It’s hard to run a centralized EA team, have have full buy in from the executives we support. You still have people who won’t give feedback, are not great at communication, and don’t fully see the value of their assistant. Block did one of the best jobs of managing this, and for the majority of the time we were seen as a significant part of company.
Unfortunately, the head of the EO team has never been an EA herself and relies on the information given to her by her direct leads. These leads were like toxic high school students, they fought with each other, they use their own directs against each other, they blocked promotions, they over shared information that they should not have shared, and there was even an instance where one of them tried to get the other one fired for sharing privy information that she herself had shared with many people. Favoritism, bullying, and promoting people that didn’t deserve to get promoted were all prevalent. It made it very hard to work in collaboration across BUs and so much time and energy was wasted on petty drama. There was zero management training for most managers, and many were not good at feedback or managing their own emotions which spilled out into their directs.
With the RIF the EO team was gutted, and the change to titles and scope was unreal. There was so much upset but the leads refused feedback, and we were told in a meeting that we had “a choice to work here, so get over it”. The management team left are either in shock, or not very good but they are there through favoritism. Some of the managers who are still there are either compliant to the toxic approach and gossip, or on one lead’s good side, and are too scared to go against her. The few promotions we saw were friends with her and it was so obvious what was going on.
I loved this job, or I thought I did, until this year when the toxicity got to be too much, and it’s so deep in leadership.
