My team in particular had no strategy and it was down to me to forge a product marketing and sales strategy despite that going far beyond my role. In other roles this effort would be celebrated, however here I felt like I was doing my manager's job too with very little thanks or reward. Often Hult EF's employee value/ mission of 'entrepreneurial spirit' is thrown around as a means to stop you from asking for help, even when the task is impossible due to a lack of investment in the right tools, you can bet that it's your lack of entrepenreial spirit that's the issue. It's used in a pretty toxic way. Especially as I failed to see any of the immediate managers around me owning this or the other values of Hult EF. Management generally is very defensive and at times, they lacked basic marketing and sales knowledge despite holding senior roles.
While I was there, four of us were hired into marketing roles, two of us left, and the other two were let go because the central team was unable to adequately onboard, manage expectations and set the team up for success. People were very unhappy in their roles after just two weeks. I think it speaks volumes about the central team that they failed to retain any of their new hires.
I also felt very unsupported by the central team who constantly had other priorities throughout my time there, yet failed to show any significant progress towards elevating brand awareness or lead generation despite that being their main focus. Cancelling meetings last minute, ghosting and ignoring deadlines were repeated issues from the team. Never in my 8 years of doing this job have I seen that kind of unprofessional behaviour.
There is a culture of shifting blame and being very defensive instead of banding together to problem solve. With a number of marketing managers being decentralised, I think the team could work harder to bring everybody together. I also had very little in the way of onboarding and really felt like I was left to my own devices. No one really seemed to be invested in the bigger picture but this might have been because it was not exactly clear what the bigger picture was.