Companies are eliminating hierarchies to cut costs. Companies like Amazon and Tesla have reduced middle management positions. In a memo reviewed by the Wall Street Journal last year, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk wrote, “We are flattening the management structure to improve communication, combining functions where sensible and trimming activities that are not vital to the success of our mission.” The LL6 supervisor is clearly not vital to Ford's mission.
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Christ on a bike that's toxic.
@ FireInBelly good one. I nominate my pervy supervisor who turns every conversation / meeting to the topic of sax. His favorite thing to say is that he would pay the women contractors more if they did a pole or lop dance for him. So he should be in the calendar doing a pole dance. Of course it would be revolting LOL.
A lot of negative talk about Ford supervisors. Maybe they can win hearts and minds by publishing a calendar featuring a different supervisor for each month (tastefully done, of course).
One example is the American Lung Association's Firefighter Calendar:
https://www.lung.org/get-involved/ways-to-give/firefighter-calendar
Important Ford lesson have learned: middle managers are foolish precisely because they believe that their tinkering is valuable instead of costly. Creating endless spreadsheets and power points all based upon faulty data, then creating “stories” for improvements, staffing up to implement the “stories”, utter failures because the “stories” were pure fiction and fantasy.
I believe others have also learned this lesson as many posts have commented on the problem of having middle managers/supervisors who are clueless about the areas they “manage”. This leads to middle managers opining endlessly on topics they have zero knowledge about but somehow have convinced themselves they are experts on the topics.
Too many Chiefs and not enough Indians doesn't help communication nor will it help the company move forward. During the 2019 SRD some dead wood was cut .... but lot of very productive intelligent middle mgmt with their huge base of historical knowledge were terminated. Not only did they get things done, the brain-drain from their loss was tremendous and senior upper mgmt had no clue how to do the work. For months, the lower ranks who inherited their former coworkers responsibilities struggled because they simply did have the historical knowledge to do the jobs. Very few VPs were SRD'd in 2019, but middle mgmt ranks were shredded because they had to make up monetary shortfall. Maybe the next round of layoffs should be limited to strictly L3+ including VP levels instead of middle mgmt. Eliminating those salaries this time would definitely save the company a ton of money, save numerous lower ranking positions, and certainly improve communication amongst all the levels.
OMG!!! I don’t know if we worked for the same LL5 or if the technical article review was more widespread than we knew. I had forgotten about the technical articles we had to read and summarize for our status reports. There were so many parameters! It had to be current, had to pertain something related to our team’s responsibilities, had to relate to the automobile industry, and on and on. So many articles were rejected because they weren’t “right enough”. Another fine example of assignments that don’t move the company forward or help us design and build better vehicles. During this time there was a hyper focus on making sure everyone’s time was billable to projects and as a result the time was inaccurately billed to projects. A waste of time and a waste of project’s budgets.
I once worked for an LL5 who required the LL6 to read all the technical newspapers and magazines and provide him weekly with a summary of articles that the LL4 might be interested in. The LL5 then assigned one LL6 a month to aggregate all those summaries into a report for the LL4, with the LL5 as the author. The cost of this exercise was 240+ man hours a month. In the end the LL4 did not even care about the report. The LL5 was passing it off like he was reading all the technical newspapers and magazines and actually understood them. The LL5 was a joke. While all this nonsense was going on the real work at the company was ignored or kicked down the road.
The LL5 level and LL3 level could be eliminated with zero impact to real work.
I agree that about 30% of GSRs are motivated contributors and some of the motivated who are interested in leadership are promoted. After being promoted they are given so many special assignments and committees that they have little time to contribute anything of value. Since upper management believes a good leader doesn’t need to know anything about the functions for which they are responsible the leaders get moved around a lot and in a few years the leaders turn into managers. It’s a race to the bottom.
@4xym+19QEeRbZ thanks for the good laugh. The correct statement is 30% of the Ford GSRs are both passionate and capable leaders who care deeply about Ford Motor Company and the welfare of our customers, employees, dealers and shareholders. The remaining 70% should be canned, otherwise once the LL6 are nixed the non-working social climbing GSRs will fill the void the LL6 left - this has repeated over and over again. The Ford culture is rotten to the core.
Ford GSRs are both passionate and capable leaders who care deeply about Ford Motor Company and the welfare of our customers, employees, dealers and shareholders. After elimination of the LL6 role, it will be apparent to all stakeholders that a employee-directed team will ensure a successful and positive force guides Ford Motor Company to achieve continued success.
Boston Consulting Group is going to merge with Boston Dynamics and robot dog consultants will make all the decisions for us. It will be great.
Please don't laugh I am totally serious.
Diversity rules.
Technical competence and productivity.... not so much.
There use to be GSR 9 and 10 which allowed for technical progression.
HR decided to combine GSR 9 and 10 to LL6, originally they claimed those on technical track could remain technical as a LL6. Rather quickly they changed their tune and started saying all LL6 are interchangeable and should be management track.
Years later they gave a half hearted attempt at having LL6 who were technical specialists, then Boston Consulting basically eliminated most of the technical specialists.
The net is Ford doesn’t respect or reward technically competent and productive individuals.
Before the so-called Smart Redesign, Ford could and did reward some top-performing technical people by making them LL6 Technical Specialists. The Boston Consulting Group's algorithm targeted many of those people for separation or demotion, leaving a technical ladder above SG8 that's a faint shadow of what it used to be.
