Dysfunctional senior management team and toxic environment at the senior levels.
Lots of senior management positions occupied by individuals with no relevant experience or technical expertise but have been promoted because their face (which more often than not is female) fits.
Despite protestations to the contrary and frequent exhortations for honesty and transparency, there is a strong aversion to bad news (for example when things went wrong with the launch of the new banking system) and intolerance of views which are not aligned with the CEO's and her cabal of advisors.
As a consequence, there is a religious cult like environment where only one version of the truth is tolerated. Proximity to and finding favor with the CEO and her close cabal of advisors is the key to progression and promotion.
Leadership, management and technical competence or experience is not a requirement for the job (Q: which major financial institution in Canada has a CFO who is not a designated accountant and incredibly, does not even report into the CEO and therefore is not part of the executive team ?)
It's an almost surreal situation whereby a great experiment is being conducted to see how many incompetent individuals can be put into senior positions before the business is run into the ground.
The real unsung heroes in the organisation are the middle and lower management staff who run around like headless chickens trying to keep the ship afloat and trying not to implement the latest ill thought through initiative from the most recent senior management groupthink session without actually appearing to do so (Strategic 2020 Plan anyone ?).
Staff morale is low and after several years of trying to get staff engagement levels up without success, senior management decided to do away with engagement surveys, dismissing them as not a useful tool for measuring engagement !
If you just want a paycheck every two weeks, there are worse places to be but be prepared to drink the Kool Aid, and lots of it.
If you want to work somewhere where you get to grow and develop and are given opportunities based on merit and doing a job well, this is not the place.
