@5doa You're absolutely right.....i have one now who views himself as a leader of people, not an expert at what we do. Fine, but he is so out of his element, he continually says incorrect things to vendors and business partners. Then, when he realizes that he has spewed nonsense, he says "well, joe can expand on this point". Yeah, well ol' Joe is fed up with fixing his mistakes. To his credit, he does create pretty spreadsheets.
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In the last 10 years I have continually heard the line “LL6/LL5 are interchangeable and do not need to understand the area they supervise/manage”. This is the root cause of so many stupxd decisions and very costly mistakes. When the LL6/LL5 spends most of their time on top of Mount Stupxd only a fool would expect a good result. Ford logic leads to Ford results.
Part of the problem is that competent people are sometimes promoted into positions they are qualified to hold and because of Ford’s belief that managers are interchangeable get moved into positions they are not qualified to hold. When this happens there is no path for training. Your new managers will be too busy to provide any direction and your new direct reports won’t be very helpful because they don’t feel they should have to train their leadership and more than likely one or more of them are bitter because they applied for the position you just landed in. Not the ideal recipe for producing excellent leaders.
Wow. After reading all these comments, I feel lucky to be working in a Powertrain department with LL6s and LL5s who deserve to be in their positions. They are smart and knowledgeable. Most are not afraid to get their hands dirty and work alongside their direct reports if need be. And of course most also act as a shield from any of the BS flowing down from above. All the LL6s have between 5 -10 direct reports. Everyone in our department is hard-working, extremely smart, and nice to boot.
By default it's annoying as all heck with the constant sliding notifications, but if you set the mode to don't disturb it suppresses that. And it doesn't stop messages from showing up in the app window, or even the notification dot on the taskbar icon. I don't like the tool, but find myself agreeing that not running it at all is more a sign of not wanting to get caught out not working for hours on end.
This could be why some people I work with refuse to use webex teams....they claim the don’t use it and shut down the app because it is too distracting....then their activity status can’t reliably reflect their actual status...
What do LL6s do? Well, I'm not going to trash all of them, since actually there are some great, good people in these ranks. Including most of the ones I have worked for in my experience. But, there are most certainly LL6s that have no business whatsoever being in management roll. Butt kissers, backstabbers, ones who are HR liabilities, id–ts who couldn't do their underlings job if their life depended on it...and the pure useless do-nothing ones.
The working from home situation has opened my eyes on the do-nothing LL6s, thanks to webexteams and the activity status it provides. Funny I do not think many LL6s even know about this neat little feature of webexteams. There were a few LL6s in my area I suspected that did not do anything resembling work, but after seeing their status during the week, I kid you not they don't even put in a days work in an entire week. Not even close. Each day is like attend a 8:00 meeting then "Active 4 hours ago" by lunchtime.
I have heard grumbling from our business partners about how frustrated they are about IT bureaucracy and cost. When they finally find a new CIO to take the helm of the Titanic, they better pay attention or we are going to get EDS'd and all those LL6's and 5's are going to be out of a job.
@1tck+191Bmks8, the LL6 who retired 2 years ago with 20 years service, you sound a lot like my old LL6 at Ford; he was a wonderful, hard working, highly technical, and very well respected supervisor. I always felt bad since I left suddenly 15 years ago, after this supervisor trained me from an FCG, but it was for good reason since I left to work on my own company and my software company was sold and I am now retired.
Ford has really changed from its “glory days.” I am sad to say that pretty much everyone outside of Dearborn thinks Ford is a dying company, and the technology companies think they are a joke, which they are correct. Tesla, Google, Apple, possibly GM - they are the future of the automotive companies.
I can’t stress enough that if you are an employee at Ford, you should highly consider moving on.
I was mocked by fellow Ford employees when I said I was leaving Ford and told I was a “waste of skin.” Well, 15 years later, my company was sold to 3 PE firms with multiple bids coming in. Most of these jokers who insulted me got laid off from Ford! The others I guess are just going to stay on the submarine that will implode.
@1tck+191Bmks8 you sound like you were one of the few decent LL6.
In my department there are exactly two decent LL6. I know exactly what the LL6 do as I am one of them. Myself and the other decent LL6 both have large teams and put in 70-80 hours a week.
Under my LL5 there are three LL6 who have no direct reports. Their responsibilities consume only 160 hours a year. The rest of the time they do nothing but s— up to the LL5.
One LL6 is a gasbag and credit stealer. He spends all his time creating PowerPoints that steal credit from my team and another team.
Four LL6 are incompetent political placements. Myself and the other decent LL6 are expected to do their work for them, if we don’t there is heck to pay (dressing down by LL4).
Three LL6 are retired on the job and have been for 10-15 years. Their reports struggle and often come to me for help and direction.
The rest of the LL6 do just enough work to appear better than the retired on the job contingent. Most of the work is party planning, newsletters, report creation. They do not have technical knowledge.
At one point in time a larger percentage of LL6 were decent. Alas that is no longer the case.
