Great people, blind leadership - User Experience Manager AnswerLab Employee Review

AnswerLab exclusively promotes people (across the org) who: - Put in well more than 40 hours a week - despite the ongoing narrative that this is not how execs want employees to work - Smile and nod to everything - Do not form independent opinions, do not offer dissenting viewpoints, and do not attempt to poke holes in new ideas Two of the six people in Exec roles refuse to hear negative words of any kind, which leads to barriers against improving processes and improving employee performance and quality of life across the org. Strategy (sales) runs the ranch at AnswerLab, to the detriment of the entire company. They work without any parameters and they are not required to help in the project success in any way other than to sell it. (Sales will disagree with this, but I challenge 90% of them to tell me even one other way they assist in project success.) This means that Sales makes all scoping decisions, agrees to difficult deliverables and (literally) impossible timelines, but are "on the hook" for none of it. When clients push too hard, go out of scope, or ask for unreasonable things, it causes the project costs to skyrocket out of control, which the Research dept is blamed for. Sales are not asked to take responsibility for pushing back on unreasonable requests, instead making the Research team do it. This means that Research: - works under unreasonable deadlines and are unsupported in pushing back - as a consequence of the above, works way harder and longer than should be required based on the original project scope - is left to tell the client "no" when demands are unreasonable. this has led to very rare cases where the client doesn't want to work with the researcher anymore, and sales REFUSES TO STAFF THE RESEARCHER on anything new - when in fact it is their fault - gets blamed when a project is unprofitable because they had to put in extra work that sales agreed to without adding hours or costs to the project. Sales is accountable for nothing at the company, but they get a HEFTY sales commission. No one in the Research dept sees a cent of the (unnecessarily large) commission. In fact, the ones doing the least work make the most money because the huge accounts run themselves; they don't have to sell, they just have to pick up the phone. When you have a company where one department creates the work, refuses to be accountable for the work, and walks away with 5x (or more) the salary of the Researcher, you get resentment and people leaving the company for being worked too hard, being unrecognized for work, or being blamed for things beyond their control.