Does anyone remember during smart redesign there was a push to make all supervisors have 6 or more employees? What happened to that? I see so many supervisors with two, three and even one employee.
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@OP. It was just a ruse. SRD was forcing the LL6s to have at least 6 reporting subordinates. Some guys stayed in their teams, but had two managers: a technical manager, and the org chart manager. These employees would do the performance reviews with the org chart manager, with a manager that had no clue what they did during the whole year of work. Crazy!
So it was a mess sometimes finding the right person for a task, since the org chart was flawed. And depending of who would ask, these employees had different managers, which caused even more confusion. Luckily, after the SRD was done, and the danger of layoffs went away, those fake managers also stopped doing PRs and the org chart changed back, once again.
Yes, I remember that. We had a small team so we moved all our GSRs under one or two LL6s and the rest of us were individual contributors. PRs were fun. What I ended up doing was filling out a duplicate of the web-based PR form, having a WebEx with the 'supervisor', take control of the keyboard and mouse, and copy/paste the content in the web form.
@18x Well said, no interest in having employees myself, that seems like more of a pain in the a-s. Why would I want to deal with that?
This is actually some of the thinking that gets management the reputation it has of being tone deaf. Thinking that in general, high performing people do well after you give them people to look after. What is the draw to this kind of thinking? I don't get it. "Here, you're doing so well, instead of increasing your pay, let's give you a$$es to wipe." Flawed logic and a classic way to drag a high performer through the mud is to give them staff to manage. Just pay them for Pete's sake...you think they want staff? If they do, you have yourself a ladder climber with an ego, not someone who operates at a high level.
The last part is the best way to treat Ford as an employer. They simply don't care about process improvement. They'll talk about it all day, but unless there is a purge at the LL4 and 5 level it will never change.
@17w the technical specialist LL6 use to be GSR9 and the tech spec LL5 use to be GSR11. GSR10 was supervisor GSR12 was manager. HR and execs decided in the late 90s to combine GSR9+10 to LL6 and GSR11+12 to LL5. It has been a cluster f ever since. “Leadership” swings from tech people are all interchangeable to we need to reward technical excellence. As the pendulum swings the tech specs are purged and then recruited. I was recruited in as an experienced hire tech spec LL6 engineer in one of the pendulum upswings, and 20 years later purged in one of the downswings. I was always amazed at how little Ford managers actually cared about training and retaining engineers. I would take every Wednesday to do training and education of younger engineers. The last year my LL5 told me I was wasting everyone’s time and to stop it, he wanted me to spend that time creating presentations for him and to review tech magazines and create summaries for him which he would present as his own research. Instead I made plans to retire and just bided my time until the axe fell, thanks for the severance pay!!!
@17w I agree, salary ranges aren’t really competitive, I got a job at a non profit a while back with about the same pay sadly. If it wasn’t for the bonus I would have taken it. Suppliers often pay more sadly, I have friends at competitors with the same education and less experience making more than me, and they don’t deal with the toxicity.
I know at least 4 people that are LL6 who aren't really in manager roles. I think it's seen as a way to reward people who are at SG8 and doing to well.
Honestly I don't hate it. The best performers will usually lead projects and naturally lend well to having direct reports. Even if they lack managerial skills because in my department the know it all's/technical experts are the ones that get promoted. The non technical managers often get ridiculed.
without these LL6 promotions people would get such in SG8 for a decade
@v1 Thank you.
@rg Resembles events under a vertically challenged director with an organization that resided in FMCC then relocated to ITHQ buildings in Allen Park.
@rh It’s tough as an external hire at LL5+. They are dropped into a pit of Friends and Family vipers all looking to eject them from their job. Trust the wrong person and they are toast. The good ones don’t stay long. The mediocre ones learn and excel at the Ford games.
Keep in mind that the FnF crowd will have presented a summary of all the employees to the LL5+ within their first week on the job. Ole Joe is a good worker but is sneaky and takes credit for others work. Ole Sam is a know it all that no one likes. Ole Tim sabotages others work. Ole Sally has mental health issues. Etc. What they say is usually more subtle but it will have shifted the FnF’s bad behavior to the people who notices/complain about the FnF bad behavior.
How do I know this? An external hire LL4 that I became friends with after he left Ford loved to tell Ford stories. The things you would never imagine doing to a coworker, all fair game at Ford.
@pc+1kmrktgrn And the game just before the SmartRedesign was to reclassify all the individual contributors as supervisory and give them zero reports. This is how they clipped 5 tech spec LL6 and 1 tech spec LL5 in our department. That December at their PR they all learned they had been reclassified, but not to worry as it is just an HR thing. Then come May all of them were clipped. When they were clipped the LL3 told them to work for 2 weeks turning over all their knowledge and skills. Guess how many of them did? Drumroll……………… yup zero.
The sad reality is that all the new external LL4+ hires have no clue what is/was SRD. They have new games they brought with them. Many will refuse to promote internally unless they are forced. Many detest Ford employees with 15+ years of service.
@e7 wow! Without giving any names, can you mention the org?
Upper limit is 12.
After the "smart" redesign, they reclassified LL6's with fewer than 6 direct reports to "individual contributor" to get around those limitations. Its all just a game.
@dy Yeah I saw that also. A LL5 created an LL6 position and the spouse of another LL5 was promoted into it. It was titled something along the lines of Modernization of Legacy code bases. The newly minted LL6 initially had no people reporting to her and was given two years to come up with objectives and a roadmap. It was hilarious at first as this LL6 did not have an IT background or skills. A year in with no progress and suddenly it was the responsibility of all the other LL6 under the LL5 to jointly create a roadmap for her. They were also required to select GSRs from their teams to move under the LL6. Then due to her brilliance in creating a roadmap and establishing a team she was promoted to LL5. You can’t make this stuff up LOL
@OP The third or fourth consulting firm they hired finally left the building and they just went back to hiring managers. It's all they know how to do. My VP told us he created a position to promote a guy into. "Created" a position... WTF kinda way is this to run a company?
@b7 Yep..I remember that..also remember when they were making people report directly to their skip level manager (GSR reporting to LL5, LL6 reporting to LL4) all just to make up and show numbers...the LL+ brigage was p*ss1ng in their pants if they had less than 6 so somehow got F&F to cook the numbers. Fast forward 6-7 years - we are totally cooked!
@OP Maybe they just can't count higher than 2 or 3? My bad. I thought you were talking about Ford executives. They are required to count up to the number of hands that they have. Yet they fail each and every time.
SRD was a disaster. Pooled resources, PT ICE engineers laid off, organizations created that didn't make sense and the whole Keep-Stop-Start work distribution where you made up what you wanted to do and not do. And now, 8 years later, they completed their talent assessment. Clearly they did not start at the top. And if they really did a talent assessment, we wouldn't have half the managers in positions they have no business being in.
@a5 hire a few more Indians and Mexicans for collaboration in office.
IDK they keep talking about flattening and pruning the leadership tree but it never really materializes. I can remember employees being shown to report to multiple LL6 during the Smart ReDesign to fake the number of reports LL6s had. What was telling was that immediately after the Smart ReDesign all the vacated LL6 positions were backfilled with promotions handed to the Friends and Family clan.
I think that some gsr employees are so lousy that they need to have a supervisor totally focused on them in order to get adequate work out of them. Thus LL6 to GSR ratio has risen.