Gates Foundation reviews about "manager"

The foundation leadership doesn’t care about employee development and retention. As one deputy director put it “we’re not here to be an employer, we’re here to achieve our strategy goals”. Why those two things are put at odds with one another is baffling, but a pervasive attitude of leadership throughout the foundation. There is little to no training, yet somehow most managers are deeply skilled at this line of thinking and demeaning their employees - taking credit for their work in public settings, making them perform two or three jobs with no pay increase or title change and then holding sessions on burnout and asking why people feel so stressed, hiring limited term employees and offering no support at the end of their contract, laying full time employees off while telling them they’ve done excellent work and there was nothing they could have done to improve. This place is full of performative strategy shifts and reorgs and leadership has convinced themselves that those types of changes (and impatience) somehow equates to impact. Unfortunately it does not.

Promotions or moving to a different team isn’t easy for Senior Program Assistants. Small company and very few new roles come available and the ones that do are usually “created” for a specific person the hiring manager has chosen.

HR and management training could use some improvement especially compared to companies that put more time and emphasis and money on training their managers. However, if on the right team it does help!

As with anywhere, your experience will be dependent upon your manager in many ways. Get with a great manager, and the sky is the limit.

Bureaucratic/political work environment, and priorities are set from the top so a lot of time spent managing up. People managers are a very rare commodity - leadership hired for their technical expertise, not for their skills in managing people/relationships/conflict/etc. Competitive work environment with antiquated philosophies (in the already problematic field of philanthropy) around investing. Lack of transparency into leadership decision making.

Very political, and senior manager are most typically hired from outside rather than promoting people internally. There's not much upward advancement.

While strategy helps structure and articulate grant portfolios , it can constitute a significant - sometimes excessive - part of the work for all program teams, which otherwise could be devoted to grant design, local partnership building or other country-level work. Work life balance can be challenging to achieve based on the role, depending on if the team is sufficiently staffed, but can be developed with the manager.

Burnout is real No one way to navigate the system Career mobility is limited Experience really depends on your manager and team