Perspectives: Frozen out of a job
Perspectives: Frozen out of a job
When good work turns into terrible work
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This week’s Perspectives edition is from Stella, a marketer living in Colorado. Almost overnight, Stella’s job description changed, with no explanation. It went from something she enjoyed to something she despised, leading her to quit. To this day, she wonders what went wrong.
Stella shared her story with me via interview.
In 2014, Stella joined a small marketing and technology platform in a sales role. Because the company was so small and she had to wear many hats, over time the role expanded to include content marketing. She developed the marketing strategy for the company, managed the company blog, ran email marketing, and built out the team.
“I was quite autonomous,” Stella recalled. “Then Covid hit. And one day, my manager (the VP of marketing) came to me and said that there were all these things that I had completely underperformed on.” Stella was taken aback. She’d worked for the manager for three years. He had promoted her, helped her niche down into content marketing, and he’d been a mentor.
The directive from her manager that day was clear: Stella was no longer doing any of her current role. The company was launching a YouTube channel and she was either going to manage that, or she was out.
“I started wondering, ‘What’s happening to this organization right now?’” Stella said, “I never really got the answers I was hoping for.” But with so much uncertainty in the early Covid days, she felt like she had to do the YouTube channel. She took courses to learn more about YouTube launches and built out a process.
No other employee at the company had such a drastic role change. Stella was even told to “keep things quiet.” Other employees came to her with questions related to her prior role, so for awhile she wondered if the change was temporary.
As soon as the YouTube channel got off the ground, Stella’s manager came to her again and told her that the project was no longer under her purview. He was going to send her a list of duties every single day and she would do only those tasks and nothing else.
Finding out that her role was changing again, with all of her responsibility taken away, “All the helium was gone from my balloon,” Stella said, sadly. She had been with the company for six years at that point. Plus, she knew her manager was stretched too thin and disorganized: he wouldn’t be capable of sending her a to-do list every day.
To this day, Stella wonders what prompted the change. She speculates that the company may have been trying to future-proof the business amidst Covid and launching the YouTube channel made more business sense than the content strategy she had created. She was impressed with how the company had handled Covid and none of the employees were let go. But none of that explains what happened to her.
Stella thinks that people’s reactions to Covid were very fear-based, and some showed their true colors. She speculates that she may have been a casualty of that fear, even though, overall, everyone at the company kept their jobs and salaries.
“I don’t know if they were trying to force me out,” she wondered. “I really have no idea. I’ve had conversations where I’ve tried to work it out and I’ve never really gotten any resolution.”
She’d already survived a mass layoff three years prior when a new CEO came in and “cleaned house.” She was one of the only people who stuck around and proved her worth.
“I was a really capable employee,” Stella asserted, “I was running a lot of things. But they were all taken away. There were a lot of conflicting signals.”
Her manager, who had promoted her a mere five months before the change and given her glowing performance reviews, was perhaps the biggest mystery. When he told her that her role was changing, he had a list of everything she’d ever done wrong. “It was clearly something he had prepared,” Stella noted, “It was like he had to put on a completely different hat to have that conversation.” She thinks the directive probably came from above him, but she was never able to recoup what she lost in the relationship.
“I was ‘all in’ on that company,” she said, “I’ve been through way harder times than what was happening [at the start of Covid]. My identity was tied to this company. I never knew what I wanted to do professionally until I found this company. I could basically grow with the company.”
But all of that turned on a dime. Stella lasted only two months after her role changed and then left. She admits she’s still grieving the loss of her role and her relationships with her colleagues. She had thought the company was building a really cool place to work. But then she was treated so poorly and felt abandoned.
Since Stella left, her former employer has had a mass layoff. She’s realized that the marketing world is very volatile. “As I tried to move forwarded with my career, I want to be less loyal to a company and more adamant about a role or the dynamics within the company,” she said. “I will still throw myself into people, into relationships, into companies, but my identity…. I’m a bit more guarded with that.”
As she’s interviewed for roles since then, Stella said she looks very critically at the person she’ll be reporting to. She thinks too many mediocre managers have risen to power and done nothing to deserve their leadership positions. She leans into “interview the company as much as they’re interviewing you” more than she has in the past.
“A simple ‘vibe check’ won’t cut it.”
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