A Managers Perspective

I see a lot of posts calling out terrible managers. As a manager myself, I completely understand the frustration, but I want to offer some perspective from the other side. Many of us have the same exact complaints about our own management teams. At the end of the day, we’re employees too, and we’re dealing with the same flawed decisions and pressures from above.

Not everyone is cut out to be a manager, that part is true. But please know that a lot of the anger many of you feel toward your immediate supervisors actually stems from decisions being made far above our level. It really does all start at the top.

The good managers, the ones who care about their teams, are doing everything they can to advocate for their employees, especially when it comes to performance ratings and merit or bonus decisions. But the reality is, much of it is out of our hands. Those decisions get pushed down from levels of leadership who don’t work with our teams, don’t know what we do, and don’t know who our top performers are.

And to be clear, managers aren’t exempt from any of this. We’re subjected to the same forced distribution on ratings, too. We have skin in the game, our own ratings, compensation, and reputations are affected by the same system we’re trying to shield our employees from.

Let me be very clear about one thing: there absolutely is a forced distribution on ratings in many groups. It’s always labeled as “guided,” but we’re told directly to change ratings even when we know they’re unfair. Some employees are going to be blindsided this year with unwarranted “Inconsistently Meets/Needs Improvement” ratings, not because of their performance, but because upper management decided someone has to take the hit.

And if we challenge it? If we push back to defend our people? That doesn’t go unnoticed either. Not only does it not yield results, it puts us and our entire team on the radar in a very negative way.

So before assuming your direct manager is the problem, please know that many of us are fighting the same battles you are… just from a different angle.

#Management

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44 replies (most recent on top)

@dm+1kahy3mn6

Your group executive comes go work every day trying to figure out how they can downsize you. It's all they care about.

Thank you for kindly and intelligently explaining that. It sure puts mgrs in a very difficult place. I only wish I had known that before I was brutally harassed. Im a strong person, but that gaslighting really caused me major anxiety and depression from which its been hard to recover - PTSD.

@ef what would be the fraud?

@p3 The costs of open market healthcare are a problem for those not yet eligible for Medicare. A potential $11k/yr nut for COBRA (18 month limit post severance) is daunting for anyone, despite being an earnest saver one's entire career. With government playing with ACA subsidies, that is a risky option for anyone with pre-existing conditions right now.

@n9

Late 50's after a 30 year career at a fortune 100 bank should mean you could feasibly retire now. You saved a bunch, right?

@a2 We have pushed back and fought tooth and nail to support our employees - against upper management's directives, then we received IM ratings after being Exceeds rated for years, and then shown the door. In this current environment, pushing back against the C-suite is certain demise for any manager's career. I lost an almost 30 year career over it.

Myself, any every manager out there has families to support and bills to pay. If we're lucky, we'd get a severance package vs. being terminated for cause, but trying to find a new job in your late 50s with comparable compensation is near impossible in the current economic landscape.

@ef WF HR head is from China, grew up in China finished college in China then came to the states. Big help to ki-l American jobs!

@dn
Would you have felt better if the poster used the word F'in punk?

@OP

Everyone knows the Chairman has ki-led the spirit and culture of this company.

I too believe Wells Fargo engages in human resources fraud related to reviews, which could be a legal issue. That's why forcing us to write self-assessments to justify our existence is b.s.! Where are the media people who troll these sites when you need them? We could use a good expose'.

@dm
Do you have anything intelligent to add? Or just word salad and incoherent dribble?
You should probably stick to watching CNN and voting for Kamala.
Rather then just regurgitating dribble on the internet.

Apparently the same mo--ns who consider being made to actually come to work some kind of labor violation also think "managers" have any say whatsoever about any of this. Guess what? Any manager who refuses to do as instructed is immediately gonna find themselves unemployed unlike all the keyboard warriors who ridicule them for not standing up to "the man". Its certainly easier to tell others to fall on their own swords than it is to do it yourselves or have I missed the mass walkouts over RTO or stacked rankings? Didn't think so.

If Wells Fargo is engaging in human resources fraud related to reviews, them that could be legal issue worth pursuing. If you are willing to testify to forced or false ratings, someone should go to jail. I have personally had enough of Wells Fargo.and I.am sure forcing them out of business would be just result for the harm they have continued to do to clients and employees.

