I am a long-term employee in risk and will be the first to admit there are too many management layers across many teams. I see managers who are just kicking back and coasting all day long. They add no value and are complete waste of company resources. If you are looking for opportunities to cut costs look no further.
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Fewer layers of management helps improve efficienciy and transparency. This is critical component of Wells Fargo reform unfortunately Charlie and his directs have not been successful at this.
@5iyh+1nPfZOBD. Many & quality
Many or quality is the issue? I have been ghosted by managers on parallel teams for years, seemingly hired through nepotism or the corporate equivalent of getting tenured.
There isn't a single person in any leadership/mgr position anywhere in the bank where one can look up to. That is probably a good thing as looking up means getting hit directly in the face by everything that flushes from top down.
@2qvy+1nPfZOBD Sounds like a guy I work with in ESG. I bet it's the same person.
@4tso+1nPfZOBD They never stay anywhere long enough to get found out. Constantly posting out & moving onto the next team. Has a ton of qualifications but doesn't know how to do much.
@4tso+1nPfZOBD Thank you for your validation. Healing. That's him alright.
- 2qvy
@2qvy I know exactly who you're talking about and yes, he is indeed a sl--eball not to be trusted and horrible to women. I once worked with him in something in his former role and he explicitly told people not to do anything we were telling them to do so what do you do with that? wells says promote him I guess
There was or is a manager in CMoR who just manages "special projects' & floats around managing things, but doesn't have a team. She knows absolutely nothing. She just intimidates people into doing things & sticking to deadlines. She used to work for her old manager at B of A & he brought her here. She's obnoxious & puts people down all the time to appear superior & a "manager'. I bet they are paying her at least 200K. This must be her last job before retirement so she hangs in there & has nothing to lose by putting people down. All she is is a glorified PM. Nobody likes her but no-one can say anything as she is her manager's buddy.
If you think there are too many mgmt layers now, you should have seen this place pre-Charlie. I had 12 managers up thru my chain of command
Sounds like the inevitable result of in-person work.
Had a former WF manager that joined my team as a single contributor as he was about to be laid off. He was worthless. Got everyone else to do his work for him & backhanded everyone. Put people down (especially women) & never gave credit to anyone. He was a smooth talker who knew how to grease his wheels. No doubt knew how the system worked & dropped negative things about his coworkers who helped him to his manager. Thanks goodness he moved on to CIB in Control.
My manager was hired into our group a few years ago although the has been around Wells Fargo for a long time and really knows how to kiss a$$. He is a major slacker and works no more that a few hours a day. Attends a few meetings here and there and is just a silent observer on most calls. He has implement a few new projects and processes which are completely useless and redundant. He is a hub so I wonder how long he can continue to skate as a director. We really need to accelerate the “retirement” of the long term executives and old guards. They are dirty and lazy!
Most of these posts are from former/current business management.
I would like to know how you (or your managers) integrated with technology management to get your needs met. Was this yet another management layer? How did you integrate with the agile teams (scrumMaster, product owner) as well? How did you integrate with technology architects and Database modeling teams? Even more layers?
In the classic way that banking has been run for years, a manager was in charge of his area, process, deliveries, and managed the team secondarily. They knew their business & took pride in keeping their business running smoothly & aligned with the rest of the bank. They usually stayed in their role more long term, integrating new team members to keep the business running. Here managers are hired based on who they know, they are just in it for the paycheck before bouncing to the next "opportunity" (ie: one of their buddies has a better role), and they primarily manage a team's administrative items (training, performance reviews, cascading information down, etc), but they don't really KNOW the area they are managing or the business. Some do a better job than others. As the culture here is based on who you know, not what you know, there isn't incentive to learn. New ideas for process improvements are not welcome & the business environment becomes stifling. Without an experienced manager who knows the business to guide team members, and considering the uncooperativeness of team members protecting their jobs by hoarding information, you get teams that also are stagnant with little real management. It's every person for themself. That is the culture here.
They get all these management jobs through friends, so they did not work their way up. They keep people & treat people that report to them that cater to their ego & flatter them. Maybe 1 in 10 is a genuine manager that knows how to manage from the old school. So it goes on.
OP, agree. The worst is middle managers without banking background that are secretly jealous & intimidated by someone that knows what they are doing. Instead of fostering excellence they try to put the highly skilled down & micromanage to make it look as if they are doing "management work". Maybe it's all those friends of friends that were hired. In the old days managers worked their way up and new the business, that way they knew the processes & could guide/advise their teams accordingly. That doesn't't happen here.
