COE: Why was I fired?

Note: The COE (Correction of Error) document below was forwarded to us by someone other than the original author, so we have removed names and other personal information before publishing it.

TL;DR: 4 senior leaders in Marketplace falsified my 2015 annual review, leading to my firing, despite overwhelming and widespread praise for role model performance by everyone else I work with. This was started as retaliatory action for my defending an employee being mistreated by one of these abusive managers, but HR continuously defended the abusers and accepted all of their lies until they illegally pushed me out the door based on provably false statements.

COE

Why was I fired?

Summary

I was fired 2 weeks ago. This was a shock to hundreds of people I work with because they recognize me as a very strong leader both for my area and for contributions across Amazon. However, four senior leaders in my department decided last December they wanted to end my Amazon career through a falsified review and worked together to make that happen. I requested help from HR as I saw each of their unethical actions unfold (but without a full understanding of their overall actions being done behind my back), but HR defended their actions as legitimate and then pushed me out of Amazon because they consider me a troublemaker for escalating these issues and not just accepting my falsified review despite overwhelming written and legally recorded audio evidence proving the dishonest actions by abusive managers.

I am writing this COE in the hopes that it will kick Amazon in the rear and force HR to fix their practices before they destroy what I consider to be one of the best companies on the planet. This type of poor HR behavior has happened at most large companies, which then led to lawsuits after HR failed to defend employees against abuses, so I am hoping that Amazon will learn this lesson without the necessary evil of a lawsuit. Without corrective action, the net effect of litigation will be destructive to the autonomy and ownership values that defines Amazon culture and enables our teams to move fast and deliver the best products to the happiest customers in the world. We already see the impact of the negative publicity caused by the recent New York Times article and this will only get worse if I am forced to publicize my situation through the media and the legal process to pressure Amazon HR to publicly fix their current behavior supporting abusive managers. HR needs to treat Amazon employees with the same customer obsession that we rightfully give our customers and face up to their past failures to publicly correct their processes immediately. 

Metrics

My 2015 360 Feedback (including a few clearly biased negative feedback where most negative boxes in the feedback form were checked without any truthful supporting data):

Customer Obsession (+7,0)

Ownership (+13,-4)

Invent and Simplify (+2,-2)

Are Right, A Lot (+5,-2)

Hire and Develop The Best (+22,0)

Insist on the Highest Standards (+9,-4)

Think Big (+6,-4)

Bias for Action (+15,-2)

Frugality (0,0)

Vocally Self Critical (+3,-5)

Earn Trust of Others (+12,-9)

Dive Deep (+4,-5)

Have Backbone; Disagree & Commit (+2,-5)

Deliver Results (+7,-2)

Contributions to Amazon in 2.9 years:

- Ran the Listing Platform teams November 2012-December 2013, improving YoY operations and project delivery

- Ran the Nudge and Business Report teams January 2014-December 2014 and then just the Nudges teams January 2015-present, improving YoY hiring, SDE career development, operations and project delivery

- Created the Marketplace Machine Learning team in August 2014

- Doubled the XXXXXXX office from 25 to 50 in 4 months through external hiring and site transfers.

- Transitioned work from XXXXXXX to XXXXXXX in 2014 and conducted a team split in Q3 2014, both processes considered role model templates now regularly requested across Amazon

- Mentored 12 people (SDMs, TPMs, and SDEs) over 2.9 years across the US, Europe, and India and continually received new mentorship requests from across Amazon.

- Shared best practices with other site leads across XXXXXX, XXXXXXX, and XXXXXXX

- Salvaged the broken situation for the Seller Central Platform team in XXXXXXX when they had 65% attrition and unreasonable workloads for over 6 months in 2014 by seeding the team with 3 of my SDEs for the team to be able to move to XXXXXXX.

- Coordinated training for my site bringing in external trainers for MGHD, Working Backwards, Scrum Workshop, etc.

- Played a coordination role in 6 internal conferences (AmazeCon, Internal Women's Day, Builder Tools, Machine Learning, Test Unconference, Intent) and 3 Hackathons (2013 Hackapalooza and 2014 and 2015 Global Intern Hackathons)

- Participated in internal Hackathons and won 3 awards (2 team wins and 1 individual win from 3 separate Hackathons)

- Co-led 2014 Seller Forums in XXXXXXX and XXXXXXX 

- Coordinated Amazon becoming a course sponsor for the XXXXXXX XXXXX University CSE Capstone Course and then led the students for the Fall 2014 semester.

