When Your VP Vanishes and Nobody Tells You Why: A Love Letter to Terrible Internal Comms

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fishbowl

You know that feeling when you ping someone on Teams and their name is just... gone?

Not "on vacation." Not "out of office." Just straight-up deleted from existence like they were snapped by Thanos mid-quarterly review?

Yeah, that's the vibe Ashley Amber Sava brought to this episode, and honestly? I felt that in my bones.

The 15,000-Employee Ghost Ship

Ashley joined what should have been a grown-up company. 15,000 employees. Global HR tech giant. The works.

She expected, you know, basic human communication.

Instead, she got:

• VPs vanishing without announcements (she had FOUR marketing VPs during her tenure)

• One company-wide email per month

• All-hands meetings where you couldn't ask questions

• A 90-day content approval process (by which point everything was irrelevant)

• Exactly TWO people allowed to post on LinkedIn for the entire company

• And my personal favorite: getting torn apart in Teams DMs for daring to suggest that social posts with only employee engagement weren't exactly crushing it

Pro tip: When your employees are learning about layoffs on Fishbowl instead of from you, you've lost the plot. Actually, you never had the plot. The plot filed a restraining order.

The Emoji Incident™

I need you to sit down for this one.

Ashley included a flag emoji in a LinkedIn post for an international event.

You'd think she'd sacrificed a goat in the breakroom.

People came at her like emojis were "unprofessional." She asked for the social media guidelines. Nobody ever gave them to her. They just existed in some collective corporate fever dream where everyone "just knew" the rules.

When she pointed out that their social engagement was literally just employees liking each other's posts (aka internal comms cosplaying as marketing), they told her she was being "disrespectful" and "not a team player."

Translation: "How dare you notice that the emperor has no clothes and also no LinkedIn strategy."

What Happens When You Control Everything (Spoiler: Nothing Good)

Here's the thing about trying to micromanage 15,000 people:

It doesn't work. It just makes everyone miserable while your company moves at the speed of continental drift.

Ashley's content team—you know, the people HIRED to create content—couldn't touch the website. At all. Because apparently nobody was "trusted enough" to use basic CMS functions.

So initiatives launched 90 days after they were started. In tech. Where things change every 90 minutes.

The math ain't mathing.

The Real Cost of Treating Humans Like Mushrooms

(You know, keeping them in the dark and feeding them shaet.)

When you don't build intentional community, your people will find community anyway. Just not where you want them to.

They'll build it on:

• Fishbowl (where they're venting)

• LinkedIn (where they're job hunting)

• Slack DMs with recruiters (where they're leaving)

The cost of hiring someone new vs. retaining them? Astronomical. The cost of losing institutional knowledge? Incalculable. The cost of your entire workforce learning they can't trust leadership? Priceless. (And not in the good MasterCard way.)

How to Not Be That Company

Ashley's prescription is simple but not easy:

Model the behavior. You can't just suddenly start asking for feedback after years of decree-style leadership and expect people to trust you immediately. You've got to earn it back by being vulnerable, accepting other opinions, and—here's the wild part—not chewing people's heads off when they share those opinions.

Stop rewarding mediocrity. Celebrate the wild, half-baked ideas. Create spaces where people can be creative without playing whac-a-mole with their careers.

Trust the people you hired. You picked them because they can do things you can't. Let them do those things. Revolutionary, I know.

Skip the org chart Olympics. If someone needs information from someone "too high up" to talk to them directly, your structure is broken. Full stop.

The Bottom Line for Scaling Companies

In today's market, you cannot afford to operate like it's 1995. Your competitors are moving faster. Your best people are one recruiter message away from bouncing. And pretending that controlling the narrative means you don't need internal communication is like thinking you can hold back the ocean with a strongly worded memo.

Startups: You might not have Ashley's 90-day approval process, but are you building intentional community now, while you're small? Or are you setting yourself up to become that 15,000-person disaster later?

Scaling companies: Are your people finding out about leadership changes from LinkedIn instead of from you? Are you empowering your teams or playing organizational Jenga?

MedTech/HealthTech folks: You're in highly regulated industries where things already move slowly. You literally cannot afford to add MORE bureaucracy on top. Your teams need autonomy within guardrails, not seventeen layers of approval to post a blog.

This episode is a masterclass in what happens when human connection gets sacrificed at the altar of "control." And spoiler alert: you don't actually get control. You just get really good at driving talent into your competitors' arms.

Watch the full episode here because Ashley's stories are even better when you hear the disbelief in her voice. Plus, she's got two cats who might make a cameo, and honestly, that alone is worth it.

P.S. If you're reading this and thinking "wait, this sounds like my company," congratulations—you're either part of the problem or you're about to become a Fishbowl regular. Choose wisely. And maybe, just maybe, send this to your Chief People Officer. Anonymously. Via Fishbowl. 😏

P.P.S. Ashley's advice about not thanking users for search results has nothing to do with this post, but I appreciated that she knows the difference between a human and an algorithm. Which is more than I can say for most corporate comms strategies.

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H—human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.