-NA CEO became progressively detached from the reality of what people were doing each day to complete some of the conflicting tasks that were passed down from Senior Leadership. He also became pretty self inflated over time. It was disappointing to watch, he started out so connected but lost sight of things as he took on more and more workload. In turn he was less involved in the details of things and the people that surrounded him fixed metrics and not problems to make it appear as though they had fixed the root issues.
-Compensation/raises are not all that great. I got more than the publicly listed 5% max as a high performer but generally speaking you won’t get more than a 5% raise and your bonus is also generally maxed out at 5% but dependent on department performance and not your own. So the people that underperformed get a bonus they don’t really deserve and the high achievers get less than they deserve. Negotiate a high starting salary.
-There have been some really questionable hires in the VP levels that just flat out do not have the experience to function at that level. I was in meetings and watched/listened to them rationalize how their support departments simply weren’t going to perform certain tasks because they didn’t know how to or didn’t think it was important. Meanwhile we looked like amateurs to our partners because we couldn’t provide pretty basic eComm support as a result of these decisions.
-Expect to work, rework, undo, redo a good amount of your work as the senior leaders lack the vision and experience to create long term goals and cohesive plans to get there. It was literally one week “we are doing this, please focus all your efforts there”. To then find out that the project was on hold or being undone without a formal explanation was very frustrating. Not to mention most of these time spent on these endeavors actually took away from completing the tasks that drive compensation.
-Constantly championed culture, etc. but it was all pretty fake and contrived. The “yoga babble” infected the ability to have a real conversation or announcement without it turning into a mantra speech.
-I was in the LDP and it was not all that valuable in the long term. If you want to get promoted, definitely get in the program. If you are leaving then save your time. It was mostly a group think of telling each other “great callout” over and over again after someone asserted a relatively basic observation of the business.
