Director told me seniors in my team don’t like me because I speak out

Maybe ask questions rather than speak out saying "This doesn't make sense". Get reasoning and lead them to concluding it's not needed themselves. Being too confrontational will not take you far, you need to learn how to speak in a way that people perceive as friendly/collaborative. Think of it this way, if you keep pushing these folks and being too "direct" in an off-putting way, will any of those hire you down the line if you need them to?

Fragile egos and the desire to have people under you become sycophants is prevalent in many industries. You think it’s just a banking thing?

You don’t think people like that can also be found in Fortune 500 companies, large tech companies and even in academia

You think any senior, in any professional setting, wouldn’t be annoyed at a junior showing them up in a public way?

Ignore my title. And please spare me the MS. I’m biting on this question because I want to hear your reactions to help me grow. I am speaking from experience and trying to be frank, not trying to upset you. 

The main issue is that analysts have one foot out the door whereas everyone else is long-term. Besides analysts, everyone else knows it’s fiercely competitive, the winner gets most of the rewards, there’s few winners, and some CEOs are very demanding of their advisers before they pay them a fee.

Many analysts make suggestions with the goal of minimizing their own work. This comes from laziness, prideful analysts or simply because they didn’t hear it from a client or top banker. All of this makes it difficult to satisfy the client, or even to go a step further and develop your own thoughts and ideas. If analysts resist all your directions, they’re limiting your own growth, development, and your client relationships.

However, when analysts are focused on the client and making the best work, they’re a pleasure to work with and we love to hear their opinions. It takes time to figure out who they are. And some start this way but later become lazy/checked out…I get it, it’s a long and difficult job. That’s why there’s no hard feelings, as long as they’re not too annoying about it.

Juniors also don’t understand how intense the competition is between banks, so making short cuts can work against you. Many fail to appreciate that.

This is less obvious to someone coming out of college, but it also takes forever to explain things to analysts. We would like to because it helps them develop, but we often don’t have the time. If a senior banker has to choose whether to spend 30 minutes of his evening explaining something to a 23 year old or spending time with his daughter before she goes to bed because he’s very afraid he or she is at risk of being viewed as an absentee father or mother, he’s going to always spend time with his daughter. It sucks but we all have to understand that.

Welcome your feedback.

Share some examples if you want honest feedback. But in general you have to pick your spots - there are places where it makes sense to speak up and there are ways to speak up without upsetting the egos of those above us. Possessing that tact and managing how you are perceived is an important part of our job.

With all of that said I would take the opinion of someone who is leaving with a grain of salt. Even less so if they’re the person getting let go…

Much like everything in people-oriented jobs, there is an art to speaking up. If you’re giving a combative vibe that makes people around you convinced that you think you’re smarter than them, it’s game over. Not just in banking, but in every job, you have to protect the egos of the people above you. Instead of saying, “that doesn’t make any sense,” ask geniune, pointed questions that unravel the logic of a request.

If the person who told you all this was the one who got fired... maybe it's not worth thinking too much into it ;)

I think there’s a line between having good dialogue with seniors to make the work efficient and effective, and being perceived as someone who’s difficult to work with because they’re constantly pushing back on the work you give them. I think you have to start from the perspective that the MD/D has a reason for having you do this work, then once you establish credibility, help weigh in on the best final product. If analysis doesn’t make sense in a certain context, that’s one thing, but if you’re perceived as being difficult to work with, that’s another. If an analyst pushed back on work you assigned them because they thought they knew more than you, you’d hate working with them; it’s the same at the associate level as well. 

That sorta thing is pretty much drilled into the banking culture. Banking for a long time has very much so been a “get shit on for years so that one day you can do the shitting” type of industry. However, it has been getting a lot better because I think most people have realized getting tortured at work is not fun. Although maybe getting screamed at is probably a lot less common now, all these senior people have sacrificed so many weekends and a TON of family time (if they even have one) so they many times kinda see it as a right of passage to have plans blown up by dumb work that might not even matter that much. Unless you get on a great team with MD’s who actually don’t want to do that, you are just swimming against the current by negotiating the work.

