#leadership

I think about all the talented people who have left this place not through layoffs but on their own. So many of them left because of ego clashes or small misunderstandings that could have been resolved if anyone had just acted like an adult. Treating people with respect works so much better than ruling through fear. EJ never figured that out.

Economic opportunity is one of the societal issues of our time, and Linkedin has been and will continue to be the platform that professionals and companies turn to as they navigate the changing world of work. For us to meet this moment, we must ready ourselves to deliver a step change in impact across our products, businesses, and platforms, while continuing to operate more profitably. We need to reinvent how we work, with agile teams focused on our highest priorities, and by shifting investments toward areas such as infrastructure to fulfill our mission and vision over the long term. This requires hard prioritization and tradeoffs.

Today I'm sharing the difficult decision that I, along with our leadership team, have made to reduce roles across GBO, Marketing, Engineering and Product. If you are impacted, or proposed to be impacted in EMEA & APAC, by these changes, you will receive a calendar invite to a notification meeting within the next hour. For impacted teams, you'll learn more about your org-specific information from your leaders shortly, and updates will be added to go/CompanyExchange throughout today.

In addition to role reductions, we are scaling back investments in some areas including marketing campaigns, vendor spend, customer events, and underutilized office space, so we can focus teams on priorities that have the broadest impact with the highest ROl. You will receive details about these changes from respective functional leaders.

I want to acknowledge and thank those who will be leaving Linkedin. You have helped build LinkedIn's culture and platform into what it is today, and I hope you are proud of the lasting impact your work will continue to have on our members, customers, and colleagues.
For those staying, first and foremost, I would like to invite you to support our impacted colleagues. We will move forward together with focus and clear priorities to reach our potential as the platform that the world's professionals and companies increasingly turn to.

Thank you, again, to our teammates who are departing, and to everyone across LinkedIn who continues to show up and support each other.

Dan

BCC: All Global Employees

Good bye Mahmoud to Optum Insight under Candyman100x

Incoming Hari who worked for WiPro and Cognizant as your SVP

Get ready ready!

Just wait until the AI bubble bursts and companies realize it can’t do half the things they expected it to do, and that in a lot of cases it’s actually slowing people down instead of helping. I don’t know if this leadership is capable of that kind of reflection, but maybe then they’ll think about all the talent and institutional knowledge they pushed out in the rush to chase AI.

I just started my career at Nike and I think I made a huge mistake joining. My manager is impossible. Every week he either ki-ls our ideas, adds random nonsense to our projects, or just criticizes for no reason depending on his mood. He doesn't understand the technical work but tells us how to do it anyway. Then later he asks why we did it that way. He interrupts everyone constantly and yells at least three days a week. I'm so tired. Is this the norm when it comes to managers here?

Salim will hit his 2 year mark at Vanguard in a few months. I left the organization mid-2025 and had already noticed a lot of change since he joined, especially in leadership and organizational initiatives. From a Crew perspective, do you think Salim is an improvement over Tim? Do you think his outsider status could make him more likely to go after benefits, partnership, etc.?

My own perspective: Over my years at Vanguard there seemed to be less of an emphasis of developing and promoting from within. This accelerated massively over my last year.

Some one tell him stop with the navi hoodies and high tops. I am embarrassed for all of you

Just announced at tier meeting , effective immediately no more overtime for R&O , unless approved by leadership.
I wonder if RIF’s are next?

Today is a reminder that job cuts do not just happen to struggling employees or people doing the bare minimum. Some of the smartest and most respected people I know here were affected too, including people with years of experience and records most teams would want to keep. Not sure how this is supposed to benefit Cisco in the long run, but the leadership seems to think it will.

It has now been over a year since I left State Farm. I know people rant and rave on here about toxic environments, dysfunctional leaders, etc etc etc. But one thing I've discovered over the past 12 months is that the State Farm environment can truly damage a person's well being and self confidence. I was in leadership when at SF, not in Claims. When I started at my new company, in a senior leadership role, it became clear to me right away the stark difference in work environment and leadership health. State Farm subtly pushes you down, questions everything you do, and makes you feel that anything you do is just not good enough.

