Every industry has its own version of emotional hazing, but corporate creative departments have elevated it into an art form.
Discussing the worst manager you’ve ever had in public still feels vaguely gauche, however. Like bringing up an ex at a wedding, or describing a humiliating moment to someone who only asked where you bought your shoes. Professional adults are expected to describe even their most psychologically bizarre workplace experiences as “valuable learning opportunities,” preferably while updating LinkedIn.
And yet nearly everyone who has spent enough time in a creative department develops the same slightly dissociative expression when certain former managers are mentioned. Not rage exactly. More the look of someone recalling a minor flood. Or an electrical fire.
The worst manager I ever had worked in entertainment marketing, which perhaps does not narrow things down as much as one would hope.
She belonged to a particular species of creative executive whose management philosophy seemed to consist primarily of removing all psychological safety from the room and then acting disappointed when nobody produced breakthrough work. Feedback was never collaborative. It arrived like a public sentencing. Routine creative discussions carried the emotional ambience of being called into the principal’s office at fourteen.
At one point, she gathered the entire team and asked everyone to numerically rate the quality of their own creative output. People answered cautiously, in the way hostages might answer questions about morale. Sevens. Eights. She informed us we were actually producing “two or three level work.” No framework was provided for what a ten looked like. This was apparently meant to inspire us.
Another time, during a meeting ostensibly about my professional growth, she explained that the problem with the company was that people mistakenly believed years of contribution should eventually lead to career advancement. She then informed me that most of my ideas over the previous year had been bad. This was especially interesting timing because the work in question had, days earlier, won several prestigious industry awards – which she happily took credit for.
Corporate gaslighting becomes especially surreal in creative industries because the evidence occasionally appears in Times Square.
One of the more disorienting changes was the quiet reclassification of who was permitted to have opinions out loud. Before her arrival, part of my role involved contributing directly to discussions and giving feedback during review. Afterward, art directors were gradually excluded from those conversations altogether. Feedback became increasingly centralized, then redistributed secondhand through management, like classified information.
Creative departments often speak reverently about merit while functioning almost entirely on opaque social dynamics. Titles appear mysteriously. So does exclusion. Approval becomes a kind of atmospheric resource people unconsciously compete for.
The most corrosive managers understand this intuitively.
One of the lonelier aspects of workplace intimidation is how individualized it feels while it’s happening. Only afterward do people begin quietly comparing notes. Years later, several other women approached me with eerily similar stories: encouragement withheld unpredictably, criticism delivered performatively, subtle comparisons designed less to strengthen confidence than destabilize it.
What stayed with me most was not even the criticism itself. Creative people, perhaps more than most, learn early to welcome constructive criticism. It was the sustained implication that we should feel grateful merely to remain included. That having opinions was arrogance. That visibility was conditional. I eventually left, as most people with options tend to do in environments like that.
Ironically, almost everyone I know who survived workplace dynamics like this became a significantly better leader afterward. Once you’ve experienced management powered primarily by fear, withholding, and ego preservation, basic emotional competence starts to feel almost radical.
Companies love to talk about innovation. What they mention less often is that people tend to do their least innovative work while bracing for impact.