- Participated in 5 on-site college recruiting events, at 3 of which I was the acting bar raiser at the request of the recruiters 

- Gave a well-received talk at EE Days 7/2014 on best practices for remote sites and for cross-site collaboration.

- Safety Czar during my entire tenure

- Provided Deskside and AV support for my site until we grew enough to hire our local Deskside.

- Beta tested internal tools and every product available for testing at Amazon during my tenure and provided ongoing valuable feedback to the teams.

- Output Metrics: Nudge business grew from $2B to $6.8B under my watch with 32 new feature launches, 336 interviews, 31 hires, 15 team promotions, <10% unplanned attrition across my teams during my tenure, 207 phone tool icons

Customer Impact

I am blacklisted from ever working at Amazon again :(

Timeline

November 2012 - I joined Amazon.

October 2013 - Our entire org was reorganized in order to remove my ineffective manager

December 2013 - I received my midyear review from my new manager and the rating was Achieves/Solid Strength

January 2014 - I am reorged under a different manager (xxxxx@) in my org, who was previously a peer. 

April 2014 - I receive a rating of Achieves/Development Needed from xxxxx. I escalated the inconsistency with the December rating and was told to disagree and commit to move forward with that rating since I was already having a great year in 2014

October 2014 - I received my midyear review and the rating was Exceeds/Solid Strength

November 2014 - xxxxx becomes upset with me due to my aggressively (but privately) challenging his unethical treatment of a transfer employee. Behind my back, he asks HR to put me on a PIP for this one issue and HR tells him it is inappropriate to do so. His actions from this point forward are clearly retaliation for this incident.

December 2014 - There is another reorg and I begin reporting to another previous peer (xxxx@). xxxxx suddenly transfers my Machine Learning team to xxxxx@ with notifying me. The team eventually suffers 100% attrition due to mismanagement. 

January 2015 - Management transfers my Business Reports team to another leader. The result is severely decreasing team morale and attrition. I request a transfer review with xxxxx and xxxx  and there is written confirmation of my Exceeds rating against my goals for 2014. My business partners (xxxxx@ and xxx@) begin to create a hostile environment for me in coordination with xxxx.

February 2015 - I am told my rating will be much worse than my expectations from the entire prior year, so I escalate this to HR.

March 2015 - HR states that my review is accurate per the data presented. I ask for a review of this data along with an investigation of the retaliation behavior by xxxxx and the hostile environment created by my business partners.

April 2015 - HR states that the retaliatory actions are legitimate and there is not legally a hostile environment and that the data in my review will clarify everything. I receive my review and the dishonest content does not match my performance data at all for the prior year.

May 2015 - A ratings review is conducted with my current and former management and HR. My former director (xxxxxx@) unethically disowns the entire prior year of public and private positive feedback, dishonestly claiming them to be "encouragement for the team" rather a reflection of my very successful year in 2014. I am told that the review data supports the rating without being allowed to challenge the data since I don't have any visibility into it. 

May 2015 - I successfully get approval to move forward with a plan to launch a new AWS team in XXXXXXX with support from senior AWS leadership, but I am blocked from moving forward after xxxx falsifies my performance record to AWS management. This does major harm to the XXXXXXX office since there is no planned office growth in 2015 and some Amazonians are desperate for rotation opportunities, leading to attrition.

June 2015 - I am put on a PIP stating that I need to rebuild the trust of 8 core leaders in my department with whom I have substantially broken trust in the past year, since this was the primary basis of my negative rating. I meet with each and, with the exception of the 3 involved in the hostile environment and retaliation, I am recognized as a strong overall senior leader with a minor need to improve my communication style, so the PIP changes to state that I need to rebuild trust with 3 leaders and learn to improve my communication skills from the others who are already trusted partners. I successfully rebuild trust with 1 leader, but the other two continually cancel my 1:1s to avoid meeting with me for over 3 months, in order to force me to fail my PIP.