I didn't realize, even as a leader, just how oppressive and damaging that is to an individual. There is no loyalty, support, appreciation for the workforce from executive leadership. State Farm leadership will praise you one minute and then turn around and make you feel an inch high because something wasn't done according to their expectations.

Instead of complaining, make the decision to leave, if you can. The subtle mental harm that State Farm propagates is worse than you believe.

Cheaper workers, offshoring, AI - whatever works. If they could charge us for the privilege of working here, they would.

I’ve been trying to wait out the correction for the people hired as “leaders” during the pandemic. I’m not sure if it’s just my BU or others were put in roles way beyond their skill set. It’s infuriating for me to have to sit in “coaching” and have my manager explain things they would have learned in the first semester of college, had they gone.

Why is my only opportunity for development wasted listening to someone who is twice my age and trying to explain a simple concept but still needs my guidance? WHY IS THIS PERSON HIGHER RANKED THAN ME?!

I don’t know how much more I can take of this. Will there be a correction for unskilled management?

Sometimes things aren’t the same when your bestie leaves. It is in-fact confusing to be a girl. let’s have some compassion and hold space for leadership during these unprecedented times

The new head of strategy was supposed to retire after the Hess integration. Why didn’t he? Is it because we don’t have anyone else capable?

Every time leadership reshuffles the org chart, employees do not feel alignment. They feel a wave of anxiety that another round of layoffs is coming. That feeling does not disappear after the new chart is published. It settles into the background and quietly consumes attention, focus, and energy. People start working two jobs. Their actual job, and the job of managing their own fear. On top of that, we are paying a massive tax on context switching. Teams barely get comfortable with new priorities or new leaders or new workflows before leadership announces another reset. It is impossible to build real momentum when you are constantly starting over, constantly reintroducing yourself, constantly trying to remember what the mission was supposed to be this quarter versus last quarter. I would argue that stability is not just nice to have. It is a genuine competitive advantage. But you cannot demand world class creativity and execution from people who are always bracing for impact. What the company actually needs is not another reorg. What we need is a resilient long term plan, a consistent direction, and a culture where people feel safe enough to do their best work. That is how you win, whether you are playing for now or for later.

Let me break down why most of the employees are unhappy. First, forced ranking. Everyone is fighting for survival, taking credit for others' work just to avoid a PIP. Second, false ranking. People on the fast track get top ratings even when they cause major problems. Third, location bias. An expert here gets rated lower than someone in a cheaper country who makes constant errors. Fourth, promoting incompetent people. Industry experts end up reporting to managers who don't understand the work. These problems could be solved, but leadership chooses not to.

Everyone has an opinion and a certificate on the wall, but nobody seems to know how to actually run anything anymore. Where is the management that has done the job before and can make a call? Because I am not seeing it. What I see is vague suggestions, meetings that end with no clear decision, and then people just doing whatever they think is right. Give me a real leader over a room full of advisors any day.

If you were in a war zone, how would you feel about having your division head with you in a fox hole? I would have been happy to have certain previous division heads with me. Not my current one. Would anyone want to be with their current divsion head in a fox hole during a war?

I’m sure there is a plan and it seems the first rule of Dan’s plan is not to talk about Dan’s plan

I’m just guessing but it would make sense if the plan is so unpalatable to existing employees that the leadership cannot be open about it

AT&T‘s leadership has been complete and utter failure under John Stankey. we continue to roll up debt, including spending $1.5 billion on an elaborate and lavish corporate headquarters in Plano Texas. Meanwhile, the company continues to lay off hard-working employees. They force employees to unnecessarily relocate in order to keep their jobs or commute, long distances entirely in an effort to force employees to quit and move off the payroll. This

This company lacks any kind of effective and moral leadership

It’s the next level leadership . What have they ever accomplished? All they have learnt is you are rewarded if you keep cutting cost.

I saw today that Vena is now asking people to contact their elected government representatives and ask them to approve/support his buyout of NS. This guy is so desperate for this to happen it is sickening.

Honestly, it feels like there’s some next-level scam going on between Deloitte and Kroger leadership. Half the time it feels like I work for Deloitte instead of Kroger.

