The only people that get ahead at Fastmarkets are the ones that actively spend all their time brown nosing senior management, even if they're demonstrably incapable of doing their job, known for treating other members of their team with a consistent lack of respect, are caught out simply not doing the core functions of their jobs for extended periods of time. If you don't click socially with your manager, which at times is due to cultural differences (since not all of us are middle class white English people) you do not get the opportunity for progression or recognition for your work, irrespective of the results you bring in, the quality of your ideas or your experience.
Related to this, if you're a junior person in the company, there's no point bringing up ideas that your manager hasn't first mentioned. The culture is such that the only good idea a junior can have is that their manager has lots of great ideas. A few times now i've seen people bring up possible solutions to problems, but the decision maker doesn't want to deal with it, because they are only interested in implementing their own manager's vision (to do something that might save the company time and money but isn't the flavour of the week for senior management is wasting your own time since it won't help you progress).
Because of the resulting lack of competence in those that do make it into middle and senior management, even the most basic projects suffer from a lack of accountability and end up being binned after significant amounts of work going into it or otherwise derailed.
In some departments there's constant change in leadership. Every time a new leader comes in they think they're going to revolutionize the way things are done, without speaking to the people that are working with products and customers to find out what the main problems are that need to be fixed. Inevitably they fail since they didn't want to work with less senior people to find solutions to known problems. People are hired into senior positions based on how well they talk the talk; rarely do they walk the walk.
You are sent the message that you should never ask for help. At the very least it will mean that your manager starts disliking you, at worst you'll be punished for speaking up by having your requests for help completely denied or even having more worked piled on your plate after you've said you're struggling.
The expectation in some teams is that instead of asking for help you need to just wake up a 6am and work till 9/10pm every day, and then do a bit more work over the weekends.
