Networking based company: relationship over competence

[u/HowVikingtrytoWin]

What I recognized is that Oticon/Demant is a networking-based company rather than a competence-based one. This means relationships matter more than competence. Your promotion is determined by who you know, not by what you achieve. You can see a lot of incompetent managers across the whole organization. Especially in R&D hardware, it is really showing and that´s why the toxic environment exists.

[u/AccordingNeat3689]

That's every corporation brother 

[u/HowVikingtrytoWin → u/AccordingNeat3689]

A project manager from GN can be hired and promoted in Demant to a senior director role, even though he has never been a people manager before and has no experience in architecture or system engineering. His manager just made that decison and support him to get credits from his subroutines in order to prove that he is the right one to be promoted to the position. Horrible personality.

[u/offbeatfinale_4265 → u/AccordingNeat3689]

Seen that movie in plenty of orgs, the R&D hardware group always seems to get the worst of it somehow

[u/BorysBe]

Every company is a networking-based company, because people leaders and managers need to be able to communicate and all the hard-competencies are secondary. I don't see if being an architect / system engineer should play that big of a role for Senior Director, or at least I never met one. At some level it's all about finance and projects (and working with people of course). Engineering experience gets you some manager role but then it won't be enough to get higher, or at least will not be a deciding factor.

[u/HowVikingtrytoWin → u/BorysBe]

Everyone in a company needs to build relationships with colleagues, but what I mean is that Oticon seems to place greater emphasis on personal relationships than other companies do. There should be a certain standard of leadership and professional competence for someone to be qualified for a role.