There are managers in marketing who do nothing but forward emails and copy and paste the performance reviews we write ourselves. Pretty sure they don’t even read them, or they might notice the reviews are the exact same thing every time.
They do attend meetings, but they don’t pay attention or add any value. They’re just there.
This has been going on for years. It used to bother me, but not anymore. If the bank wants to have people like that on the payroll it’s no skin off my nose. I’m not a stockholder and I’ll retire when they can me so it’s just entertainment now.
More JPM people are on their way to save the day. Need need make room for them. But wait are they hired into Hubs?
Our lazy as$ processing manager got axed in May and just got another management job in legal! How the heck do we keep these people???? She spent the 3 years of COVID building her house and never working. She micro managed us and made the whole team so her job. Good job Wells Fargo keeping lazy managers.
I’m a former employee of another bank that picked up a couple of risk and compliance senior leaders that WF managed out, just prior to the CFPB action in December. They have completely ruined said bank with micro managing bs in every area of the bank, from mimicking hub strategy, to RTO policy.
There is a group of completely toxic leaders that move from bank to bank, getting higher and higher salaries and completely ruining cultures and tormenting good employees. Most operate out of Charlotte.
Everyone is afraid to speak up. Where are the 360 feedbacks or management anonymous feedbacks or two downs. There is no accountability for incompetent middle managers they just blame their employees for everything. We have no voice!
My group director keeps manipulating staff beneath him to evade spans and layers. He even changed some of the job title to avoid losing staff to centralized technology group. He also wasted $10MM on a technology project that went way over budget just to keep some of his buddies employed longer. This place in filled with corruption at all levels. We need to dispose of all the old guards and rotate the middle managers to different areas to we can start seeing cr-p float to the surface where everyone can see it.
Spans and layers will fix this! Oh wait…
I see a bunch of old-time boomers who have nothing better to do than come up with new spreadsheets and pivot tables to highlight how important they are to us in measuring metrics and massaging data.
Never mind that Service Now can generate reports in both of these formats, so that skillset is useless. Admitting we no longer need to do that specific function would mean we're expendable.
Dinosaurs need to be extinct in the workforce.
remember, it's not pushing the button that adds value, it's knowing what button to push. risk is finally going through spans and layers so by end of year there will be a lot fewer layers
The WF risk team is a total failure.
No way, we need more, how can we get more of the JPM crowd over if not to have roles where no additional direction is needed? Certainly can't bring them over into roles where actually leadership is required. In risk we've had several such hires and the exec has finally moved from Credit Card to Mortgage after hiring all her friends from there, still waiting for all the amazing ideas they will bring, only been 2 years I'm sure we'll be hearing the huge business changes they have soon, right? Right?????
We have a very seasoned workforce. Many management duties including training of new employees is done by senior and lead employees. Many managers have no clue. They are just rubber stamping work.
I see a lot of DE&I selections sitting around me that do nothing but play games on their phones all day and (some) have been for years......looking forward to the day they will be held accountable.
I don't know anything about other groups, but in mine the middle management is essential. I could never do my job without them taking care of the corporate nonsense, freeing me up to do my work. It would be impossible.
Agreed. My manager got promoted to a senior manager while no one in the group they manage has had a promotion in years, though plenty have left. And as far as I can tell, all they do is communicate to their boss what we do, or tell us to do our training or fill something out before a deadline. And if their boss has a question for us, they ask us directly. My manager would not be missed from a professional standpoint.
Welcome to corporate America. This is always the case then they go through and layoff middle management. My manager has a couple of direct reports who don't actually report to him, just need to have 5 or more to prevent being let go.
TOTALLY AGREE my middle mgr. went from 23 to 7 directs--enough to stay a mgr I guess. Tho wants to be and is on every project call....I'm thinking why do we have 1-1s--you're on every call I am!!
Agree. WaY too many mgt layers. So many of them do nothing. We can't even reach ours EVER. She always appears "on mobile" and is doing stuff with hers kids. It's ridiculous that she's drawing a paycheck when she does virtually nothing and the team manages itself.
WF, wake up and get rid of all these mgt layers! (incl all thise near the top making min. $750K/yr).
Good luck once the people who do the actual work are laid off and you are left with managers that can’t answer a simple process question!