‘Creeping failure of senior leaders’: Former Google employee criticises leadership; here’s why

A former Google employee Jonathan Bellack, who claims to have worked at the company for over 15 years has criticised the leadership at the company. Google has been trying to take away the AI lead from companies like OpenAI and Microsoft by introducing its own products. However, the former employee claims that the leaders in the company are not able to take tough decisions, leading to lack of clarity and cohesiveness. 

Bellack, who served as a Project Manager for 15 years at Google, recently highlighted the company's issue of 'fiefdoms', where certain teams act as if they're in control. He stated that the main problem wasn't usually the engineers or Project Managers, but the senior leaders who had stopped making tough decisions or resolving team conflicts. 

He claimed that this led to important decisions being stalled due to prolonged debates among mid-level managers. This situation allowed non-tech departments like policy, legal and finance to step in. The ex-employee mentioned that it was easier for senior executives to discuss risks or costs rather than confront differing opinions and progress together. He concluded that by the end of his tenure, a Project Manager would face more backlash for disagreeing with Global Affairs than for failing to launch valuable software within a reasonable timeframe.

In his post Bellack said, “In my 15yrs as a PM@GOOG, I saw fiefdoms a lot, but eng was rarely the root cause and PM was rarely the solution. It was a creeping failure of too many senior leaders, who lost the incentive/ability to make tough calls or resolve team conflict. Decisions that should have been made promptly by VPs/SVPs were dragged out for months of circular debate between mid-level managers using junior people as cannon fodder (turn another proposal into another deck for another leadership review).”

Post by @jbbellack

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