Shane Goldsmith

Bad management gets in the way of a great mission If you're interested in a job at Liberty Hill, be wary of the red flags throughout the interview process. When you're pressed for your salary history, note that you are competing with management from day one. When you go to your third interview with the same people, note that it takes FAR too long for things to get done there. When you get asked the same questions for each of those three interviews, note that management has a strict set of rules that doesn't seem to actually benefit the organization. I have no doubt that everybody at Liberty Hill - from the CEO on down - wants the organization to be a good one. However, there is far too much of a culture of heirarchy, micro-managing and distrust for any of that to be a reality, and the workplace suffers for it. Despite it's progressive mission, Liberty Hill runs like something out of Dilbert. Although most of the staff is tremendously talented, they are not empowered or given the latitude to make their own decisions. Instead, everything must be run by a manager, who must then wait to share the information at the bi-weekly directors' team meeting. Often the directors won't reach any agreement or they simply don't have time to discuss so the idea slowly dies. And even when managers seem to like an idea, they seem unwilling to accept that their staff is more expert on that topic than they are, so staff must slog through trying to explain technical specifics to management instead of being given the freedom to implement good ideas on their own. This is partly due to a culture of distrust - there are rifts between employees and departments because each decision is made behind closed doors. And behind those doors, there's a whole lot of finger-pointing. Communications blames Finance, Finance blames Development, Development blames the CEO and so on. What is wholly lacking is the ability for any of the management to admit their flaws - any constructive criticism is met with defensiveness and sometimes even retaliation. In one particularly bad instance, an entire department was railroaded by management simply for raising extremely valid concerns about an awful supervisor. It's no wonder the workplace is eerily quiet - say the wrong thing and you risk several surprise meetings with management and strikes against you on your performance review. Because of the micromanaging and the inability to move forward, workers push themselves harder and harder and never see forward progress. I have never worked so hard to accomplish so little. The workplace is infinitely more stressful than it needs to be. Beyond all this, there isn't much of a ladder to climb within the organization. Instead of promoting their own expertise from within, Liberty Hill shells out huge sums to outside consultants to tell them what the entire staff already knew about why the organization isn't running as well as it likes. Higher-up positions are typically brought in from the outside instead of being promoted from within, most likely because few people want to stick around long enough to get that promotion - the turnover rate was easily double that of anywhere else I've worked. Lastly, be wary of any glowing reviews shortly after this one is posted. There's one very negative review on this site, and just days later it was followed up with a 5-star review that reads more like marketing copy than honest employee feedback.