Smoke and Mirrors - Anonymous employee Guitar Center Employee Review

*friendly environment *great discount deal *lots of opportunities to connect *Good opportunity to get comission *Tour Leave

*hours / shifts get cut *Sometimes understaffed, sometimes overstaffed *Competitive salaries because of selling Protection Plans, Credit Card Applications and Lessons

- Plenty of capable individual contributors doing real work. - The brand and the business itself are legitimate — the problems are organizational.

- Senior leadership is politically driven rather than outcome-driven. Strategic initiatives stall out, and leaders spend more energy assigning or shifting blame than actually diagnosing and fixing problems. - Some parts of the org operate on deference to the top. Honest assessments get softened into whatever narrative leadership wants to hear, which makes real cross-functional work difficult. - Senior leaders do not consistently advocate for their own teams. When things get political, self-preservation takes precedence over backing the people underneath, and capable managers end up exposed.