I work as an in-house communications and marketing specialist in a team of 4 people. About 4 months ago, I tried negotiating a promotion with my senior manager since I had taken on senior-level work until we could hire for that position full-time. He said he would try to advocate for me for the next budget review and get back to me. My manager is great, my team is great, and this job has awesome benefits.
Now here's the single event that is making me question if I should quit:
- I was asked to plan and execute a very low-risk and low-key communications campaign involving minor stakeholder engagement, graphic design and email campaigns working with a senior manager from a different department. Not challenging at all.
- All the communications and marketing products are approved by my supervisors, but the day before the campaign launch, I'm hit with a flood of questions and concerns from one of the executives asking me to provide every single detail about the marketing plan, the emails between stakeholders and supervisors with their approval, the timeline of events and somehow there was a rumour that all of the marketing products had incorrect information in it (surprise surprise, it wasn't true).
- I gave all the information to the executives and had to make a bunch changes to the campaign in the 11th hour. No big deal, we had it sorted out in time for the launch.
- My supervisor sets up a meeting with me to discuss what happened. Turns out the VPs and the CEO are livid about everything.
- My manager lets me know he and another manager (who I collaborated with) “defended” me to the executives, saying I followed all of the protocols for approvals and I followed instructions based on the information I was given.
- It's good to know my manager has my back, but the fact that they needed to protect me from the wrath of our executives makes zero sense if I did everything I was told to do.
Now I cannot stop thinking about how the executives are pissed at my team (particularly me) for everything that went down. I'm starting to be taken off as lead for projects, every external project I was working on has been put on hold (their excuse is that the executives are sensitive, so we need to lay low). My shot at getting a promotion is probably non existent looks like it's down the drain.
I have probably answered my own question at this point – but is it a sign I should quit my job over this one event?