We had a Marketing Manager who was talented, but she had a glaring flaw. Every single Monday, she’d march into the office brimming with a "groundbreaking" new idea. Each new campaign required shifting resources away from the last week’s great idea, plus a hefty chunk of extra budget.

The first time she did it, it felt like brilliant innovation. By the third week, it just felt like total chaos.

To fix the madness, we decided to hire a seasoned Marketing Director, someone who could bring adult supervision, establish a real strategy, and rein things in.

Instead, we hired a trainwreck.

Looking back, the red flags were practically screaming at us, but somehow everyone missed them:

  • The Daily Shift: The Executive Assistant noticed he’d spend his mornings staring blankly at his computer screen, completely listless. Every day at lunch, he’d slip out. When he returned, he was suddenly high-energy and “full of beans”, so much so that he’d constantly interrupt her with relentless jokes.

  • The Cover-Ups: He was always hanging out with the smokers outside and perpetually chewing mints.

  • The "Creative" Concepts: Whenever anyone asked about his past successful campaigns, his answers always revolved around client entertainment. For our upcoming events, his big strategic proposal was placing dustbins filled with ice and beer bottles around the venue. "People can just help themselves!" he insisted. "No need for a bar, and everyone can drink as much as they want!"

  • The Missing Deliverables: The comprehensive strategy document he was hired to write was already a month overdue.

The climax arrived at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday. The CFO walked into the boardroom and found our new Marketing Director fast asleep, sprawled across the boardroom table. When the CFO shook him awake, he was visibly, unmistakably drunk.

He was fired on the spot. As he was being escorted out, the composure crumbled, he broke down, begged for his job back, and confessed he was a struggling alcoholic who desperately needed the work.

The aftermath only confirmed the depth of the issue. When he turned in his company car, it was covered in dents with empty gin bottles rolling around the back seat. Later, someone stood on a toilet seat in the office restroom, lifted the drop-ceiling tiles, and found a hidden stash of empty gin bottles tucked away in the roof cavity.

Conclusion

It’s easy to judge a bad hire in hindsight, but addiction and incompetence rarely present themselves in obvious ways at first. What we misread as executive charisma, quirky campaign ideas, and afternoon enthusiasm were actually classic warning signs of a severe problem.

The lesson? When key deliverables are late and a leader’s behavior operates on a pendulum between lethargy and erratic energy, don't write it off as "creative personality." Trust the process, look at the evidence, and address the red flags before you're fishing empty gin bottles out of the ceiling tiles.