When the Cheer Gets Louder and the Engineers Get Quieter

At one time, a skilled engineering team thrived within a major retail organization, built not on hierarchy but on mutual respect and technical excellence. Contractors and full-time employees worked seamlessly, united by shared ownership rather than separated by employment tags. Collaboration was genuine, and ideas flowed from the ground up. Engineers were trusted to design, build, and deploy what the business truly needed — quickly and with pride.

The culture was personal. Leadership was accessible. Many of those early team members had deep institutional knowledge and longstanding relationships across business units. It wasn’t uncommon to find people who had risen through the ranks — individuals who understood both the technology and the business because they had lived it from the inside.

Years later, revisiting this once-cohesive environment painted a very different picture.

A new wave of leadership had swept in — bringing with it layers of managerial insulation and strategic detachment. These incoming leaders often arrived with playbooks from elsewhere, applying recycled strategies without adaptation, context, or continuity. Morale waned. Engineers who once led with initiative now seemed subdued, navigating structures that appeared to prioritize performance theater over meaningful progress.

Some patterns were hard to miss:

Leadership turnover became routine, with many staying just long enough to implement disruptive change before moving on.

Industry trends were mimicked rather than understood — ideas borrowed from elsewhere often arrived stripped of relevance or nuance.

The human element was increasingly ignored in favor of optics.

Perhaps the most surreal symbol of this shift was watching leaders — many of whom lacked any real connection to the team or its mission — perform symbolic rituals with corporate enthusiasm. What once stood for pride and unity now looked more like a routine performed for the camera. The sentiment behind it had faded; the branding remained.

What’s most disheartening is that many affected weren’t just employees — they believed in the place. They built careers, communities, and innovations within it. To them, the recent changes weren’t strategic shifts — they were betrayals of what once made the company special.

It’s said that CEO began his own journey on the front lines. With any luck, those early experiences still echo somewhere — and can cut through the layers of polish to reach the truth: that a brand is built from the inside, not the slide deck.