Pros
JE Dunn has many talented, kind, and collaborative employees who genuinely embody the company’s values. The organization has a strong reputation, an impressive legacy, and many long-tenured leaders who care deeply about their teams and the work. I built meaningful relationships with colleagues across the company and consistently found my peers to be thoughtful, supportive, and highly skilled.
Cons
JE Dunn has many genuinely good people, a collaborative culture in many parts of the business, and an outstanding reputation in the industry. That’s what makes my experience so disappointing.
My advice is simple: if you’re interviewing for a newly created role or a department experiencing major leadership turnover, ask a lot of questions. The answers may determine whether you have a fantastic experience or a deeply frustrating one.
I joined the company in a brand-new role within a department that was still finding its footing. Shortly after I started, the experienced leader who had hired me and understood the function left the organization after more than a decade of service. That departure created a leadership vacuum that, in my opinion, was never adequately addressed. Rather than thoughtfully stabilizing the transition, leadership appeared to assume the work would simply continue as before. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t.)
The replacement manager was new to both their role and the organization. More importantly, they were new to the function I had been hired to support. The management style shifted dramatically. Collaboration quickly gave way to micromanagement, expectations changed frequently, and the role I had been hired to perform slowly evolved into something very different from what had been discussed during the interview process.
For any fellow Hogwarts alumni reading this: imagine expecting to report to Molly Weasley only to discover you’re reporting to Uncle Vernon instead.
As the department adjusted to the transition, I found myself taking on not only my own responsibilities but also significant work that had previously belonged to more senior leadership. There was little onboarding or guidance for these new responsibilities because, quite frankly, no one had fully figured out where the work belonged. I was expected to navigate an expanding role without adequate functional mentorship or a clear understanding of where my responsibilities ended and leadership’s began.
When I raised concerns about bandwidth and sought clarity about my role, the conversation quickly shifted toward whether I was capable of fulfilling my responsibilities. I was repeatedly told that, despite the leadership change, my role and responsibilities had not changed. When I referenced the company’s own published role descriptions to demonstrate how my responsibilities had expanded beyond the scope of my position, leadership shifted gears, arguing, in effect, that the role descriptions did not matter and that I was expected to take on whatever the department required.
That moment perfectly summarized my experience.
The most frustrating part was never being given a stable definition of success. Expectations continually evolved because of leadership turnover, yet my performance was evaluated as though the department had been mature, fully staffed, and clearly structured from day one.
What was especially telling was that experienced colleagues elsewhere in the organization independently recognized the structural challenges I was facing. They worked in comparable roles but benefited from established support systems, clearly defined responsibilities, and deeply tenured leaders who understood the function. Their perspectives reinforced that the conditions I was experiencing were not simply an unavoidable part of the job; they were unique to a department navigating significant leadership instability without an adequate plan for continuity.
Looking back, I don’t think the organization fully appreciated how disruptive the departure of a long-tenured leader really was or how much institutional knowledge, relationship-building, and strategic coordination disappeared with that transition. Replacing a name on an organizational chart is not the same as replacing what that individual actually contributed.
This wasn’t simply a story about one difficult manager. It was an organization struggling to navigate a major leadership transition while simultaneously building a new function. Unfortunately, the burden of that instability fell largely on the department’s newest employee.
When I was eventually told my employment was ending, I was informed there had been “anonymous concerns” regarding my performance. Ironically, within hours of the announcement, multiple coworkers reached out to express their shock and sadness and to offer kind words and encouragement. Their reactions stood in stark contrast to the explanation I had been given and felt far more reflective of JE Dunn’s stated culture and values than the leadership practices I experienced within my department.
To be clear, I don’t believe my experience represents JE Dunn as a whole. Many people there are thoughtful, talented, and genuinely invested in one another’s success. I also recognize that I experienced an unusually turbulent period of transition. That said, I believe the organization failed in several important ways:
- It underestimated the impact of losing experienced leadership.
- It placed a brand-new strategic function under leadership that lacked experience in that specific discipline.
- It failed to define responsibilities and success metrics while holding an employee accountable to constantly changing expectations.
- It prioritized the appearance of organizational stability over honestly addressing the structural challenges created by rapid leadership change.
If you’re considering joining JE Dunn’s marketing department, ask how established your potential role really is, how success will be measured, and what functional mentorship and continuity plans are in place, especially if the department has experienced recent leadership turnover.
JE Dunn remains a company with many exceptional people and a tremendous legacy. My experience demonstrated that even the strongest reputation and workplace culture cannot compensate for ineffective leadership. The quality of leadership can make or break a department and the experience of the people working within it. New departments need experienced leadership, clear expectations, and the humility to acknowledge when a transition is more disruptive than anticipated. Without those things, talented employees can find themselves trying to solve structural problems their role was never intended—or empowered—to fix.