Mixed Emotions - Senior Business Manager, IT AT&T Employee Review

AT&T is working to "cross-pollinate" skills between wireless & landline orgs - while this is good if you're from the landline side, if you're from a legacy mobility side, the movement could take you from a high-growth, fast moving division into a negative-growth, dying division. Senior leadership says the right things, but often the execution of those ideas and strategies get filtered while working down through multiple levels of leadership (from C-Level to EVPs to SVPs to VPs to AVPs to EDs to Directors to 2nd line then 1st line managers and the front line employees. There is too much bureaucracy and process orientation in many orgs - it appears that many people are so focused on working the processes they support that they forget what we're really trying to accomplish. In addition, there are a high number of employees with 25, 30, 35, or even 40 years of experience. There are some good sides to this, but with what appears to be a high percentage of employees with long tenure, I have questions about succession planning for when those employees begin to retire in large numbers. Because of the shifts between legacy environment and large numbers of high tenure employees, advancement potential appears to be reduced for 2nd line employees. In my personal experience, I have applied for Director-level positions which I was highly qualified for, only to be told by the hiring Executive Directors that they could not even consider me because I was not already a Director. Only existing directors could be considered for lateral moves, so promotions were not possible. This situation has also been confirmed with other 2nd level managers. Last point is the constant reorganizations. In the 10 years I have been with the company (and legacy divisions), I have had 15 different supervisors, although only one came from being selected for a different position.