I was hired to elevate the quality of the in-house work being done at Optimum, I would draw upon my experiences at Verizon and other fortune 100 companies to bring Optimum in standard. While the broader team and our EVP had good intentions and were among the best I've seen at their job, many existing projects within my immediate team fell short due to limited experience with an uncollaborative colleague who insisted on gatekeeping his projects, which is something that isn't normal in the other Fortune 100 high-performing teams I've worked with.
Despite my background delivering polished work for Fortune 100 companies, I was quickly placed in a difficult position where project overview and creative control were assigned to people with no real background in project management or developing polished deliverables from start to finish. I quickly found that I was treated as the "runt" of the team. They had 0 appreciation for the value of the experience I brought and refused to leverage the knowledge, skill and experience that I could do for an organization. I suspect it was office-politics at play and good work was not in their interest if their names weren't on it. My immediate small team didn't understand the concept of team-work and collaboration.
This significantly limited my ability to apply the quality standards expected by our higher leadership leadership (set by the EVP), leading to inefficiencies and inconsistent deliverables. I also noticed team members frequently being assigned tasks well outside their expertise.. for example, technical operations staff handling web design, which resulted in noticeably lower-quality work being released to the public that wouldn't past muster in any of the previous companies/agencies I've worked with. This risks signaling to customers that the company’s standards are lower than they should be. Additionally, a few long-tenured employees seemed to be struggling with the company’s strategic direction always reminiscing about the Cablevision days (get over it and move on). In some cases, this manifested as open negativity towards the ELT team which we were there to support, if left unaddressed, can spread and affect overall morale and performance.
