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> “We need to break down silos between departments and get people to collaborate better” — almost every leader everywhere. Almost all 'leaders' in corporate ar
by thelastgallon 1y ago
> “We need to break down silos between departments and get people to collaborate better” — almost every leader everywhere.
Almost all 'leaders' in corporate are completely clueless. There are gatekeepers who 'manage' access to the leaders. Nobody can meet with the leaders. Every meeting with the leader is controlled by these gatekeepers. They decide who will be allowed in a meeting. And what they will present. The powerpoints will be carefully crafted to make everything a success story, the numbers massaged to show some growth of something desirable, decline of something undesirable and wins and applauds all around. Every failure is a massive success. The small number of people who are allowed in these meetings are handpicked. The gatekeeping org is full of extremely incompetent loyal lackeys who call themselves experts at executive communications, budgeting, forecasting, data analytics, etc; grant themselves high titles, more pay than engineering roles.
The gatekeepers keep exceptionally good relationships with other gatekeeping orgs. Even if there is something incredibly bad in the other org, they craft a narrative and make it sound like a success story and there is something on the roadmap to improve. It is critically important for gatekeepers to keep this 'success' story because gatekeepers hire each other. Nobody else can hire them.
These gatekeepers also create endless bureaucracy, hire LOTS of extreme clueless people who don't understand anything, but make high level decisions on things they don't have any clue about. Think about a dog making decisions on whether to fund cancer research vs more dog treats or chasing cars. Also, they create a LOT of systems and broken process that require their approvals. Broken processes helps empire building and also keeps them in power. Anybody who needs anything done has to reach out to them directly and they escalate within the org to get it done. Then the person owes them a favor. A working process takes power away from them.
The level of cluelessness of leaders is unbelievable. The gatekeepers constantly say we need to dumb things down. This is unfathomable, because the gatekeepers themselves are headless chickens. All the leaders want is pretty ppts (and eliminate trigger works, every leader has a list of trigger words or their own arcane vocabulary that they want to use), some like bento boxes, some like sankey charts and some leaders who have seen other people ppts ask the gatekeepers that they like that specific slide from that meeting, can we have a chart like that?
Source: I am an engineer now working in a gatekeeping org (in a mega corp).
- thelastgallon 1y agoI suspect the gatekeeping orgs collude and orchestrate the hiring of 'leaders'[1]. The sacred duty of the gatekeeping orgs is to preserve the gatekeeping org. These people are extremely well connected throughout the company. In fact, the only thing they are known for is for their connections. You might have used their services in your org, if something needed to be escalated in another org. [1] Reminds me of Bene Gesserit(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_Gesserit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bene_Gesserit) who install the 'leaders' they want. Except the gatekeepers have no greater mission other than keeping the gatekeeping orgs.
- AnonymousPlanet 1y agoReminds me of the Civil Service in the BBC series Yes, Minster.
- rikroots 1y agoReminds me of why I left the Civil Service after 18 years. The volume of stupidity seems to increase exponentially, the higher you climb through the ranks.
- hassleblad23 1y agoThat makes coasting easy for everyone.
- Spooky23 1y agoProbably the most spot on assessment I’ve read in years. I’m kind of stuck with golden handcuffs for a time, but I’m deeply uncomfortable with the toxic behaviors I have to engage in to allow my team to thrive. It’s bad for the soul.
- YZF 1y agoThis is why golden handcuffs are terrible yet organizations keep wanting to have them. Why can't CEOs understand that having lots of people around who are staying mostly because of some RSUs but wouldn't otherwise want to be there is a poison to any organization. It's weird how supposedly super smart people can't get compensation and incentives right.