When you’ve been part of digital marketing teams for a long time, you see some dumb stuff. Large companies have middle managers who think they are experts on everything. I’ve worked with some experts; ma’am, you are not an expert.

I can’t tell you about my last run-in with poor leadership, I’ve settled out of court with my former employer and am for bidden to disparage the company or the manager who fired me so he could use my salary to hire two young women. Let’s just say, they bought me a new car. Not a Lexus. But it’s nice to have gotten my day in court.

Bad leadership is exemplified by someone with little hands-on experience in their role, or in the roles of the people they are leading. For example, a design director who is not a designer themselves will always be faking it to some extent. This manager was a skate punk as a young man, with aspirations to be a journalist. He wrote mainly bar reviews, they’re still up on the web, not all that inspiring. But as he was trying to manage me and my writer, he kept interjecting things that were for his ego and not serving the message. He wanted to assert his creative leadership.

He also used an image of Bodhi from Point Break as his icon in Slack. (“Wait, the Patrick Swazee Bodhi?” “Yes, that one.”) He told a colleague the historic figure he most admired was Howard Roark, from Ayn Rayn’s Fountainhead. That explains a lot. He was certainly self-absorbed and leading from the seat of his pants.

We launched our 18-month project to performance awards for the team, a 23% uptick in online engagement, and an 11% uptick in Web Qualified Leads. That was in May. By June, our entire team was scrambling to reinvent our roles for the ONGOING maintenance and optimization of the new site. Our team collaborated on the NEXT GENERATION of BIG IGEAS. This manager contributed ZERO ideas. Was he phoning it in, or did he not have anything original to add to our shiny new website and web team?

I put forward seven ideas. Three of my ideas were chosen to move forward over the summer into projects and work motions. That was, until mid-summer my manager had an epiphany while he was on vacation. If he could get rid of me, he could move his two young proteges from contract>to>hire. So that’s what he set out to do.

What I learned from one of my business mentors was this:

Your manager is
Either moving you UP
Or moving you OUT

My skate-boi manager was done with having someone who led beside him from experience. I could see through his bluster. I called a spade a spade when things didn’t look good. (See: Mega-Menus from Hell). He didn’t want anyone who challenged his authority. So he began to belittle and shame me in our online meetings. He made me redo some projects that had already been accepted by the stakeholders. He was out to get me to quit. That wasn’t going to work.

At the end of the summer, I contacted HR to see what resources were available to me. WARNING: HR does not work for the employees, they work to protect the company. In this case, I got a Jr. HR Case Manager who had been in her role less than two months. I asked her, “So this is 100% confidential, right?” She assured me it was. Three hours later, my boss and his boss were looking at my LinkedIn profile. Confidential my ass.

Here’s the problem with this kind of arrogant middle-manager: the will snuff out stars who threaten the image of their leadership and genius. In this case, he didn’t like that my projects for the NEXT GEN were picking up momentum. I was leaving his orbit and working with other teams. I led an AI Homepage Project that we were going to fast-track to beat our biggest competitor.

At this point, my manager, after learning I was talking to HR, changed his approach. Now, he wrote me a scathing letter after our next 1 X 1, telling me all the ways I was failing in my job. This is called PAPERING THE FILE. HR needed a file showing I was bad at my job, that I was not meeting expectations, or the needs of my manager. So he proceeded to write exactly two emails, reviews of our 1 x 1 conversation. And when the case went to trial, that’s all the law firm presented.

The problem for them: I received TWO performance awards, even as they were firing me for under-performing. Um…

My mentor said to me, “Don’t respond to those emails. You cannot litigate via email, and you’re just going to give him more papers for his file. Keep your head down. Do your work. And start looking for another job.”

The only other people on our 20-person international team were either vendors (They simply say, “Yes, Boss, you’re so smart,” even if the idea was theirs a week earlier. Then there were the young contractors. Doe eyes and compliant. Last were the other full-time staff. They were not leaders, just followers. I was the odd man out, the quark, the contrast of knowledge and experience to my manager’s bravado and cult of personality. He thought we liked hearing about his two sons and seeing his tattoos as he flexed in his wife-beater shirt during our daily standups.

Miserable.

The company bought me a new car for the injury. I hope that stings.

John McElhenney