Thread regarding Crown Castle International Corp. layoffs

The fundamental question of whether we should remain a REIT needs addressing, although it becomes less of an issues if fiber goes, it still harms our ability to operate as any kind of pseudo utility. Completely hamstrung our being able to self perform construction and large scale maintenance work.

@3cud+1pZAnv86 When our CLO downplayed installing security systems on all towers, I knew these people couldn't be serious about protecting company assets. A few hundred to a few thousand dollars to protect an asset insured for over $1 million sounds like a good investment to me.

The worst part about gutting the field force was that it took away our most visible presence with landlords, customers, etc. Crown went from the company people wanted to deal with to the albatross they hope doesn't get stuck around their neck.

Ask any field person for a candid assessment of the condition of our oldest asset class.
While you're at it ask how many security issues they've seen.

A complete restructuring to get rid of all the siloes. I.e. you have sales, but they are split into several different parts of the company. Sales of fiber, sales of tower space, sales of SD-WAN products, and sales of Colo space, all are in different parts of the org. Bring them under one umbrella, sales. Same as the company's accounting. They are divided. Put them all under the CFO with accounting, including payroll, under the CFO where that part of the business belongs. All the money should be under that person.

The enterprise security should be under a CIO in their part of the org. Get a CISO who is not afraid to take security by the horns and guide them in the right direction under the CIO. The CISO we have now is lazy and incompetent. He refuses to take charge and do real security tasks this company needs. Having a document manager send out documents is not real security. While at it, go through that whole department and place security people with real security knowledge and experience in those roles. There is no need for the non-security people running the security teams, i.e. a paralegal heads the SOC, a sales coordinator is their project manager for applications, a building janitor checks the documents for security keywords, and an accountant is their VP who has no security training whatsoever, and this list goes on and on. Too many non-qualified people are in security roles that have no real technology experience telling technology people how to secure technology. It makes no sense, but that shows how inexperienced and incompetent the CISO is.

Also, audit teams should not be under the CFO since their job is to protect the integrity of the company. They should have never been under the CFO for that is how financial and public trading cover-ups occur. cough Enron

Have a CTO for all the data and digital, networking, fiber, etc. under one leader. Right now they are all split and neither side knows what the other is doing. This is wasting a LOT of money on projects that are repeated and not coordinated together. No one on those teams will work with the other. There are fingers pointed when issues occur. I expect a breach any day due to how D&D will not work with anyone. Fiber is worse...

I won't even touch Business Support, Talent, HR, and the like. They are a complete disaster and seriously need a revamp. LN screwed the pooch with all of them.

I can keep going, but I'll be here all night with all the nonsense I have seen in this company. I'm still surprised they are as large as they are with how many people do repeat work and even more don't do any work at all. I watched a chick who was just hired a few months ago in Phoenix who is now sitting at her desk watching TV on her phone. She does that almost all day. It is people like her that should have been laid off. She was hired before the layoffs, and her whole team got canned under her. She was the newest one and kept her job. Now she sits around watching TV all day. These are the failure points this company has.

This company needs a real business consultancy firm to come in and revamp the structure to allow the business to get back on track. It will take 3 years, but it can be accomplished and the company will be better off.

Here's half a thought. Given that trust has fallen, maybe some interested 3rd party could assist in creating a safe anonymous space to constructively address issues that need examination.

Get rid of the D&I nonsense

Way past fixing. The mistakes made are beyond fixing at this point. Any and everyone who knew how fiber ran is long gone. Leadership was informed of the issues with fiber and chose to ignore them and get rid of anyone who did not support the bs they were selling to the shareholders. If you can, jump ship. Fiber will be sold for pennies on the dollar and you will all be short timers for the layoff at the new company. Zayo comes to mind. CL got Jim and Jay fired with his incompetence. Frontier, Google Fiber, and Verizon. Check out his timeline and the troubles they had. He was unable to help them succeed and Crown is another failure for him.

A bigger, better gym. Maybe convert the connector to a super gym. Add a daycare and pet daycare in there too.

