1. I found middle management to be very representative of a lot of the bad things happening in our cultural landscape. I never had a disagreement with anyone during my time at Shaw because I’m an agreeable person (too much so) but I really just lacked a lot of respect for the way supervisors and lower management, as well as HR, handled situations. Sick days are a really big deal to this company and while I understand why, the lack of empathy and tactful approach to delicate situations caused me to break down at work on more than one occasion toward the end of my time. I never communicated the lack of support I felt and that’s definitely something I need to recognize as my own fault, but I didn’t feel the empathy was there for me to feel comfortable coming forward with serious concerns.
2. After taking the time to listen to my colleagues calls and customer interactions, I was appalled at the lack of willingness to solve complex customer issues. I think a lot of people lacked empathy around me and it got to the point where I lost all faith that anyone productive would be there to move up in the company and enact real change. The laziness became too much for me to bear because I’m deeply affected by small dumb things!
3. Shaw is currently going through what they call a “total business transformation” after the voluntary departure program left a lot of room for new leaders to emerge. While this sounds promising in theory, the main area in which I feel the higher-ups have failed is in instilling the right attitudes and cultures to make marginalized voices want to step up and take on responsibilities that they’ve earned. Instead, I saw a lot of office politics coming into play that allowed the rich to get richer, as well as the promoting of unqualified candidates in an effort to appear more inclusive and diverse.
I don’t think the company has grasped the idea that they can’t just promote minorities and call it a day — they need to overhaul the entire system to be more empathy-based in order to elevate the voices that need to be heard. I’m not sure what’s going on in HR but I think that’s the department that mainly is dropping the ball on that front. There are a lot of great resources to teach agents to be better salespeople, tech supports, etc., but there aren’t a lot of leaders teaching their teams how to be good people.
Should people already know how to be good people?
Ok, sure, maybe that’s not Shaw’s job, but it’s definitely a leader’s job. Shaw is not putting people in leadership roles that have any intention of embracing both assertiveness and empathy in equal measure. I think the problem with Shaw is that they see tears as a sign of weakness instead of a sign of strength.