TWO WEEKS AGO - I am suddenly told that I am leaving Amazon that day. This is after I was told that the PIP was going well at the PIP 30 day check-in at the end of June and that it would either be closed soon or extended slightly if needed just for me to meet with those who have repeatedly canceled 1:1s. After that, false new PIP goals were continually invented to drive the PIP towards failure since I was easily proving myself as a strong leader and disproving xxxx's lies with written proof again and again. All of this was happening with clear HR approval and with them ignoring the truth and the overwhelmingly positive feedback from across Amazon.

Whys?

1. Why was I fired?

Because I inaccurately received Achieves/Development Needed as my rating for 2014 and 2015, marking me as a Least Effective employee who should be managed out of the company and blocked from ever returning.

2. Why did I receive the rating of Achieves/Development Needed in 2014?

In April 2014, I had my first review which covered from my hire date in November 2012 until March 2014. During my first 6 months at Amazon, I received no support from my very ineffective director who was well known to be a failure as a leader and who survived at Amazon only due to his long-term relationship with our org VP/GM. Six other leaders managed by this director in recent years were also dissatisfied with his leadership and all asked to leave his org, as did I. Due to his lack of coaching, I brought a lot of work habits from the prior 17 years of my career which had made me extremely successful elsewhere, so I attempted to use those here and failed miserably. After 6 months, I began receiving guidance from another director (xxxxxxxx) and his tech VP in my org and immediately corrected my performance. After being here for nearly a year, I was reorged to work for xxxxxxxx in October 2013 and I asked him for a meaningful midyear review since I had not received any useful management feedback since joining Amazon nearly a year earlier. He rated my year as Achieves/Solid Strength in recognition of solid performance after my very poor launch period. However, after 4 months of working for him, another department reorg took place, so I took on a new role working for one of my L7 peers (xxxxx). When I started working for him, I confirmed that he would follow the same review methodology as xxxxxxxxx and focus on the period after I finally received coaching on the Amazon culture. However, when I received my review, I was surprised that the rating was Achieves/Development Needed and included lots of content from my launch period. When I challenged this with xxxxx and with HR, I was told that I shouldn't worry about it because I was already having a great year for the first half of 2014 and this was a just a reflection of my earlier bumps in the road. I was told that I would not be put on a development plan or PIP, so I disagreed with the rating but committed to moving forward.

3. Why did I receive the rating of Achieves/Development Needed in 2015?

Throughout 2014, I received feedback from xxxxx and xxxxxx as my management chain that I was having a great year as I exceeded my goals for hiring, operations, and delivering projects. xxxxx was promoted in Q3 largely based on my successes. xxxxx confirmed in September that he had communicated to HR that all prior year performance concerns were fully resolved over a sustained period as stated by all feedback providers. In October, I received a midyear rating of Exceeds/Solid Strength. However, xxxxx then got upset with me in November after he behaved unethically related to the transfer of an employee and I aggressively challenged him on this during our 1:1. After that, we had another reorg and I thought the issue was closed but then a series of actions led to my current manager (xxxx) falsely claiming that I had substantially broken trust with a large set of senior leaders and peers in my department during my review and that was falsified basis of my receiving another failing rating of Achieves/Development Needed.

4. Why was that the basis of your review?

xxxx stated that my feedback reflected mostly positive feedback from my team and from across Amazon, but claimed that a group of key leaders from our department had stated that I was substantially breaking trust.

5. Why do think this is inaccurate?

After my mediocre first year review at Amazon, I worked very hard to ensure a very successful 2nd year and checked in frequently with my management and other leaders in my department to ensure I was receiving consistently good feedback all year. This continued with overwhelming positive feedback until the November transfer incident. After that, the following sequence of events demonstrate the inaccuracy of my review:

5.1 After the November transfer incident, xxxxx canceled all 1:1s as my manager until we were re-orged. He then moved my MML team to xxxxx in December without notifying me and advocated the same for my Business Reports team, which was moved in January. These actions were clearly meant to punish me as well as to help other leaders get promoted by having bigger teams, even though the changes made no sense from a business perspective. Both transferred teams eventually suffered substantial attrition due to these org changes.