Hmmmm…Smart and Fast???…What Crown leadership, EMT and managers, have actually been is: d-mb and smart a$s. EMT and all managers need to get your resumes updated. Change is coming.

Let go back to being real, being accountable, and being owners

Just a suggestion - Solicit feedback from our customers. Are we good at doing what they need and how would they rate us vs. our peers?

Smart and Fast is a great concept, but the way we've achieved Fast is by sacrificing Smart. It's time to put Smart back into our strategy.

Too many innovation teams and eliminate Purple Park.

Maybe we can introduce pet insurance…?

We all know you can't name names on this site. A high school kid could go back through org charts for the past twenty years and use the internet to tie all the claims on this site together. BS let it happen. And complacency by the EMT. If you owned the business you wouldn't allow nepotism to subvert your ability to operate. It is just plain stupid. So many great people have come and gone because they threatened the nepotism apple cart.

If it weren't for the ATMs this place has in the form of towers it would have been stopped 10 years ago at the latest because it'd have put any other business out of business.

Name names please.

I had 5 mgrs and 5 directors over 9 years. Although I dealt with MANY. Of my 5 and 5 four of each were nepo hires. I kid you not. I can tell you exactly who they were related to. 80%. Of each of those "4" s I can tell you each of their 6 - 10 nepotism hires ( all of whom are now mgrs). They hired friends and relatives who had their entire attention and support to the detriment of every other person in the department and the business as a whole. The one mgr and director that weren't nepos were actually pretty great for the business. Well respected to this day. My only complaint would be the go w the flow mentality, chose ur battles. But I get it.

Project mgrs, finance mgrs, acctg mgrs, sales mgrs directors, vps. 80% nepo hires and most go directly back to sales. Trace the "coaching trees". Lol. You'll find them. Interview them and see if you get anything but a line of bs. Parrots. Words certainly do matter. If you're looking for them.

As mentioned by others, assess EVERY manager’s background and experience. Weed out the ones who were carried on the back of their manager or another. It wouldn’t be hard to do. I had a manager that would have weekly meetings with their team and the meeting, subjects discussed and his comments were exactly the same every week. It was a waste of time. I think he did the meetings just to satisfy his manager and Clown Castle’s safety/weekly meeting requirements. There was no creativity nor encouragement of new ideas/suggestions by him to the team nor did he encourage it from others. Anytime someone did make a suggestion or question something, the manager would get defensive and he perceived the comments/suggestions as threats to his so-called managerial leadership. Clown Castle has ALWAYS been manager level heavy. Time to reduce managers across the company nation wide!

Lol asking mgrs, directors and vps "how". I'd love to be a fly on the wall. They spew the party line, which is essentially a summary of the question and new mgmt should ask again but how? Then they rephrase the party line and new mgmt ask again but how. Have you looked at some of their linked in summaries? I wouldn't hire one of them. All word salad pats on the back. No results. Review every single manager and up. Ask them how. How they met results and how they would move forward. you'll get a bs line out of 95%. Then ask who they are related to or if they've spent any time at a mgrs house. Or if they've been paid by a mgr for work outside of crown. Reinterview them all.

Screen the youngsters that have all the answers. Their smart enough to run to parents, aunts and uncles and grands when their in trouble or starting out in life buying a house or car but not smart enough to know experience is a key ingredient to any success. I'm sure we do that in the field where people can be ki-led or maimed by stupid but that also needs to be true in the office. The participation trophy generation needs to understand they don't know everything. And more importantly respect. I thought millennials couldn't possibly be more ageist but here comes y. We've hired to many people that think a-s kissing is what makes them marketable. That goes back to the inept mgmnt who crave the attention.

I have had more equipment ruined and jobs ruined in the outside family business by kids that know everything, with the attention span of knats, then I care to discuss. Not all of them, we screen thoroughly now, but a disturbing majority. Young and full of oats has taken on a whole new meaning. I've worked w people at Crown that flat out say "I hate old people". When looking at a 40 something. Its crazy. I'm not even that old and I'm offended by it. The stupidity.