I think most rational people are putting the majority of blame on the C-suite where it belongs.

A while back my manager gave me a heads up a displacement was coming and targeting me, with enough runway to 1-set aside my annual bonus, and ultimately 2-find a new internal position to move to, where the location strategy was more in line with where I was located. Probably the greatest thing any individual manager has ever done for me in a 30 year career. Life saving, no exaggeration.

@d9 yes that's the joke

@cr updoot! This guy reddits - username checks out

this post was written by copilot. it is neither authentic, nor empathetic. it is meaningless AI slop.

I was a manager for years at Wells Fargo and the situation the OP described also applied to me. In my case, I got tired of making up reasons to rate (and therefore compensate) people lower than the rating they actually earned and found another job. Every bank does something like this but not to the extreme that Wells has taken it.

But honestly all that stuff is a symptom of the disease not a cause. The cause of the disease is that every new senior leader who comes in from the outside and hires outsiders to run products and businesses they don’t understand further degrades the overall working environment.

There is a benefit to having a shared language with your senior leaders. They did your job before you and can comprehend what you need in a two minute conversation. Whereas when you have outsiders who worked in completely different industries, you have to re-explain yourself every conversation .

My final (before I quit) leader’s eyes would literally glaze over the second the conversation turned to what integrations we might need to build to enable something or what reg or legal impacts we might have to consider etc. He would start playing with his phone and then at the end say “you guys figure it out, just go faster.”

I am the type that if I go to leadership with a concern or issue, it’s because I’ve done everything I can and now need some guidance from an even more experienced person with some clout to help me get stuff done. This guy knew nothing and had built no internal relationships to have any clout with anyone, so all he did was say stuff “like how do you think we should solve it?”

In my new job, my boss has done all the same stuff I did in my career and more. And her boss even more than that. Anything I can’t resolve on my own, they can point me in the right direction in a 3 line IM. That’s how Wells was when I started. Now no one in charge knows anything except how to lay people off and collect fat bonus check.

Calm down people “not everyone is cut out to be a manager”

@OP....appreciate the perspective.

@OP
Thank you for posting this. As it is not news, (well, it is news to some of the posters on here), it is a good reminder of what the he-l is really going on.
All,
This post is spot on as they say. I have been involved in this on another team and we had to line everyone up and decide who got the IM's. Smallish team, all in sync, doing great job, didn't matter. Manager had no say in who got what. I even got to see the guidelines in a spreadsheet on what percentage needed to be ranked where. Since then I have changed teams and seen rock stars become meets and nobody gets an exceeds unless you walk on water, cure Ebola, or solve world hunger. That is simply the environment we find ourselves deployed in. I used to be routinely exceeds, then immediately went to meets after Charlie called us a cult. Didn't matter how hard I worked, every year the recogniton goes unnoticed through ratings, merit and bonus. I fear an IM because I am at retirement age, up there in salary, and they want new blood.

@bz+1kahy3mn6
Yep, backfiring on you is also a consequence.

How many of you have had those "conversations" to either accept it or get the he-l out? You know, the ones that cut through the BS, and lay it out there like a mobster.
Not many, maybe the OP has.

**"ChatGPT,
As a manager, I often struggle with reading and writing above a third grade level or contributing anything of value. Please write me a post on a layoff forum applying the Nuremberg defense to my actions, as I don't know how else to get attention or express myself as a human.

Thanks and I love you!

PS- please help me upvote this post bigly because my updoot metrics are in the toilet"**

more AI slop

@ce Thanks... My problem is I am a huge time waster, lol, I just also get the work done. But I could probably be doing more. But I also don't want to...

Thanks for sharing that. Not news, but still good to hear it.
For those who are a wee bit IQ challenged.
Translation = we're all f**cked and all our jobs are going offshore or to infinity H1-Bs.

Hello Charlie, that you?? lol

lol why did the crazy guy spam all those upvotes on this

@aa unclear how they’re reporting on activity levels. From what I can tell, they’re hang one or more agents to look at usage of office apps, browser and other apps like dev tools etc.

