Pros
There was a lot of good things that happened to me while at Symphony Talent. I grew exponentially in my client-relationship, presentation and time-management abilities. These are intangible skills that I will take with me the rest of my life, both personally and professionally. I had the privilege of having not one, but two excellent bosses. Both were advocates for work/life balance and pushed me to be more creative and free-thinking in my role. I had an incredible team, one of the 'best I ever had'. People who will hopefully be my life-long friends regardless of distance. The unlimited vacation policy allowed me to go on three different two weeks vacations during my tenure with (relatively) low stress about my absence. 'You only live once: That's the motto.' I feel fortunate to have been on a team that supported that work hard, play hard lifestyle. And yet...
Cons
Started from the bottom now we're... still on the bottom. There's a reason I left. Or rather, there's several reasons. Let me tell you something about the Content Marketing team. Not ONLY were we one of the fastest, most efficient teams in the game (see: last name ever, first name greatest) with the resilience of a rubber band and the witty and uplifting banter of a particularly well-done Amy Sherman-Palladino episode, but we also pushed other teams at ST toward success as well. We formed committees to improve upon our organizational, management, analytics and creative work to aid not only our personal goals but also company goals. During my time at ST, we organized guest speakers from other teams to learn about their specialities, aided the creative team in several trainings both on content marketing and organizational processes, sent out weekly informative emails about the latest content marketing trends and worked to continually come up with new ideas internally as well as for our clients. Simply put, WE CARED. And it showed. We were consistently among the top givers and receivers in our weekly recognition platform and we were proud to be doing something for ST even if it wasn't recognized in a public manner. I was proud to be on this team. I was excited for my future at this company. So what changed? Well, where do I start? Let's start with the fact that our VP left and was never really replaced. We stopped having a real advocate for our team. We had a "kind of" boss. We stopped having a real voice. Still, we pushed forward. Then, we had a team of 5 coordinators removed from our team and then had their work handed back to us (temporarily, we were told). Guess what? My team is still doing that work six months later. Then, in a plot twist similar to the Red Wedding, our company switched to 'regions' and most of us were forced to leave clients we had launched ourselves and had very close relationships with, to learn a whole new set of clients (I had to learn 4 new clients and lost every single other one) in a period of basically a month and a half. It was like being forced to drink from a career-related fire hose when all we wanted was a tiny sip from a Pamplemousse La Croix. We fell into a system of grinding to get the work done, keeping our head above water and losing creative, strategic thinking in place of frustration, anger, confusion and ultimately, burnout. We had a pretty good OOO schedule when we were a real team. Everyone covered everyone else so there was a more balanced workload when people took time off. With the new system, everyone only has one backup. Right now, the south team has no backups to my knowledge. This new system was set up with literally no respect to this team. There is no growth for the Content Marketing team at this time. There is only survival. Beyond that? How about layoffs in the middle of the night, your CEO getting on a call to tell your team that if you go on vacation you should prepare to work 70 hour weeks AND having core values passive aggressively thrown around to bully people to put their head down and get back to work? Don't believe me? Check out the comment from our 'people success team' on a review below about how the 'content marketing team champions the work life balance'? Yeah. How's this for championing? I literally left without a job because I couldn't take the toxic culture from our leadership anymore. "Where you movin'? I said onto better things."
