Culture of fear leads to inefficiencies and wasted opportunities - Tech ONCI Employee Review

I have been at OakNorth for 2 years. I am writing this review not for prospective employees (they have already read the other reviews), but for our founders and leadership team. Leadership team - Stop meeting and discussing how we should do things, and let us do our work! or do work yourself! Please look at your calendar, and be honest to yourself: how many hours have you spent meeting with each other taking no meaningful decisions - or thinking you acted but then never followed up? And how many hours have you spent preparing these meetings? And what was the outcome? Is the product further developed? Is the direction clearer for your teams? Do we now have ANY designers? Do we have happier engineers? Are the teams better staffed? Have we increased the velocity? What did your meetings really achieve? Did you help people who actually do work in any way? Are you leading? Rishi - please read this: The other day, someone told me of a story of how it took a full day to answer you back on an email because the answer had to be reviewed by 3 different people in Credit before being sent to you. How does it make you feel? Are you proud of the culture that has emerged? Another fun fact: did you know that before you have a meeting with the leadership team, they all manage to meet all together to run the meeting they have with you end to end - without you, and then run it again with you? They want to make sure it's perfect before you attend it. Do you know that they are calls, pre-calls and pre-pre-pre-calls to prepare meetings with you? Is that what you really want? Or would you rather people spend time building the product? You are smart, and yet it seems you confuse respect and fear. You want people to respect you and instead people fear you - these are not the same thing, and this creates a lot of inefficiencies. Anyone who has had a bit of back bone has been fired. So now you are left with "yes man" people, who just spend time managing you instead of managing their teams. How sad! And imagine how the teams feel about it.. Because yes, it's the very people in your leadership team that fear you the most, they spend more time thinking about their safety than building the product or caring for their teams. And that's the biggest issue! Please please please, take a hard look at the culture you have created.