The business seems to be fine and it's still growing. But with some M&A, they seemed to have troubles with the integration, especially on culture and people. For example, the IT team I worked for was the one with great issues. The CIO tends to use the old school 'control theory' without understanding the IT business and people, merely a layman manages the professionals. They call the IT professionals knowledge workers with no respect in their minds, there's nearly no career development but only hypocritical sweet talk. There's no 'appreciation' culture, but 'blame 'whose fault'. they hired more and more like them to 'control' the professionals. Their CIO was a layman who got moved from a non-IT position. All he knows are the IT terms from Gartner - BIG data, IoT, Agile, digital transformation, blah, blah, he only uses them with his own understanding with arrogance to cheat the board of directors. He tries to "control" everything to follow his will. He micromanages the team. Managers' major work will be providing documents, emails, PPT reports. People have to spend quite a lot of time in useless meetings to explain things. He keeps blaming why those so-called poor managers do not get things done on time. Then the managers have to cascade down the pressure on IT professionals to work overtime. The IT leaders do not have general ideas how commonly IT resources should be allocated for that much work, for such size a company, nor know how to motivate IT professionals. All they do is to keep pushing and pushing, specifically: The so-called Front Office App director is an aggressive, arrogant control freak who created a stressful team working environment. and people in her team better shut up and always listen to her. The IT control lead is the one who is good at creating a lot of useless paperwork to control and extremely bureaucratic stuff. She only responds timely to the boss level person. If your rank is low, don't expect a timely response. The PMO lead seems to be a stutter ass-kisser. Whatever the CIO said, he would agree and ask others to do it to please the CIO. He's ‘excellent' at checking people's titles and deciding what to do and takes opportunities to be 'connected' with a high rank guy, which was encouraged. He has added more and more non-value-added so-called control processes to IT based on his own understanding, not industrial standards. he's good at 'up-management' but tough to his team. it was said many of his guys left because of his management. and there're many other stories. they have steep turnover in the team, key resources left, but no one cares, no one asks why. The teams are siloed, IT directors have their own ideas and barely get agreement, and the CIO seems not to be able to 'control' this. Sitting in one of the meetings, they will debate "this is mine, that's yours". The teams have to work in an overly political environment. And there're additional stories and a few friendly leaders, but most leaders don't care about why professionals left, and called people resign as' evolving ', and of course that people who left were "not doing good jobs". The leaders do not resolve problems but try to resolve the people who raised problems by questioning them by forcing them to leave. They created countless file-based PowerPoint just because their CIO doesn't know how to use anything else better. or ironically, the IT team is one of the teams that might not use the latest technology. The CIO's job is then to copy and paste the project PowerPoint from those 'low level' guys. Well, maybe summarize a little bit then talk to the board of directors about the great jobs he has done. While the "low level knowledge workers" were never sincerely appreciated. Under this IT leadership, the IT team is full of arrogance, bureaucracy, politics, stress, hypocrisy, micromanagement, no-respect, useless meetings, opportunists, layman leading the experts, "never good enough', arbitrary, bossy, no consistency, only 'command and orders', no communication, no autonomy, full of bias. picky, if you ask for help, they will kick the ball back. The trust has been completely destroyed. They don't believe that people are self-motivated, they want to control every single step with 'reports', and try to make people feel bad, but they as the leader always have some ideas. and btw, the workload is never sufficient, people better work overtime. Working hours to 12-14 hours a day and numerous night evening meetings is common but useless. There are no true 360 feedbacks anymore. The CIO leadership won't hear what's happening in the 'lower' level people, or they pretend they're listening but after the survey done, the job is done. and they care about those top rank. For instance, VP guys' voices, lower-level team voices are simply fart. BTW: They set up a surveillance system in the company, spying on everyone stealthily, installing or removing software on your computer without telling you.
