In May 2025, I joined this small startup (hardly 50 permanent employees), and I made a very huge impact on their customer success team. There was no micromanagement, a lot of flexibility, and there was even an open-door policy. Whenever we had any issues, we could directly reach out to our founder, and he used to resolve issues effectively. I was thriving and was genuinely happy for the first time in 6 years of my career.
Our customer success team was quite small, and there were two managers. one day shift manager and one night shift manager. The day shift manager rarely did any work and was scared of the night shift manager. The night shift manager was hungry for power and was a micromanager. All the other teammates were really hard-working.
I started my maternity leave in March 2026, and before I went on maternity leave, I heard there were going to be a lot of changes in the customer success team. I was happy that finally management was going to do something about the managers. I gave birth and was enjoying motherhood, and my teammates came to meet my newborn. The “changes” the management made to our team and process literally shocked me. I am now scared to go back to work.
The changes they made are:
They fired the day shift manager and promoted the night shift manager, who was already hungry for more power. He is micromanaging and shouting at people, and everyone on the team is stressed and looking for other opportunities.
We had a flexible hybrid policy. Even though it was 3 days WFO, we were not asked to go to the office. The office used to be empty most days. Now they have made WFO mandatory ONLY for our team. Please note that even while working from home, all the teammates except the managers were super productive. And this mandatory WFO policy is not applicable to the manager. Lol.
We are not supposed to contact the CEO directly. Approval needs to be taken from the manager before contacting the CEO. For approval, you need to communicate the issue to the manager. The manager decides whether this issue needs to be communicated to the CEO or not. Please note that this is a super small organization. This rule was made so that no one complains about the micromanagement to the CEO.
And the most interesting part is that you are not supposed to interact with any cross-functional team members. If you reach out to them, a warning letter will be issued. As someone working in a client-facing role, I am not sure how I am supposed to not interact with cross-functional teams. It is literally a part of the job description for all client-facing roles.
It feels scary. I am only joining back in August, but I cannot stop thinking about it, and I am really stressed. My teammates are really good people, and hearing them struggle and not being able to do anything about it is so sad.