The working environment cultivated by marketing’s leadership (mainly the VP): micromanagement and “this meeting could have been an email” or comment in a doc. Leadership was fixated on trivial details like checking off subtasks, organizing folders, or scheduling endless meetings to discuss previous meetings and schedule more meetings to discuss those meetings. This obsessive focus minutiae led to a significant amount of time on tasks that didn’t directly contribute to the project’s success, or progress. 95% of people's days were meeting.
Poor planning and project management compounded the inefficiency. While there was documentation on the big picture, none on its necessary inputs—no briefs, no scopes, no objectives. Deliverables were only communicated verbally in meetings. I mentioned making a brief for something they got very concerned and told me not to create one.
It was like chickens running around with their heads cut off, constantly stressed and worried about how everything should have been done yesterday. Yet, there was no reflection or evaluation of what contributed to everything being so behind and how it could be improved. I've never actually experienced an environment filled with so much unnecessary anxiety.
Zero processes for review or iteration, which exacerbated the dysfunction. When you presented anything you worked on, there was no "Good start; let’s refine it further." Instead, leadership was irritated it wasn’t what they envisioned or wasn't a polished final product. They acted like you screwed up/ did a bad job, they would be visibly mad, which created this environment of fear and stress. This wasn’t an isolated issue to my self—it was a pattern with other team members work.
Not sure exactly if this stems from the VP's inability to clearly articulate their highly specific vision or because their true requirements were either not fully communicated or so rigid and specific that delivering on them without mind-reading was impossible.
Even when you documented verbatim what was requested in a meeting, thanks to a recording, your work still didn't align with what the VP’s wanted.
Their anxiety extended to insignificant details. If they saw a detail they didn't recall, they were up in arms, sending a flurry of worried late-night messages questioning its validity. Only to confirm in the morning the tiny detail was correct.
Managers were so anxious that your work might be "incorrect"—because their interpretation of the deliverable would differ from what you produced—that they would redo your work themselves out of fear, only to present something that completely missed the VP’s expectations. Obviously, I left the moment up I had other work lined up.