By Wildest Career Experience
The wildest experience in my professional career was working at an agency where the owners had absolutely no sense of boundaries.
On my first day, they told me I should use my standing desk more because maybe then I'd lose weight. They told a Black colleague how much they liked her "ghetto music".
The wife sat in a meeting once complaining about how feminisim was ruining everything while also applying for a Women in XXX award, and also regularly tried to set one of her employees up with a rich neighbor despite that employee being both uninterested and in a relationship at the time.
They called me at midnight once to fix a problem my boss was supposed to solve, and that same boss later disappeared from work because he'd been arrested for fraud.
My team was screamed at in front of the entire office once for underdelivering when we'd just completed a record number of websites in the week. There was a couch in the office touted as one of the "benefits" but when my team worked from the couch they were told they were lazy. The provided water dispensers were always moldy and no one ever fixed them even when we reported it.
In other words, it was a comically awful place to work and everyone who was there when I was is still in touch because we trauma-bonded.
Rant
The marketing industry is rife with a sense of unrest right now. Marketers need to get back to the foundation of why they do what they do. We need to return to driving clarity, building connection, and creating community. That's the trio that builds great businesses.
Useful Advice
That's a big question.
The most useful advice I've ever gotten when it comes to marketing is to keep learning. Whether you're reading the latest marketing book, taking a new course, or shadowing a coworker in another department, it's critical to keep building your skills so that you don't fall behind.
