Manipulative boys club at the top. Dishonest. No HR support when needed most. No women in leadership. C-suite only interested in exit. Tech is for PR.
The essence of what Talon was meant to be is long gone. Senior management was either retired out, shifted away from day to day, stopped caring, or are focused on their exit.
The global CEO brought in was a total culture shock, completely manipulative and created a level of competition among senior staff that was unhealthy and cutthroat for the sake of power play. He also treats female employees poorly, thinking they don’t hear what he means and tries to joke and make light of situations - only when I saw women stop giving him room to make his comments did he then shift his attention elsewhere. Inappropriate comments are made on all staff calls and somehow no one in the company can make it stop despite people complaining every time.
US senior leadership is very closed off and inner circle male - themes of manipulation run rampant under the guise of “support”. The senior team reporting to the CEO was asked to be vocal about their career aspirations as there would be support for their career path, only to be told 6 months later that they were complaining. Junior staff suffer from senior managers not being held accountable so training is inconsistent and junior staff are allowed to be scapegoats and no one bats an eye.
Pay equity is an issue and the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
HR is not on the side of the employee even when they witness firsthand the wrongdoing and tell you they agree with you. I had an open HR complaint and my line manager was actively trying to gaslight me on a call we had together with HR, HR acknowledged to me that yes they saw and heard, and still nothing was done. There was no follow up for months. My next HR interaction was my resignation.
Your ideas will start out as your own and promises of being able to represent your own work forward is stymied when line managers see an opportunity for themselves to use your work to win despite what they’ve promised you.
In my first 2 years in the company I was supported, empowered, trained and grew with the business. In my last 3 years I worked for managers who were happy to agree with everything you said until it was no longer convenient for them. My peers and even those junior to me would tell me all the time, “we know you’ve done all the work on that” each time a manager took credit for work that they hadn’t done.
At one stage in my time there I was self advocating for a particular role. Multiple (male) senior staff tried to coach me away from that role, citing I should be aiming for other things or that I was needed for a different role…I learned months later that someone else had long been earmarked for the position, yet not one of those people along the way had the courage or compassion to be honest with me at any point to explain it wasn’t going to happen and that there was already a plan for that role. In fact I was lied to and told the role wouldn’t even be filled for at least a year or longer.
“Coaching” and “mentoring” and “advocating” were actually ways to collectively convince me to stick with the role they wanted me to play, where I would be grossly underpaid. A manager finally made good on my salary, yet when I tried to negotiate the salary vs bonus ratio (to a higher base lower bonus), told me that by doing that I was saying to him that I wasn’t committed to working hard and growing the business - which was unfortunate given how wildly inaccurate that was, yet for some reason they decided it was an acceptable put-down to use to get me to second guess myself and accept what I was being offered. Rather than considering that not everyone is in it for the bonus, some people will give you their all everyday, for a fair wage and a “thank you” at the end of the year.
Individuals were allowed to stay in the business despite evidence of poor/detrimental contributions. Poor managers were allowed to stay in the business no matter how many times their teams complained to HR with evidence of wrong doing or poor treatment.
For being an “open and honest” culture, Talon suffers a massive identity crisis between trying to figure out what they need to represent to the market to accelerate perceived growth, what they need to convince staff they are, and what they actually are as a company. They can finally reinvent themselves once they are bought by whoever is willing to take on the half truths.
Lastly, the devil is in the detail - very prescriptive language is used very purposefully, more than you typically see at companies. Quite often you ask a question and don’t actually get an answer back, but rather “positioning” that absolves them.
