Safe Spaces for Women.
The last time I wrote a blog post, I was sharing that I had found a new job after five months of searching—and after the most bizarre job offer/rescinding experience most people had ever heard of. Well, now I'm here to tell you that after a month at this new job, I decided to leave it and start maternity leave a little early. This decision was made because of lack of support and safety, as well as major stress, in my new work space.
During the interview process for this social media manager job, I felt pretty good about the opportunity and my boss (head of marketing) seemed easy to work with and had quite a bit of marketing experience. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for and didn't pay what I wanted, but, at the time, I was about four months from my due date, so if I wanted to add any work experience to my portfolio before baby, I had to take the offer on the table. I was told that the marketing team was relatively new (my boss was just hired in November) and that after a while, a second social media person would likely be hired.
On my first day, I had a call with my boss, and he told me they had hired another social media manager. At first, I was a little put off by this, because I was under the impression that I would be the one to own and lead the social media strategy, but I let it go because what else could I do? What I didn't know was that she would be the best thing to come out of this crazy experience. I had a feeling that since it was a startup there wouldn't be much structure, but it was a bit of a red flag to me that my boss didn't have any sort of direction for the marketing team when we chatted that first week, and although I asked multiple times for the three of us to sit down and iron out roles and responsibilities, it ultimately was left up to us social media managers to make that decision.
The CEO wanted to meet twice a week with the marketing team (my boss, us two social media managers, and the content lead) until we were settled. I figured, ok no big deal, it's a small company so it makes sense for us all to get together. Well, by the end of my first week, our content lead unexpectedly quit, and the CEO decided he needed to tell us what social media "strategies" were the top priority for us to work on. Want to know what his first priority was? Reddit. Yup, you heard me right, he wanted us to begin engaging with people on Reddit before building up our brand presence on any of the actual social media channels they were currently active on. A bit of backstory: the coding projects on their website are created by themes to get kids excited to learn to code with something they are already interested in (i.e. basketball, Harry Potter, cooking, video games, etc.). The CEO wanted us to come up with 300 channels that were communities of people who are experts or fans in these themed areas and ask them for project ideas—with a result of these people engaging back and then driving traffic to our website.
We pushed back on the idea a bit but it was also our first week so we didn't want to say a hard no to the CEO—especially since he seemed intense and tunnel-visioned when it came to his own ideas. Oh, we also had two days to come up with these channels and had to immediately start engaging because he had a product launch coming up in THREE WEEKS. He also spent the entire morning leading up to our marketing meeting sending us Slack messages every hour with how many hours we had to complete the project and the number of channels left to 300..... W.T.F.
The other social media manager and I met the following Monday to chat a bit further because we hadn't had a chance to connect yet. We both agreed that we had to get started on the strategy that we had built the week before and that our boss (who reported to the CEO) needed to push for us to be able to focus on both brand building and engagement. That Wednesday, our boss got the green light from the CEO to move forward with our strategy and told us we had to create a content calendar for the rest of the month (it was the first week of March) by that Friday. I must also include that we had asked our boss for a marketing calendar, goals, and budget, which we had never received from him so we were literally creating this blindly based on our platform audits and past social media experience. I've never written so much social copy in my life. That Friday, we showed the CEO our calendar and convinced him to let us try out Sprout Social since they also didn't have a social media tool to post, engage or pull analytics.
Fast forward to the following Friday morning. Before our marketing call, the CEO messaged us saying he wanted to see DAILY analytics for our social posts (keep in mind we had literally just started posting new content each day starting that Monday and their engagement was pretty much nonexistent before we started). He also wanted links sent to him every day so he could look at it all. Uhhhhhhhh what???? So we got on our marketing call and I began sharing with him some data from Sprout Social, how we were tagging links for Google Analytics, and all the KPIs we were going to track as we kept posting and working on our strategy. He immediately started questioning me and didn't understand why some analytics in Sprout (link clicks specifically) didn't match our tagged links in Google Analytics. My marketing peeps know the answer to this, and I confidently told him why they would differ but my answer was not good enough for him. He told me I had to go back to the Sprout rep and see why they were different. He then asked my boss on the call why they were different, and my boss says that they would never be exactly the same and that it was his educated guess. UM WHAT. That call legitimately consisted of the CEO interrupting me and talking over me for 45 minutes while I tried to continue presenting my findings and explaining our approach to the strategy. Did my boss speak up on my behalf at all? NOPE.
Fast forward again to the following Tuesday on our next marketing call where the CEO proceeded to explain profit and loss statements to us and attempted to drill down from organic social media impressions to the number of new customers we should expect to see daily when we have our product launch. Each time my colleague or I tried to chime in to ask a question, he immediately cut us off and started to answer the question he thought we were going to ask before we could ask it. He also told us not to be scared off by these goal numbers being so high or start looking for another job but rather we should be ready to ask for a raise because we are going to have so many new customers coming in. From social media. Only.
After this call, I messaged my boss and said we had to have a call just the three of us without the CEO because these marketing meetings were not productive, the CEO is all over the place, and we needed to align on a holistic marketing strategy going into this launch. He agreed and set up a call for the next day. We got on the call and I kicked things off by saying that I first wanted to address the treatment we were receiving in the marketing meetings from the CEO. I was very honest with him about the fact that we were not being given the space to speak up about our expertise but rather being talked over, interrupted, and told how we should be doing our job. His response? That's just how the CEO is. That he is the type of person who reads these random articles he sees online like "Amazon did X and grew X customers in 10 days" or some shit, so he gets these crazy ideas and wants to implement them immediately into his business.
