At one time it was a pleasure to work with most knowledgeable and capable people from whom I could learn a lot. As the years went by, I realized that Nike no longer cultivates such a culture. Roles once held by experts, are now being performed by mediocrities.
Why are talents no longer important here? Why is the company increasingly driving them to the competition? Absolutely incomprehensible.
8 replies (most recent on top)
To the comment on the threat of filling too many roles internally… just to provide context, this has nothing to do with checking boxes or not wanting to retain great talent, it is a true formula of moving talent too often internally causes major business disruption and threat to continuity, especially at leadership levels. Moving E bands before the 1-2 year mark in role is a risk to business disruption, S band is typically 2 years (sometimes 3) for business risk and E7+ is 3 years. In people leader and function ownership spaces (at every company) there are typically 1-3 year dashboards and initiatives needed to accomplish (plus provide leadership stability to teams. If you go through a big 1-2 years of higher than average internal moves (which we did in FY22, even if not seen as much on the outside, it was a very high internal movement year) then you need a stabilizing year to keep people in roles stabilizing the work and business and therefore leaning on external hiring. Then in 1-2 years it cycles back around to a heavy internal sprint for the next 1-2 years. Good healthy business practice
@4mzc is right on the money. i cannot tell you how many phd's without an ounce of leadership skill or even a whisper of empathy get direct reports and drag down the morale of their group
@2ddc+1hgBh83P, and beyond that, expert skills are valued way more than any leadership capability. The number of "experts" that we promote into leadership roles who are complete psychopaths with no business leading teams is astonishing.
Our team experience is similar to the one mentioned below with at least two high performers and great people managers leaving due to no growth opportunity and no support from above. It really hurts the morale and makes the rest of us wonder what our opportunities will be if those two couldn't advance despite being so widely recognized as great leaders. Sadly these days it does seem that leadership cares only about checking DEI boxes and very little about retaining good leaders that have been with the company for years. It's all for nought though because once Nike hires those DEI candidates, leadership does nothing to develop or retain them, so not many last anyway. HR and company leadership doesn't seem to care or recognize that you need to lift everyone together and invest in a culture of developing people rather than using crude short term metrics. So to confirm what the OP says, I fully agree that Nike doesn't focus on retaining great talent. The current 'leaders' care only about DEI metrics and nothing else and let's face it Beaverton isn't exactly a diverse place.
Because sucking up skills are higher valued than expert skills in your area of expertise.
My team lost one of its long term star players last year because he had maxed out his potential in his role but there was no more advancement opportunity. Rather than try to keep him Nike let him walk out the door. Unbelievable. People come and people go but losing that guy hurt. He went to a different company and last I heard was thriving. We’re lucky my team is strong so it wasn’t the end of the world. Still it showed that Nike doesn’t at all value keeping its best talent.
This was written on a whiteboard after an executive meeting:
SWOT analysis
Threat
Filling too many roles with internal talent;
The internally grown experts are being replaced by newcomers with the thought they would bring better innovation.
Because you're hiring based on some sort of societal bingo card and not on talent. It's really all it is