Crown need to take a good hard look at leadership to be sucessful going forward. All people leaders director level and above should be assessed for competence and leadership capabilities in their current role. Flush out those "leaders" who have been floating under the radar who got to where they are not based on merit, but only by connection to someone else.

Consider things like...
How are they at decision making? Do they take the time to understand what their people do in order to effectively improve processes and workflow?
Do they have a proven track record of successful process innovations?
Are they willing to balance forward thinking progress with the happiness and stability of their people?
Do they empower or suppress their people?
How are their survey ratings?

Perhaps an outside firm would be able to best assess the people leaders. Crown should not invest in people that don't belong there.

1. Give people stability in their roles and stop shutting down offices.
2. Re-evaluate management or at least get everyone on the same page so there aren't multiple "Crown experiences"
3. Reconcile Fiber and Towers so that we are actually #oneteam
4. Lighten up with the annoying, juvenile in office 4 days rules
5. Listen to the employees and focus on improving the systems and the data
6. Improve morale somehow to get out of this all time low
7. Focus on promoting only character and merit.

It comes down to higher leadership, VPs and Directors, they are incompetent, and they overlook for lower level management position to hire their friends and family members. Stop nepotism all together. Hire and promote real talent. Look at what all the real company lost, because of nepotism. Fire everyone who are related to each other in the company, that's a nuance.

Get back to who we were! Stop with the purple bullsh-t and let’s work. Stop the nepotism and let’s GO!

Data data data. Much of our data is unreliable. When we began in the digital transformation journey we started with a CRM platform instead of master data management. We have so much data but when it’s not reliable you can’t automate. Many process improvement initiatives have fallen short because there has been no investment in systems for years. Different departments were left to own their data. Some have governance and some don’t. It should be standardized across the org. Supply chain hierarchies should be built the same as customer the same as landowner etc.
Even the new iPMT project is typical. They picked the platform and then try to put the process in it rather than picking a platform that works best with a streamlined process. We’ve robbed Peter to pay Paul for years. Start with the data and build on it.

Evaluate every leadership positions, all the way to Manager/Supervisor, do they really have knowledge and experience required for the position? Do they have certifications? Example, engineering team let go of engineers for not having certifications, and yet 50% of the engineering managers/Sr. managers do not have certifications. Remove incompetent's from leadership roles. People out side of Emerging Business Leaders Program also got promoted with just a few years of experience in high paying leadership positions.

Stop with the organization changes every couple of months! In any given year an employee in the same position with report to multiple managers and directors who all have different philosophies on how business should be done. It’s nonstop change, how can anything get done in that kind of environment.

Don't bet our future on unproven execution of unproven technology. More transparency on the process. The mistrust of automation within the employee community is due to the fact that there is no evidence that any of it will really help our business processes or execution for our customer. We've been promised improvements for so long that any promises we hear now become just the latest joke.

Towers and fiber have never felt like they were part of the same company. In fact, they felt like they were a million miles apart from each other. It almost seemed like the EMT wanted it to be that way. If Crown is going to keep fiber they need to do a better job of making sure the employees know we are all on one side.

Constructive post. Thank you.

There’s a lot to be done. And barring any sale of fiber, the following come to mind:

• Data fidelity & systems - we all know we don’t know a lot about Crown’s assets. There are multiple systems of record for tower assets and fiber.

• Streamline the commercial org to focus on accounts, not products/asset types. Cross train sales to upsell ALL of crown’s asset types, not just what asset they are incentivized to sell. This drives higher wallet capture, ie more revenue for crown, and reduces overhead. We don’t need a 5:1 crown to customer ratio on customer calls…

• Build product teams by asset class/fiber products to support commercial teams and manage P&L by asset class/product.

Oh boy, where to begin.

Something that always bothered me was the Emerging Business Leaders Program. You take a young kid with no real work experience and send them on a glorified job shadow. Shortly after that they are inserted into manager roles. They pass over current employees that have real knowledge and skills for that position. Putting the wrong people in positions has been an ongoing issue at Crown for as long as I can remember. If I recall, I believe Jay came from this program. It’s time to reevaluate its effectiveness.