So we had a brutal female MD who would have been long ago fired if she were a man. I was a 3rd year analyst, and all of our associates and some of the analysts went to our group head about her after a secret juniors meeting. I refused to participate. As a result I became the only junior person allowed to work with her. She was actually smart but bitter about life, not great when you are managing clients. 
 

She would ask for all kinds of crazy stuff that made no sense or was actually impossible to produce because the data didn’t exist. My response was always to say, let me understand if this is what you are trying to portray in this analysis? I would then suggest an easier path that would take 90% less time. It worked perfectly, and we had no issues after I figured that out. The mutiny did eventually lead to her firing. 

Welcome to banking, where half of what MDs ask for is completely worthless and never sees the light of day. I've been pushing back of worthless work my entire career and one thing I found to be helpful in getting senior bankers to realize what they are asking for is stupid is to "respectfully" ask what is the value add to doing whatever they are asking and why it's actually useful and needed. This typically prompts them to explain their rationale which half the time causes them to realize they were asking for something out of habit instead of actually needed it, and other times you realize that what they want actually does have some value because you now understand their thinking. Good senior bankers will have no problem explaining their thought process because they realize it's important for junior banker development while shitty senior bankers will dismiss you and tell you to just do what they tell you.

Read the book Never Split the Difference.  You can start by simply repeating back the request from a superior "I'm sorry, but you want me to do x..."  The attitude should be "Please, help me understand."

You have to choose your spots when to speak. That's likely the issue. In fact, it's one of the most important skills to have in the business world coming up as a junior.

Unfortunately, most people's egos can't handle constant thoughts coming from a junior on the assignments given to them. Here's what you do: Keep your mouth shut 90% of the the time. When the seniors are trying to do something truly dumb and destructive to the firm or don't have the full information needed to make the decision, then raise your hand.  Save these rare rare bullets and you will get respect for solving some real problems at the company.

The other alternative of never raising your hand is also not a great long term career move. People will just look at you like a power tool for powerpoints and models. Sometimes, you have to butt heads with your bosses but you just have to be very very careful where you pick those spots. If you do it right, it will be a benefit to your career.

I would push back on your idea that you “always turn out right”.

Would say you don’t fully grasp sometimes why something is being shown / added to the deck because they are working directly with the client and have more information than you.

You sound pretty miz to work with tbh and like you have entitlement issues. You’re an associate whose job is equal parts being responsible for producing work.

I have found that seniors are often pretty understanding, but the problems often occur when you have a weak associate / VP who is afraid to push things up the chain. There are many times where an MD asks the team to run some type of analysis that isn't very important but will take the team 2 days or they ask you to create slides with information that you realize will be useless after spending 30 mins looking at the data. Many times when you push this to the associate / VP, they will agree with me but say something in line with "Yes I know, but let's do what the MD asked for. He will realize that the data is shit and we will then remove it". 

However, when you have an associate / VP that actually speaks up to the MD, the MD will often be pretty understanding and tell us that "if this will take the team a lot of time, then don't do it because it's really not that important". Given the hierarchy in IB, it's quite difficult for an analyst to stand up against an MD so you need buy-in from the assoc / VP. 

I think that this is a huge problem in IB. People are so afraid of questioning the directions of a VP / MD that they would rather produce stuff they know will not make sense. As a result, you get endless of turns with comments which adds a lot of hours to your week. 

>He said it's particularly annoying because I often turn out right. 

when he said this your reply should have been "then shut the fuck up and listen to me more"

I was very much the same and still am, so I can’t offer much in the way of advice.

It has earned me the reputation of being a fiery confrontational character, despite being a very kind person who people often used to take advantage of.

I guess you need to try to frame it as assertion rather than aggression, but keep your self worth champ. A lot of these bitch boys have none.

I 100% feel you on this. One of the things that always bothered me about IB culture was how junior professionals are often expected to accept direction from seniors without any questioning or pushback. Finance is a very old school industry so I understand why things are how they are, but as somebody who ultimately left for consulting, it became very apparent how senior IB professionals don't really value a junior banker who speaks out too frequently. I made a short video highlighting my experience between both IB and consulting and how the cultures differ - feel free to give it a watch if you are so inclined.