This was when I realized that although I did want to work through this hurdle, it was apparent that the CEO would continue to be heavily involved in all aspects of marketing, my boss wasn't going to stand up for us (nor did I really know what he did on a daily basis), and we were going to continue to be subjected to this terrible treatment in meetings. I spoke with the other social media manager and we were both starting to feel like all the red flags were just piling up. We also knew we were likely not going to be able to own anything like we had been told we would in our interviews. We agreed that we would take things day by day but would keep each other in the loop if we decided to leave—so we wouldn't blindside each other. She also told me that she was tasked with creating an influencer strategy that she had to present at the meeting on Friday. We both knew that influencers were NOT the right place to focus our energy yet as we didn't even know what budget we had to work with and the brand has basically zero presence on social media. Alas, she had to create the presentation anyways.
So Friday.......we all hop on our video call and she begins to present. Not five minutes into her (amazing) presentation, the CEO starts firing questions at her and questioning her approach to the strategy. He completely disagreed with everything she was saying and she had to cut in multiple times asking him to let her finish as she would be able to address his questions throughout the presentation. At one point, he kept talking in circles with her, getting nowhere, so I chimed in saying that we needed to let her move on with the presentation. Where was our boss in all of this? Oh, just quietly sitting there saying nothing. About ten minutes later the CEO's kid tries to get his attention, so he gets up from his computer and puts his headphones down. At this point, he's continued to interrupt my colleague so much that she says she doesn't know if she can finish this meeting. It is visibly clear that she is uncomfortable and upset by what is happening (so was I). Our boss says "just take a deep breath and don't take it personally." He's lucky this was a video call because I wanted to throat punch him so bad. After another grueling 20 minutes or so, the call finally ended and I called her to make sure she was ok. It was terrible. We both had had enough. As we were chatting, our boss slacked us asking if we should get on a call just the three of us. We both laughed, because we were like, um yeah too late so no thank you. I told him yes we should but wanted to meet on Monday. We both needed to decompress after that horrific call.
Monday, we both received a meeting invite from our boss that said: "meeting to discuss Peter's concerns." (Peter is the CEO). I was absolutely disgusted by this as it was again clear that our needs and concerns didn't seem to matter. We both decided to put in our notice that morning and had zero desire to hop on this call to hear all of the things we were doing wrong. We decided to email our HR person because a part of the reason we wanted to leave was the lack of support we were receiving from our boss, in addition to the harassment received from the CEO on these calls and within Slack. We didn't hear anything from him for over an hour, so we decided to also let our boss know we had sent our notice details to HR. Almost immediately, we were blocked from our work email and social media accounts with no communication from anyone. Finally, that afternoon HR emailed me saying he was sick that morning but wanted to set up an exit interview.
The next day, when I was talking to HR, I was told they let my boss go. Apparently, he had been underperforming for quite some time (per the CEO's expectations), so this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I was LIVID to hear that we were hired to report to someone who was underperforming and that the CEO decided to take his frustrations out on us rather than our boss—the head of marketing. We were both offered an option to stay on with ZERO contact with the CEO and all communication with HR only as they decided how to rebuild the marketing team. I had no desire to do this and then he offered up a contract option instead that would allow more flexibility, no contact with the CEO, but gave me an option for income while looking for another job. At this point, I decided to tell him I'm pregnant and that the stress put on me over the last few weeks was something I just didn't need in my third trimester—or ever. He was very understanding and still offered a contract if I wanted it up until I was ready to be done working.
After hours spent on the phone with HR over three days, I did feel empathy from him and contemplated staying on to help him out since he stepped in to help make this work for us. Unfortunately, it was very apparent that although we were not speaking directly with the CEO, all information being funnelled through HR was still the same insane ideas and unrealistic expectations as it was before. I made the decision that I needed to part ways completely because I didn't need the stress and morally I just couldn't work for someone who could treat employees (AND WOMEN) like complete garbage!!!! There was no way I'd continue supporting the business of a person like this.
In my professional career, I have had a lot of tough conversations with people and I have had men treat me poorly because I am a woman, but I've never had a person in the C-suite blatantly disrespect me the way the CEO of this company did. I have never felt smaller or more uncomfortable than on those calls with him.
I am so unbelievably fortunate to be in a position that I can leave a toxic, unhealthy work environment (for the second time in a year). I know many women can't leave these situations (professionally and personally) and my heart goes out to those women every single day. This is one of the many reasons I became heavily involved in women’s professional development groups and held leadership positions within these groups at Herman Miller and why I started volunteering at the Women's Centre in Calgary last year. I have always been an advocate for women having a safe space to speak up and to be able to live their life freely, but I know I can do more. I wrote this because my experience needs to be heard so that other women can feel empowered to take control of the conversation and (if they're able to) leave a toxic situation. These personal experiences will help me be able to guide my daughter and give her the tools/resources she needs to feel safe in her success and (more importantly) help other women do the same.
PS: The book, “Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America” by Ijeoma Oluo, is a great read if you want to know the history of white male identity and the consequences of white male supremacy over women and people of color—dating back to days of the wild wild west.
xo, Stef