5.2 In early December, I met with our new HRBP and she mentioned her knowledge of the November transfer incident, which was a surprise to me since I thought it was over and done. I explained my mistakes in that process and she stated that she had heard that I had a great year overall and this one negative incident wouldn't ruin that. I also met with another senior leader in my org and he stated that he had also been hearing a lot of negativity about the November transfer incident, so he suggested I work with xxxx and our new tech VP to ensure that it stayed as a single incident and doesn't have any further repercussions.

5.3 I shared my concerns with xxxx in mid-December and we agree to have a transfer review with xxxxx, which occurred in mid-January. The content of the review was consistent with my midyear review in stating I had exceeded my goals all year and the only new leadership principles concern raised is the November transfer incident.

5.4 I suddenly received accusatory emails in late December from my business partners (xxxxx and xxx) stating I have substantially broken their trust over a minor misunderstanding. The ultimate root cause of this misunderstanding was an accounting error by our PMO director.

5.5 In mid-January, xxxx updated my personnel file stating that my performance had reverted back to the negatives of my initial launch period and the proof given is the November transfer incident along with the new accusations by my business partners. There is blatant collusion in this situation because it clearly follows my working to ensure that the single November transfer incident would not hurt my performance for last year, so these additional incidents were created to give weight to the false new claims of poor performance.

5.6 From February-May, xxxx provided no recourse for me as I repeatedly escalated the hostile environment being created by my business partners. In fact, I recently found out that he was actively working against me in regards to this hostile environment by making statements to HR that I was showing aggression towards my business partners and telling them that he would walk me out the door due to my behavior problems if needed, which is completely disproven by everyone in our office as witnesses. Whenever I made any minor mistakes due to this stressful situation, xxxx uses those to justify to HR why he believes my performance is poor and I deserve a bad review and PIP. 

5.7 In June, when the basis for my review and PIP was proven to be false since the claim of widespread broken trust is disproven and the only broken trust is with xxxxx and my business partners, xxxx becomes very defensive that the false basis of everything he has done is being exposed. I agree to move forward with the PIP goals being reset to repair only the broken relationships with xxxxx and my business partners. HR refuses to consider the new evidence constantly coming to light exposing the abusive behavior of xxxx, xxxxx, and our business leaders, which is all part of xxxxx's illegal retaliatory behavior against me after the November transfer incident.

6. Why would xxxx, xxxxx, and your business partners want to harm your career through fraudulent accusations?

For xxxxx, he has clearly held a grudge against me since the November transfer incident and wanted to illegally retaliate against me by removing 2 teams from my org and driving a PIP and bad review for last year even though he confirmed my overall performance in writing as Exceeding my goals in January and was told right away by HR that this single incident did not warrant a performance improvement plan. All of his actions from that point forward were clearly intended to harm my career. Over the past year, I have dug into his performance as a people manager and found at least 14 other clear instances where his actions have been substantially harmful to his team members, clearly showing him to be a serial abuser of his employees.

For my business partners, it is well-known that their leader (xxxxx) is "joined at the hip" with xxxxx and he joined in this situation to create new instances of broken trust just before OLR to justify falsified negative feedback and my poor review. He also took credit for all of my YoY technology delivery improvements to get xxx promoted in Q1 and his actions led to the attrition of the entire MML team since his only interest in managing them was to drive promotions for himself and xxx.

For xxxx, I thought I had a good trust relationship with him as my peer until December based on his direct written feedback to me in 2014. Others also stated that they considered my 2014 efforts to repeatedly help his teams to be role model behavior in terms of earning trust. However, xxxx is apparently more interested in his own career growth being supported by our dysfunctional org leadership rather than in accurately measuring my performance data. Knowing that I had a much better year than him in 2014 in terms of hiring and developing teams, projects, and operations, xxxx worked to ensure that he received a better performance review by creating a false basis for claiming that I am failing at earning trust, since that one leadership principle alone is considered sufficient to justify a poor review. He also claimed I wasn't vocally self-critical for not accepting his lies. This is despite having overwhelmingly positive feedback from my teams, peers and across Amazon and only 4 people providing any substantial negative feedback about me (xxxx, xxxxx, and our 2 business partners), which is clearly falsified data.