Part of the problem is a peculiarity of US corporate culture. If someone maxxes out their progression as a technical contributor and hits the ceiling as a GSR8, their options to advance in the company are to change career to an LL track, or leave for a senior tech role elsewhere. A lot of LL's were once top technical contributors who were rewarded with a LL role just because there wasn't anything else their supervisors could give them. This results in a lot of people promoted away from where they're most effective, bloats the overall number of LL roles, and ends up bloating the company even more because you can't survive as an LL without direct reports, so they gotta hire some. None of this would need to happen if there was a track to simply become a more senior GSR.
I’m not sure that in all cases the LL6 is the management layer that needs to go. When I was an LL6 before retiring I actually knew how to do the work my direct reports were responsible for. I provided deliverables, helped solve technical issues and acted as an advocate when my team was asked to do ridiculous things. The LL5’s never helped resolve issues. They held wasteful meetings where they shared what they heard in other wasteful meetings. They gave me many assignments such as metrics and reports that never changed any of our actions or behaviors. My most productive years were when I didn’t have an LL5 and reported directly to the LL4 because it eliminated a layer of unnecessary meetings and reports. Keep only the layers that resolve issues and provide value that supports designing, manufacturing and selling vehicles.
So glad I retired. Those sensitivity training videos and code of conduct videos were irritating.
Corporate America just down right s—s.
Less supervisors means less meetings wasting everyone's time. Less talking and more doing. That is what HR needs to have as a slogan for a new imitative to increase productivity and reduce the billion dollar losses. Out of a 8 hour day, engineers can have around 5 hours of meetings. Oh wait.. sorry HR this has nothing to do with diversity and PC cancel culture.
The long arc towards productivity only bends towards a supervisor-less workforce if people work to make it happen. For Ford to be a survivor, ditch the supervisor!
@ 1vhh LOL. I thought our Dearborn walking club would disband with work from home. But nope, now they walk even more. I didn’t think it was possible as they were always walking or having a social club at the cafe. They are logging 3-4 hours a day during work to walk and meeting at Home Depot.
I guess that is the social prowess others have mentioned that allows for the non performers to advance at Ford.
The Ford walkers and lunch club is quite busy in Dearborn from Monday to Friday. How does anything get done at Ford? Oh, they have contractors that work! Silly me.
There are many at Ford who through social/political prowess are able to slide by with mediocre/dismal performance at work and still get accolades and promotions.
The interesting thing is that these people are also nearly always living paycheck to paycheck and willing to do any dirty tricks to keep their job.
Meanwhile the disciplined dedicated hard working high performers have the same discipline with their finances and are often wealthier than the LL6 and LL5 they “work” for.
Interesting how things play out.
Ford needs to decide if they want to continue to be a company lead by posers or one lead by people of substance.
Ford salary employees are big money wasted. Why do I say this?
Ford engineers hire outside suppliers to do the engineering, build the equipment, service the equipment. Majority of Ford engineers don't know how to use the equipment that they purchased so they hire outside engineers to do thier work.
Ford can eliminate 50 percent of thier engineers and the company will do just fine.
Ford LL6 to LL3, they can also reduce the headcount to 50 percent and everthing will be just fine.
This is a big cost saving that Ford leadership never look at.
What part of we live in f—ing capitalist system and you are just a number ($$$) you don’t understand?
At the end of the day we are a number and we cost money to the company. When they need to boost profits, they are just going to slash their highest expenses aka highest paid employees regardless of performance!!!
Need to develop a plan to mandate Ford employees will be Zero-Supervised Employees (ZSEs) by 2035, banning the employment of supervisory personnel in an effort to boost productivity and mental health of all employees.
Yes ford needs a good haircut but they never seem to cut the ones who need to be cut. As mentioned below the last cuts targeted people who were about to get a pension bump and/or the ones who have higher salaries than their peers. Never occurred to the consulting firm that those with higher salaries have been getting better reviews than their peers and therefore bigger increases and bonuses. It’s like saying they could save money if the cut some of their highly skilled staff and replaced them with people with lower salaries. It would be advantageous to cut those who aren’t productive and not replace them. But that will never happen.
The company is in need of serious pruning. The problem is who is going to do it? The people who created the current situation (aka the leadership levels)?, Boston Consulting? Both of these have been utter failures. Every time there is a haircut, there follows promotions and hiring. The net is always getting rid of the highly skilled and productive employees and replacing them with clones of the ineffective leadership (unskilled lazy sycophants).
It is humorous to watch these posts as people scramble to claim that their area is the exception and has talented hard working leaders and workers. Of course we all know why, they are afraid HR is reading the posts and want to protect their cushy jobs.
The amount of waste at this company disgusts me. My department could be trimmed 70%, we have so many dead weight and political positions. Even with all the extra staff the LL5 talks of hiring more people. Even the good people have stopped working because they feel like a s—er when most people do nothing but talk. The company has become welfare for ever expanding friends and family contingent.
No, if you are going to eliminate a management layer, LL5 would be more appropriate. They are overcompensated in comparison. I have had many LL6s over the years.
Some were better than others. Most LL6s, in my experience, not only provide leadership, but are strong technical contributors.
Nix the LL5s, Nix the LL3s, Nix all the LL6s who have no understanding of the areas they are “supervising”. Nix all the slacking brown nosers. 50% of the company is dead weight.