They hire one senior person and fill the rest of the team with clueless recent grads, then expect everything to run smoothly. The leadership is weak, disconnected, and completely out of touch with how much extra burden that creates.

Better to find another job than keep working under incompetent leadership.

Looks like the Ford family just handed out a few more years of free money, proving that "d-mb" is a relative term when you've got $19 billion to burn. Sure, he was an arrogant id--t who took a job he definitely didn't qualify for, but let's be real: that's on the genius who thought hiring him was a good idea. At this point, the only one actually leaving is the rest of us.

What’s the magic word these days, strategy?

Because I have to ask, what actually makes a company great?

Is it the awards? The software? The return to office mandates? The endless systems and process changes that somehow make everything more complicated but never better?

Is it leadership that rebrands failure as transformation, then asks employees to trust the next pivot?

Is it accountability, or just accountability for everyone below a certain level?

Maybe greatness now means HR has enough time to monitor salaried employees’ attendance but not enough influence to protect institutional knowledge, experience, or morale.

And maybe AI really is the perfect corporate employee. It never pushes back, never says “this does not make sense,” and never reminds leadership that people actually matter.

But what is the strategy here? Not the slogan. Not the slide deck. The actual strategy.

Because from where a lot of employees sit, it does not look like a strategy. It looks like churn. New systems, new processes, new messaging, new priorities, every few months, while the people who know how the business actually works are treated like interchangeable parts.

A company is not great because it says it is. It is great when leadership knows where it is going, tells the truth about where it is, and respects the people who built the place before asking them to believe in the next transformation. Endless transformation isn't "transformation" it's chaos that drives poor quality, subpar results and unhappy employees.

Onshore collapses, offshoring expands. We get the scraps while leadership counts the profits.

HCSC according to Beckers article lost $1.7 Billion in 2025. The geniuses in charge tell everyone to track their backfill slots and make sure to keep them documented so that when money loosens up we can fill them. Then HR partners tell us if the back fills were lost in 2024 and 2025, you must have learned to live without the positions, only 2026 losses "MIGHT" be backfilled.

They keep piling on work, but yet they fund nothing to help automate or just invest in basic system infrastructure. Yet what business do we have expanding to other states without the staff to support this effort.

So why do I use the comparison to a trailer park? HCSC has ambitions on a beer budget, everyone wants to be something more but they forget they live in a trailer park. HCSC has turned into a run down, rusty trailer park of a company. Constantly broke, constantly thinking leadership is high and mighty but instead they are the drunk on the porch in their underwear at the trailer park.

Listening to Chuck talk about Circuit really made me laugh. 😂

Ford is in denial if they believe the supply base is responsible for their pathetic quality performance, First they purge their tenured engineers from the team and they revel in lowest price globally and can’t provide reliable repairs for recall issues.

No one is drinking the Ford Kool-Aid on TVM.

From Ford Authority:

Ford has certainly dealt with its fair share of quality issues over the past few years, leading to soaring warranty costs and a record number of recalls being issued. However, many of these quality woes stem from supplier parts, and not anything made by The Blue Oval itself, though it's obviously dealing with the repercussions. As such, while Ford attempts to improve its relationships with suppliers, the automaker is also getting serious about improving the quality of parts it procures from them.

According to Crain's Detroit Business, Ford is cracking down on supplier quality and costs by placing companies that exhibit quality issues on a "no bid" list for future contracts, as well as requiring others to submit three-year cost savings plans to prevent a similar outcome. The Blue Oval is requiring certain suppliers to enter what's known as "total value management" plans (TVMs), which require a certain percentage of cost savings on the overall supplier business every year.

TVM programs are nothing new nor uncommon, as automakers generally bind suppliers to meet certain quality and cost savings targets in that manner. What makes Ford's TVMs unusual, however, is that it's stepping up the enforcement of its multi-year requirement, and even pulling business from suppliers that don't reach some sort of agreement with the company.

At the same time, Ford was quick to point out that this is not a new policy, and that enforcing TVM programs are part of its broader efforts to improve quality and reduce costs in order to better "compete in a rapidly changing and complex industry."

