Toxic and micromanaging manager - Senior Marketing Manager Chubb Employee Review

I recently had an highly unpleasant experience at Chubb Life, based in Hong Kong, briefly being part of the marketing and communication function, a team of 4 including the manager. I was hired as a senior digital marketing manager. With a strong background in content marketing, naturally I expected to work as a real marketing professional, even though I understand this is a non-existent part in the team, which is mostly comm-focused and the manager only had communication background. I thought this newly created role is precisely to build out this new function on a blank canvas, as it was advertised and communicated to me during the interviews. I left my job in asset management for this seemingly “exciting” new opportunity, while I should have been more alerted when the manager pretty much made a very arbitrary decision to hire me after one interview and she subsequently requested a few “offline coffee chats” but could never specify what exactly she expected this role to focus on. When the hiring process went too smooth, you tend to let your guard down. When I finally joined the firm, I quickly realized there’s no vision for digital/content marketing at all from the management level, instead I was repetitively told and positioned to be a stand-by fill-in for many communication wok already covered by a colleague, and was constantly given below-my-level/somwhat-ridiculous tasks such as localizing a hk colleague’s Chinese email to internal counterparts in China, translating the manager’s email into Chinese for China (she herself is native Chinese), taking up catering ordering for 80 people for an internal event, etc. I wouldn’t mind taking up these tasks as a quick favor, but I sensed that the fundamental issue is the manager has no marketing expertise/thinking to know how to play out my strength - a content/digital marketing specialist - properly. Therefore I put together strategy decks and communicated to her some ideas I developed that I think I could start with, but in the very limited overlapping time we had in the office, she’d always brush the real work off, appear completely disinterested in what I tried to develop and didn’t offer any support or guidance. “I don’t have time to look at the strategy deck you sent.” “I don’t need to know the details. Talk to this/that and figure it out yourself.” This is frustrating enough, but I was still hoping to slowly work towards the right direction. What came across as a real red flag was at the same time, I was constantly picked by the manager for the way I dress, the way I manage my schedule, and the way i express myself. I received intrusive comments like “no more funky shoes” while all I did was wearing functional shoes on the way to work or when going out for lunch and changing into heels in the office. I was unjustifiably and targetedly reprimanded for showing up “15-min late” for a 3-hour drop-in office ice cream thing, while the fact was I left for lunch at 1:15 and came back for the ice cream thing at 1:45pm. I was also told off for not being “vocal” enough in group discussions - referring to the fact that I didn’t feel comfortable saying much on topics I wasn’t an expert at, and I didn’t join every single casual chitchat among the team which happened very often. I am an introvert and I was explicitly frank about that in my interviews, for which the manager showed understanding. But in reality, it was a very non-inclusive team culture where she couldn’t tolerate any diversity in personalities. Historically, I’ve always been a high performer in my 10 years in financial services as a marketer and I was lucky enough to have managers that granted me plenty autonomy and value and evaluate me by and only by my work, not anything else. Naturally, I wasn’t thrilled with the way I was being micro- and maliciously managed, but I remained civilised with every single crossing-the-line request. Still, it was clear I wasn’t the type of conforming puppy that she needed. One day before the one-month mark of my probation, at a very calculative timing, she terminated my employment, even though she was only present for two weeks during that one-month, making it a hasty and unwarranted decision by nature. But what’s more unpleasant isn’t the outcome - I can live with the outcome, I wouldn’t wanna stay there much longer either - but the nasty and dishonest process. In that half hour, which the HR was also present, she started by positioning it as a regular check-in during probation, induced me to start evaluating how things were, then rebuffed all my concern and reasoning, launched another round of petty, unprofessional and self-conflicting accusations at me in all the non-work-related matters, pretended to give me a final chance to plead for myself (which I declined), finally declared that it is not a good fit and stormed out of the room, leaving me with the machine-like HR to sign the termination paper that was of course already printed out. Now I won’t say this is a fair review of Chubb or Chubb Life as an employer, after all it was only a month. I could only share my limited but real experience, which was not great largely only because of one manager. But I can’t help thinking, if such an obvious form-over-substance kiss-up-kick-downer kind of person can have her way like that in this company, what does it say about the culture the employer is fostering?