I'm sorry, but State Farm has the most middle management I've ever seen at a corporation. One has to wonder what percent of premiums goes to paying these people that, aside from a few rare exceptions, do nothing but drain company resources? I personally cancelled my State Farm insurance after being a customer since the age of 16, when I saw first-hand the cost of the ineptitude around me.
4 replies (most recent on top)
The problem is that for decades, Systems was the place they sent you if you'd been laid off from some other facility. It didn't matter if you had zero Systems experience or knowledge. It was like a dumping ground for every useless warm body in the enterprise.
I wish performance was the reason certain managers were purged, but it's hard to have faith in that when I see the strategy the organization is using for culling other roles.
Seems to me leadership will be smaller, but just as detached as ever. Worse still, I see that now some of our resident pencil pushers are actually expected to get involved in technical strategy or tactical decisions, and some of them are wholly unqualified. I guess we'll see.
Rough crowd. To the OP, part of all of these restructures is a big reduction in management and a very thinned leadership rank. SF is very thin in leadership now.
And I’ve met a lot of really good leaders. A lot of leaders in IT were not selected because of numbers, but bc they were not considered effective. Of course there are some not so good ones, but I’ve seen a lot of them get them door. And most places have the same thing, some good and not so good. No one has only rock stars.
Like I said there are a few exceptions throughout the enterprise, but from my personal experience, they are very few and far between. Most prefer to manufacture drama, take sides, lie, drink the kool-aid regardless of outcome, don't give credit for hard work and great contributions, etc. Might as well call them premium s---ers.
Some of our middle managers actually help guide the business. For example, in Systems, service managers sometimes know how to keep State Farm from signing bad contracts with unscrupulous vendors, which earns their salary several times over.
I've had a few managers like that. They were a joy to work for, even though they could be quite terse at times.
Of course, for every manager like that, there are 10 more who are basically pencil pushers whose primary job is acting as a mindless conduit for information to flow downhill. I've never understood the purpose of this type of manager.