The biggest obstacle that I faced while working at GLG was the lack of client response / engagement on open projects. It amazes me how often clients would ghost me whenever I was in the middle of working on a project that they initially came to us for help with. Unfortunately, this ongoing cadence of client ghosting became almost a daily occurrence for me. When clients are unresponsive, leadership will push you to do immense (and I mean immense) outreach to try and follow up with those unresponsive clients. It got to the point where most of my day was spent either on the phone or writing multiple follow-up emails to get clients to respond to the work that I did for them. Many instances, these projects would end up being closed due to a lack of client response and the worst part about this was that all of the work that I did on those projects would not count towards my performance metrics. It was demoralizing, but leadership rarely took that into consideration. The worst part was, if you told leadership about these issues, they would always use the same excuse every time (“we’re client servicing, that’s just the nature of this job, control what you can control”, etc.) and would turn the other cheek. Despite this, I always tried to offer solutions on how we could improve this ongoing issue to better and strengthen the partnership (i.e. set up a meeting with the client sponsors to discuss best practices on how to best use GLG, etc.) However, leadership was (and still are) too scared to give clients any form of feedback on how they can be better partners to work with. I’ve never seen a company be so afraid to stand up for their own employees and the hard work that they continuously put out. After all, GLG always told us that this dynamic with clients is a partnership. A partnership takes effort from BOTH sides in order to succeed. If clients are constantly falling into a bad habit of ghosting / not communicating, that is not a recipe for success. Don’t be fooled. This is not a partnership or a true-blue consulting environment. It’s an over-glorified customer service role that’s incredibly one-sided (in terms of expectations). All of this ultimately led to a burnout, and I ended up leaving the company to pursue a better opportunity.
