Toxic, Disorganized Mess - STAY AWAY - Anonymous employee Kong Employee Review

Back-stabbing, politicking, general disorganization, dysfunction and an overall lack of trust is rampant across most teams. No clear direction on platform enhancements and product releases. Little to no enablement for employees outside of a dozen or so poor-quality training videos filmed with an iPhone or webcam. Sales leadership for North America is a train wreck, an utter disaster. The recent removal of the incompetent, narcissistic, toxic presence that had no business being in a leadership role, and everyone (sans leadership) knew it. Sales teams, following their leaders, are the first to point a finger at various support teams when deals go south, never taking ownership or responsibility for their own shortcomings and deficiencies. As a result, sales reps rarely earns the trust of prospective customers yet continually deflect blame across other support teams, while never being remotely in the stratosphere of hitting a quarterly number. However, if you can put together a pretty powerpoint for QBRs loaded with unattainable numbers and say "bullish about next quarter" every other sentence, management will look the other way as it relates to your multitude of deficiencies as a manager and you're golden. The corresponding attrition rate for employees on this team (and across the company, which now qualifies for "rats fleeing the ship" territory) is a direct result of leadership not demonstrating that it has the discipline or mettle to make immediate, widespread changes to sales and sales leadership to reverse course. Despite what is promised during the recruitment process or posted on the company website, you'll quickly learn that there are "Rules For Thee But Not For We" such as "Unlimited" PTO and "Unplug" Weekends, for example, where you'll find people Slacking and texting you as frantically as if it was the final hours of quarter-end, where the financial goal is nowhere in sight (which it usually isn't). The newly-added "Core Value" OWN IT is a joke. For many employees, and without question enterprise sales in the US, what OWN IT actually means when deals are hard (which is always), when deals push (which is frequent) and when deals are lost (which is often) is this: point fingers, deflect blame, and look for victims. When you find an unsuspecting victim, gaslight everyone. Never assess what you can do better or differently. Question how everyone other than yourself is doing their jobs. Introspection and looking for how the team can come together to improve are afterthoughts, at best. Rinse, repeat. There is a cancer at Kong. And it's killing this company.