Expectations for a mid level Associate
Current associate at a small boutique. I am tasked with managing teams of 1-2 analysts (quality varies) with no one in between me and the Seniors. I am pretty hands on and review everything but still find myself missing things that I should catch such as data table outputs that are off, a number that should be consistent across pages, etc. I am concerned that this is going to be perceived as extremely poor attention to detail. Am I being overly concerned? What are the normal expectations?
For additional context, I find myself doing roughly 40-50% of work on the decks and then have to review everything as well.
Yes, you should be catching that, since there's nobody between the seniors (I'm assuming MD). MDs aren't going to dive deep in the models / datasets, so you have to take ownership in the product. If a buyer / client catches something, it's ultimately the MDs fault because it's their deal, but you'll definitely get humiliated, especially when it's simple things. This starts at prepping your analysts. Most of the time, I felt as though I'd just hop in and finish edits once the analyst gave me things / didn't give constructive feedback, especially for nit changes, but as you move up, you should really give more feedback. The only way analysts will learn is by getting reps and getting constructive feedback. If you had to fix a typo, you should definitely let the analysts know that, and that will (most likely) have them check their work more in the future. If you fix structure changes, you should definitely tell them you did that and then give the why. I'd also recommend printing out your materials more, it's very helpful to review work in a different medium.
At the end of the day, you just have to change your mindset a bit from transitioning to analyst > associate. I always thought the work I got from analysts was top notch / (nearly) error free since I took immense ownership in my work product as an analyst and tried to make it that way, so I got burned a few times at first when I wouldn't review the work that analysts sent over and I just forwarded along. Realize that you're still 100% in charge of the deliverable, you just have more resources to get you closer to 100% complete. A great analyst will get you >90% of the way there, a bad analyst will get you ~50% of the way there or lower, but in the end, it's still your work.
You’re doing too much of the work yourself because it makes a prt of your life easier.
To move, you need to shift gears: instead of doing 40-50% of the slides in a book, you need to give the instructions for 40-50% of the content of the pages that make the book, and then get the analysts to work from that. As a senior associate, you should be using pen & a stack of white paper more than powerpoint.
If you do that, you’ll get your analysts to progress mote and you’ll be forced to pay more attention a d catch the mistakes. It’s awfully difficult to catch your own mistakes when you deliver volumes of work you do on your own in the time constraints of IB
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