“We work with each of our suppliers to seek ongoing improvements to address gaps in quality, cost, delivery and resilience, which may take multiple years to implement,” Ford spokeswoman Ursula Muller said in a statement. “Sourcing is a multi-dimensional process that rewards suppliers who perform and bring the best enterprise value for Ford and our customers.”

Here's an Interesting article that parallels what is happening in our industry today.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mark-zuckerberg-is-realizing-that-when-you-treat-your-workers-like-human-garbage-they-might-not-like-you-anymore/ar-AA2369ab?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=6a04bce8f6f34192a3919b59b944e2ea&cvpid=5ea63c8bb12642a98ff3e9b42593777f&ei=36

Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is apparently shocked to discover that when you treat employees like garbage, they stop applauding your “vision.” After years of layoffs, culture rewrites, and “efficiency” crusades, Meta is now learning the obvious: workers don’t develop warm feelings toward leaders who treat them like cost centers with pulse rates.

And the irony? Everything described in that article reads like a template for what BNY employees complain about daily on this forum. The same themes echo: performative culture, leadership detachment, endless “transformation,” and a workforce managed like an inconvenient expense. Employees at both companies describe the same pattern — praise the mission, cut the people, then act confused when morale collapses.

The punchline is simple: whether it’s Silicon Valley or Wall Street, executives keep discovering the same truth. If you treat workers like garbage, they eventually notice — and they talk about it.

Just watched the “Highlights” of the convention. Same old bs blah blah blah as every convention. Nothing will change in any significant way. I swear these are the same taking points I heard 30+ years ago 🫩

Please stop sending unprepared or poorly matched representatives as the face of the team or organization to seminars and conferences (external events). It was embarrassing to watch our representative at the AIChE recruiting event struggle to communicate and barely explain the material. We had to step in repeatedly to help her.
The same issue happens when people who simply want the spotlight are allowed to present technical work they cannot clearly articulate. Wanting visibility does not mean they can represent the science of the work they didn't contribute to.

Leadership changes coming? any info….

BNY has finished its evolution from financial institution to LinkedIn‑themed performance art, where optics outrank output and your “personal brand” is the only deliverable that matters.

Real work is optional; what counts is the curated feed of hallway selfies, Teams‑call enthusiasm, and gratitude posts praising and thanking the EC, all polished to a corporate shine.

Following RV's brilliant example, Leadership has quietly traded competence for corporate‑influencer energy, rewarding visibility over execution because it’s easier to manage a workforce obsessed with image than one asking hard questions.

The shift isn’t accidental. It’s a distraction from layoffs, offshoring, and AI quietly absorbing job families. If employees stay busy perfecting “leadership presence,” they won’t notice the restructuring happening beneath them. BNY doesn’t want performers — it wants performances. Show up to the photo‑op town hall, drop a few “inspiring journey” hashtags, give a like to an EC empathy post, sing hallelujah praises to the almighty RV and EC team and suddenly you’re a rising star, even if your actual output fits on a sticky note.

At BNY, the only performance that matters is the one you can screenshot.

$1 billion share buyback announced while they have $500 million they still need to repurchase from the last buyback.
At the same time...the leadership team has wipes out the last 6 years of growth and gains.
They are basically gaslighting shareholders at this point as I'd rather be able to dump ally shares at $250 as opposed to $98.
The announcement didn't help stock price as it only stayed in the green for the first hour and a half of market open.

What happened to the "Corrupt DXE..." post? Great post - very informative, detailed, & with references. Some good responses as well.

Did an administrator pull the post? Or, one of the leaders that was called out? My concern is that OP, who was laid off last week, pulled the post out of fear of losing his/her severance.

Let's be honest about what's happening at Humana. Constant turnover, good people leaving every month, reorgs that make everything worse, leadership saying one thing while we see something else entirely. Who can think this is a good way to run a company?

Fidelity's leaders should be ashamed but that would require them to be able to feel shame. Ned must be rolling around in his grave, rest in peace. I didn't agree with everything he did but he never showed the lack of respect for employees that we see today.

So much this! Reposting from @a6+1krerh6ct for being 100% correct.

Did anyone else see the post where the Chief Digital Officer was just dancin’ around at some Good Energy Event? I didn’t see her doing any actual work.
This was posted on LinkedIn.