I do a borderline administrative marketing role – at least that’s what appealed to me about it when I took the role almost 2 years ago. There’s some opportunities to drive growth, but mainly, it’s been about ensuring things are accurate and up to date, and maintaining a level of appearance – not about EXPONENTIAL GROWTH, TARGETS, PERFORMANCE. I’m a team of one with no budget, minimal resources, and by no means am I the super star of the company, hell even the marketing team. I’ve always been fine with that. I do my job as best I can and try to influence things I can control/do something about. The rest – I leave it to the “top performers and rockstars”.
Well lately it’s like a switch has flipped and my boss has no patience or tolerance for me at all. There’s no pleasantries, no acknowledgment of humanness, it’s just pure business speak – most of which makes no sense, genuinely baffles me, and comes with absolutely no consistency. I get sent from pillar to post on hare brained endeavours every other week (god forbid we just stick to one USP and try to do it well with integrity – it’s all about creating exponential viral growth, by any means necessary, with absolutely no budget or resources). Apparently the company used to be happy with “top 5% employees”, but now standards have raised and the expectation is for “top 1% employees”
Now I’ve had my worst ever review, they seem genuinely beyond irritated by me and my “lack of ownership and impact” and when I try to ask questions for clarity and guidance, in a situation where there’s very little I can directly control or even influence, I just get told jargon business babble which gets me exactly nowhere. I have to wonder if it’s designed to simply wear me down and encourage me to leave.
Today I was bluntly told I need to “take ownership” and come back with a strategy, my quarterly review was poor, all my efforts to simply take the feedback on board constructively were basically trashed and it feels like a done deal that my days are numbered.
My people pleasing tendencies are telling me to resign, which I assume they want, but my wisdom is saying fuck that, if they want you to leave, make them say it out loud, give them hell, this is bullshit and they know it. I’ve never stopped trying to do everything I realistically can, but I have a practicality which won’t allow me to do insane things to meet the outrageous demands and targets which are pulled out of thin air.
How would you handle the situation? Ideally I would keep the job, but being set up for constant failure and feeling like chopped liver is demoralising.