7. Why didn't HR defend you when you showed them the correct performance data?

They were (and continue to be) overly deferential to the lies told by the abusive managers. They also tried to follow their same playbook as they do with everyone else: (1) they try to convince people being mistreated that they aren't a good fit for Amazon (as they correctly do for poor performers) and (2) offer some kind of financial incentives to leave the company. Since I am not a poor performer and I am an excellent fit for Amazon (as widely recognized by everyone I worked with, including the abusive managers in writing until the retaliatory behavior began) and I am also much more interested in fixing Amazon to repair these few weaknesses in our overall awesome culture versus being interested in just taking a lump sum of money and leaving, HR became very unhappy with me for continuing to challenge their defense of the abusive behavior. This is the kind of destructive behavior by HR which led to the NY Times article in August and clearly still exists today as shown by my situation for the past 10 months. HR apparently refuses to fix harmful actions by unethical leaders since those leaders' actions are supported by dysfunctional org leadership.

8. Why are you sending this COE out so broadly across the company?

As someone who was forced out of the company that I truly love to work at and that I was very strong contributor to and where I was the most correct implementer of the culture, I am officially blocked from ever working here again due to this situation. My lawyer friends who are aware of my situation desperately want me to sue Amazon, given the clearly illegal behavior by abusive leaders and their overt protection by HR. 

However, all I really want is for Amazon to fix these broken HR processes which enabled this abuse and prevent it from ever happening to anyone else without my having to sue. My only remaining internal mechanism to force that issue onto HR is through the mass publication of this email to the entire company so that sufficient weight given to the issue and it is fully addressed.

9. Why didn't you contact Jeff as he suggested in his August email?

I did, but that only led to HR treating me more aggressively since they saw that I wouldn't compromise on my principles to accept the abuse of my managers and was easily disproving every lie which they had supported for months.

Lessons learned?

1. Although I believe my HR partners operated honestly at the beginning, they excessively assumed leaders who are provably dishonest are telling the truth and instead question the motives of a victim of illegal actions who is being blamed under false accusations. This is the classic definition of blaming the victim. After that, they stop being honest and just do everything possible to "make a situation go away" rather than dealing with abusive managers, enabling the abusers to continue with their illegal and harmful behavior.

2. Claims about trust can be easily falsified and exaggerated and yet HR seems to fully defer to those false statements.

3. Bad managers can get away with false claims that an employee wasn't receptive to coaching after the bad manager wants to change their performance data after the fact.

4. It's currently impossible to fight management abuse at Amazon because the result will be that you are accused of being disruptive if you don't disagree and committing to falsified data.

5. No employee being abused should contact HR or Jeff until this process is fixed, because their solution now is to remove you and not to correct the abusive managers.

Corrective actions?

1. The managers responsible for this fraud should be immediately severely reprimanded and also demoted or dismissed from Amazon and potentially prosecuted for fraud and management abuses.

2. Other leaders who are more concerned with their relationships with abusive leaders at the expense of having any integrity also need to be reprimanded, notably my former director (xxxxxx) in this case who disowned 12 months of continuous private and public positive performance feedback to concur with the falsified ratings when challenged. This sick leadership culture in Marketplace, where leaders focus on their leadership relationships over honest performance data assessment, needs to be crushed.

3. HR needs to deep-dive into their enabling unethical and illegal behavior by abusive leaders and take meaningful corrective actions to improve the treatment of abuse victims rather than doubling down on the abuse.

4. I should be immediately rehired with compensation for the 10 months of hell I had to endure due to this abusive behavior (but I know widely sending this email alone will likely prevent that from ever happening, ignoring the fact that I'm already blacklisted based on the falsified performance data).

In all likelihood, this will be the last email you every see from me inside Amazon since this very public COE is far from an ideal way to get things done. I have been an Amazon customer for 17 years, an Amazon seller for 14 years, an Amazon Associates advertiser for 12 years, and a large scale user of every product (11 Kindles and Kindle Fires/HDX, 3 Fire Phones, 5 Fire TVs/sticks, 2 Echos) and service (AIV, MP3, Prime, Audible, Appstore, AWS,etc) and I truly believe in our company, so I am very sad to be forced to leave this way.

You can reach me at XXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXX.net or https://www.linkedin.com/in/XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

To quote a great American: Goodbye and Good Luck!