Went through volatile changes in management over the past several years. It was anywhere from non-existent, to horrible.
Leadership:
- Terminated multiple employees so that they can replace them with team members from their previous company. When leadership terminated the iHeartRadio employees, the reason stated was for “restructuring”. These terminated employees were also the same employees that vouched to hire this leader.
- Hired new team members without allowing the current team to conduct any formal interviews. None of us saw their resume or portfolio until after they were officially hired.
- Had unrealistic expectations. For example, the team was asked to switch all internal files into a new program within 6 days, when the previous transition took over 6 months. Leadership expressed extreme disappointment when the team did not meet this expectation, and used our weekly 1:1 feedback meetings to scold each of us.
- Could not communicate expectations clearly through verbal or written format, which lead to a lot of misunderstanding and more reprimands.
- Setup a performance feedback survey which garnered responses from 5-10 coworkers outside our team, with nothing to verify the accuracy and honesty of the feedback on our performance. There is also no repercussions for writing dishonest, negative feedback. -This type of feedback system is known to be ineffective and harmful to employees.
Project management:
- Falsified research findings - eliminating all data that went against their favored concept, and changed the data to try to illustrate that their top solution was the best, and presented their own version of the user testing conclusion to the higher ups. These same PMs were awarded for employee performance.
- Fabricated meeting results, so that design and engineering will adhere to the PM’s agenda
- Micromanaged areas where they lacked expertise, thereby causing the project to come out worse than it started, and dragging out the timeline longer than it needed to be, because we have to clean up their mess.
- Does not trust certain teams, and shows disrespect for some of the work these teams produce.
- Exhibited poor time management of their team members - scheduling meetings back to back, all day, leaving little to no time for the employees to complete actual work.
- Holds extremely biased views
- Does not understand “work process”
- Cannot tell the difference between what should be a group activity vs. individual activity.
- Points blame on certain teams when the results aren’t what they wanted.
- Focuses on political games, rather than working to collaborate with the team.
- Uses bullying tactics (ie., being controlling, using verbal labels, and verbal attacks) to steer conversations and projects
- Continues to provide prescriptive solutions, instead of letting us do our jobs.
- Focused on higher number of releases, and not good quality products.
Overall:
- No room for career growth
- Company culture can be demoralizing
- Rewards poor behavior, while punishing those who worked hard to push the product/company into a better direction
