abusive tendencies that are characteristics of toxic leadership. They have no qualms about twisting clear, concise descriptions of their behavior into misgivings about the intent of the person criticizing them. The Construction Managers are not much better, as they have a tenuous grasp (at best) of residential construction and best practices in construction trades in general. These guys are fresh out of college with a Construction Management degree, they have zero real-world experience on a construction site. These individuals are students of bad management practices: conniving, shameless, eager to appeal to authority and shut down constructive feedback or solution-focused initiatives. The Construction Managers are taught to lie to homeowners about anything they can get away with. In the span of a year, the Houston division went from having a nationally-recognized, top-performing warranty team to being at the cusp of class action lawsuits and a PR nightmare. After our original manager left this company, the wheels came off and we were stuck with two individuals who prioritized their career aspirations over the wellbeing of the team.