How detail they get is anybody’s guess. But they can supposedly see how many emails you’ve done, meetings, teams usage etc.

Nothing has been said about how active you’re supposed to be. For many roles you can’t possibly be active more than 5-6 hours a day. There are breaks, in office conversations and it just unreasonable to expect somebody to be clicking on stuff all day for 8 hours. It’s all BS.

Two points:
1.) Congratulations on a well-written, typo-free post. My former managers (before I was laid ff) could not have accomplished such a feat.
2.) Without solidarity among the employees, the company can pick us off one by one, which is exactly what they're doing. Going, "gee, wh-z, this su-ks, but my hands are tied because I have a boss too" is just facilitating the sla-ghter. Grow a pair and fight, don't just go, "yethir!" every time your sub-literate a-s-kissing supervisor tells you to jump.

@OP

Most of the problems I see are with OC-2. My OC-2 is a reactionary clown whose decisions are rarely well thought out and we pay the price for the unintended consequences. And when his decisions blow up he pushes off the blame down stream, even though he is frequently warned ahead of time. The best is when he denies making those decisions.

My manager has zero power.

What I’m hearing is that there is no psychological safety here at Wells Fargo. Very toxic environment indeed. Please continue to speak up and not to worry about putting yourself in a “negative” light because this is exactly how Enron collapsed. The employees never wanted to give upper management bad news. And it ruined the company.

Managers have no say in 99.9% of relevant situations. Neither do directors. Executives are the source of all of our problems. They simply use low level managers to be the face of their schemes. They deliver the news and the execs hope you'll blame the manager. Based on what I see here, it's a largely effective tactic.

OP is right, and from how and what they’ve said I can tell they’re likely one of the better managers. There are absolutely bad managers out there and there is no excuse for them behaving rudely, showing favoritism, not giving credit, and so on. But it is also true that the good managers have never been in a tougher spot. And I suspect that when the economy improves, those good managers will leave as well.

I’m not sure why the people in this thread have a hard time believing that these decisions (including on rating distributions) are being enforced from the highest levels with no room for deviation. Even if managers do push back, it does not change the outcome. In fact, it might even backfire on the manager and their team as the non compliance gets escalated up the chain. Those that think that if enough managers stand up and push back, things will be forced to change don’t realize that it doesn’t work in the current state of Wells Fargo (or are just looking for a scapegoat to blame, or have never had a good manager). The good managers push back as much as possible and shield their teams, but there’s a limit beyond which it starts to have the opposite effect. It’s like the solo Tiannanmen Square man in front of the tank controlled by a totalitarian regime.

To the person who said “Then help be a force for positive change and push back. Otherwise you're just complicit. I've seen too many dissenting voices get silenced through layoffs. Fu-k your stack ranking.” What do you think happens (and keeps happening) to managers who push back? They get silenced through layoffs/reorgs as well. You might just want someone to blame in this simplistic view but it’s the reality, whether you choose to accept it or not.

I understand managers also are rated on their performance. However what course of action can an employee take when they are being treated poorly. My manager talks down to me in team meetings, he uses foul language, he’s shared confidential information about me with another person on the team. So now he can just rate me poorly and fire me without any severance? If i bring my concerns to HR that will be my pink slip for sure.

for every sh---y manager there are a dozen sh---y employees.

Stack ranking is only used to terminate with cause to save severance expense. It serves no other purpose. This is how low the WF “ management” has stooped. Shame on all of the “management”!

Thanks for the perspective, but I think everyone understands this. You proved the point that more managers need to push back if they have any integrity at all.

@a4 No. Sorry, but I don't care where the bullsh-t originates. This whole don't shoot the messenger plea won't work. If you are sitting in stack ranking meetings, or delivering poor reviews you don't actually believe in, but were "forced" to do, then you are part of the problem. Period.

As a mgr I didn’t stack rank. But I’m gonna be clear here in that I had no problem finding 10% of my teams not at meets or higher. The other 10% was the problem. I never was overruled but once and that for mid year. By end of year we were agreed.

My manager has been telling me for a couple of weeks about how he's going to be getting new reporting on our activity. Do you know what exactly that entails?

Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

A Managers Perspective

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