Story 343

I was recruited by an MD in USCC Risk for a role I was told would come with 5 direct reports — a management seat, in line with the director-track conversation we’d had very explicitly. I didn’t interview with her in the final round. When I noted that at the time, I was told it was because she “already knew me” as she had been a stakeholder in my prior role.

What I wasn’t told is that the headcount for my role had been repurposed from an existing individual-contributor position. Someone was already in that seat in a parallel organization. They didn’t want to bring that person on staff as part of the reorg, so their position was eliminated and replaced with what became mine.

When I found out and raised it, the Director said the MD had told them it was management’s call how to handle it — not HR’s — despite this happening inside a round of position eliminations. Whether she assumed more authority over headcount decisions than she really had, I cannot be certain.

What I do know is, when I started, I had no direct reports. The role I’d been sold did not exist.

A year later, I was let go in another round of reorg.

This wasn’t isolated to me. About a year prior, she had also recruited someone else with a promised director position, to eventually replace an employee she said was close to retirement. When that employee didn’t retire on the timeline she expected, she terminated them in the reorg instead — and told a peer (my boss at the time) that the reason was that the employee “no longer worked hard because she was close to retirement.” She still did not put the new hire into the vacated director role.

Three people, three versions of the same shape: a director-track promise used to bring someone in, and a “restructuring” mechanism used to not deliver on it, remove someone, or both.

When I raised what happened with Employee Relations, the MD said she didn’t know my resume when she hired me. ER asked me repeatedly when I had met first met her — my boss introduced us, claiming they are friends.

That same boss is the person who heard, and repeated to me, her stated reason for the other “retirement candidate” termination.

What we have here is a pattern of a manager who uses reorg mechanics as a tool to control who advances and who doesn’t, and who is willing to misstate facts once someone is checking her decisions rather than just watching her make them.

That’s not bad luck. That’s a method. It is the systemic use of corporate restructuring to disguise broken promises and avoid accountability.

When an MD views HR, Ethics, and fair play merely as obstacles to navigate around rather than standards to uphold, protected by the very institution meant to monitor them, it isn’t just poor leadership—it’s institutional gaslighting.