The Start of Healing

I’ve complained far and wide on this blog about the inadequacies within the marketing team where I work.

The marketing director and marketing manager usually come in late, leave early, and not much gets accomplished. Things that do get done are completed by an outside agency, so it appears that those in the marketing team don’t know what they are doing.

The marketing team blew their budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars last year and this year, mainly because they need to use an outside agency to do their jobs for them.

For months, there has been talk, complaints and questions as to why those in charge haven’t taken any steps to fix a deepening hole in the company – marketing.

Today the executives listened. They fired the marketing director. It happened so fast, I was shocked and relieved all at the same time.

It is always sad when someone you know loses their job. Even if that someone lost their job for blatantly failing to do the very job they were hired to do.

However, it is a good step and a promising step for the team, department and the company.

For the team, although in shambles with more questions than answers now, once the initial shock of the firing wears off, it will be better. Now the team can re-build and re-evaluate its goals, and how it goes about achieving those goals.

The department, many of whom – myself included – outside of the marketing team had long lost faith in the marketing team, and the marketing team’s leaders. Every time it came down to working with marketing on any level, many would cringe and sigh – knowing it would entail excuse after excuse for not having anything to support the project. Scheduling meetings was next to impossible, as the marketing director and marketing manager never around. And when they were around, they would always come up with every reason in the book to not meet with you.

Hopefully, the degraded reputation of the marketing team will improve throughout the company. Many throughout all levels and departments saw the marketing team as a joke, or worse, a cancer or blemish on an otherwise fine organization to work for. Hopefully this will change.

The marketing manager is now in charge of the team, and she’s someone I still have questions about. She’s not very “corporate” in her behaviour, and she’s one of the reasons the team has suffered in the past. This firing can be a wake-up call for her to get her butt in gear and make things work – or maybe it is a set-up to see how long it takes before she completely mismanages the team, to get her out.

Either way, today’s firing was a step in the right direction.