Fidelity Investments

There are a lot of very smart people working in the IT area here, and it's been a pleasure working with them.

There are also a lot of very lazy people working here who have adopted a "cover my butt" attitude. Taking risks and initiative is actively discouraged by multiple layers of middle management who are afraid to be on the "wrong side" of a senior manager, so the safe-but-inadequate decision is preferred over a better solution which entails some risk. There is too much paper-pushing and red tape in getting things done. HR & Management like to crow about paying "industry average" salaries, which to me seems like a way to guarantee you'll only retain "industry average" talent.

Set clear directions. Speak directly with your individual contributors and encourage those individuals to give you clear, direct, and honest feedback.

Learn that if you wish to retain "star" talent, you can't offer "average" salaries and benefits. Learn that implementing a review system which dictates only certain proportions of your employees can receive "excellent" and "outstanding" reviews necessarily means that you are comparing us against one another, and when one employee "wins" by getting a great performance rating, some other employee "loses" by being prevented from getting that rating.