In paper, the description of the LL6's responsibilities should match the description of your work at Ford. In real life, most of the LL6s are a waste of space. They are only good to sign off the weekly hours and yearly reviews.
My current LL6 is one of the good guys, like you were. He has the technical skills, and he works hard. However, my two previous LL6s were clueless and one of them a dangerous SoB (he was promoted to LL5).
Thanks
I believe it varies from team to team and even among the LL6s within the same team. I frequently wonder why I have 11 direct reports and numerous projects while other LL6s within my org have 0 or 1 direct reports and responsibility for a single testing tool.
While there may be the one off example, Ford has always had the problem of the number of "leadership levels" far exceeds the number of GSR. Tell me how you can have section upon section where everyone at the lowest level is a LL6? Before the reduction before the SRD, it wasn't unusual to see situations where 1 GSR reported to 1 LL6 that reported to 1 LL5 that reported to a LL4 that only had 3 reports. Yep, that's Ford.
Let's just speak in today's terms ie. the last 6 or so years as "what they used to be" might as well be 100yrs ago with all the havoc Ford leadership has wrought on the company. Having been so gutted, the LL6 level is nothing more than a classification filled with the worst of the worst. Most lack any subject matter expertise and promoted based on their ability to backstab, brown nose, avoid work and responsibility. Laughable as most have no direct reports- or ever had so Ford just claims they are subject experts. Strange how only a 'certain profile' of employee lost their LL6 status due to the SRD, while others did not. My last section had 4 LL6 and 1 GSR who all had the same job and reported to a LL5.
Since the LL6 level is no different than a glorified GSR that often knows far less than a GSR, and with no leadership skill or experience.....LL5s are often clueless babysitters desperately hiding their inability to produce anything, of course not when they aren't focusing their work on seeking their LL4. Their current role is only a stepping stone. And I am not IT, this applies to nearly everywhere at Ford.
I retired from Ford two years ago after 20 years of service. As an LL6 I worked 50 to 60 hours per week. I developed detailed project development plans, test plans and test cases. I took part in testing and worked with my direct reports to resolve technical issues and when we were overwhelmed with work I would take assignments and do the same work they were doing. Yes I knew how to do the work my team was responsible for and felt I needed to stay current to keep their respect. If one of my direct reports made a mistake I would take responsibility for it. I may have a conversation about it with them in private but facing outward i was their advocate. I had a large team and these responsibilities alone could keep me busy. In addition my LL5 and LL4 gave me many special assignments and I was expected to volunteer for “committees” many of which seemed to add questionable value. There were also way too many weekly, monthly and quarterly status reports and metrics, presentations, development plans, performance reviews and meetings. If there was a slacker on my team I had to address it and create a detailed improvement and work plan. I was expected to volunteer to interview with other LL6’s, hire and train FGCs. The list goes on and on and I won’t bore you with all of it but I did not have a $200,000 salary or get $200,000 bonuses. Not even close! I didn’t share with my team how busy I was because I wanted them to feel comfortable bringing their problems to me as they were the ones doing the important work. Since they weren’t aware of my workload they might have wondered what I did with all my time.
Bottom line, my LL6 position was very busy and stressful. The workload could be crushing at times. There may be some easy LL6 positions out there but I never had one. When people say Ford could get rid of most of the LL positions I have to assume they aren’t aware of their responsibilities.
They make the decision to lay off peons who can't be bothered to know what LL5 and LL6 are.
@xoc, come on over to IT. 90% of our LL6's are clowns. They are meeting attenders, powerpoint creators and politicians. Their IT skills (if they ever had any) are looooong gone. The last 4 we've had could not answer simple system questions and only knew what the portfolio did at an extremely high level. The reason is that technical skills are not valued but leadership skills are. Unfortunately, ours have neither.
I'm putting my flame suit on - but - In my 33 years at Ford all my LL6 (PD) were very hard working and contibuted much to the effort, and also, many filtered out the BS from the LL5 so that we could concentrate on the right things.
I was typically in small LL6 groups, with at most 3 gsr - I can't think of a bad LL6 during that time. Certianly had some bad LL5 and above - but LL6 were all great.
FWIW......
LL6s are supposed to be the first level managers. In real life they are not different from a team lead, but with the "power" to approve the regular hours and OT. Most of them have no clue and just nod and sign the technical details. There are also LL6s that are technology specialists, with no people under them, but most of them were laid off already.
LL5s are supposed to be the second level managers and they complete, with LL6s, the lower level management. Technically, they should manage the several LL6s under each of them. In real life, they just do (no discussion) whatever the LL4s tell them to do, even when the LL4 is out of the chain of command of the LL5 (I've seen it). To look busy, they are always in meetings, and as other managers (including LL6s), they all play the CYA game.
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Actually they don’t get bonuses that starts at the Director level
Not much more than collect $200,000 salaries, $200,000 bonuses and write status reports. We could eliminate 90% of them and not notice them missing.