Garbage Work From IB Analysts
I keep getting garbage work from my analysts and associates. This has been ok for the majority of my IB career as I usually clean it up myself or work late at night with the analyst or associate. I’m nearing the end of my second year VP and should be focusing more on client coverage. Anyone have any advice on how to ensure work quality is strong? I think I perhaps am too friendly with the analysts/associates but I’ve never been a dick ever in my career and like to treat everyone around me well.
Have you ever considered no one really cares about the work you are producing or thinks it's "garbage". No one cares if footnote 8 on p.75 of the followup analysis is jacked up. People spend about 30 secs looking at your slides.
They do however care about client relationships, deal flow, and that workstreams are being taken of. Start focusing on that instead of hopping in model riders and freaking out about numbers. That's not your job.
Based
Exactly. Freaking out about quality of work is a forever vp mentality. He should be freaking out about client relationships and building a book. Not ensuring numbers tie.
This truly demonstrates the discrepancy between "junior" bankers and "senior" bankers. It's been said 100 times that as a senior banker, your job is to pull in deals. As a junior banker, you execute the deals seniors pull in and are more replaceable --- whether you are a PPT guru or a Modeling wizard.
The thing is, most banks don't really have a structured, upward system where juniors can learn how to sell once they are on the job. A very small amount of people actually get to pull in deals for banks. If banks really want their analysts and associates to be generating deals some day, they should give them some space to source deals as analyst/associates. Not that is unheard of, but more common at boutiques or LMM banks.
Yeah, this isn't really true. Yes, people on the other side of the table absolutely care about your work product quality. Your job as VP is to quarterback the engagements process and make sure the client is getting what it needs. The move from VP to senior banker is the hardest step in the career path. You have your full time day job, doing the "quarterbacking" and then on the side trying to demonstrate to the senior bankers you're more than just a super analyst, but an individual contributor that can bring in work for the group. There's no roadmap for this, it just happens for you if you're doing things "right" and making the right impressions.
Probably because they've been crying to sleep thinking about the $25K after tax bonus they got 💀
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Edit: To account for JPM, $25K pre-tax bonus*
I’m not talking formatting or footnote stuff. Actual errors in decks like comp tables pulling wrong multiples due to incorrect formulas (pulling 2023 multiples when it should be 2022 and client calling us out in this), poor judgement/logical errors leading to us not addressing a MD or client ask properly, all stuff that would lead a MD or client to actually get mad.
People here are dumb. It is extremely embarrassing when numbers are wrong and the client calls it out on a call. Makes you look incompetent and can certainly damage the relationship. Even worse if it's a live deal - inserting wrong numbers in public filings can get you sued.
@OP have you tried moving to a better bank where the analysts aren't goobers? I made this decision and it was a considerable step-change in my quality of life when the quality of juniors underneath me improved.
OP I just want to chime in with the following - I don’t know on the broader question:
Treating people well is likely getting their best work, not their worst. I do not think you should go that route.
You’re a VP, you have an associate: hold him accountable within the team. Getting comps right is his job. You need to keep checking, but as an associate, getting this wrong should start impacting your career and how people treat you. If the only consequence to the associate shit work is that you work a few extra hours, why would they care? This needs to impact them too.
Choice being:
You won’t ever be able to go fully away from ensuring work quality though. Even MDs check that the team doesn’t fuck up. And take responsibility vis a vis the client. But holding people accountable (not saying being a d*** to them) is a first necessary step at your level.
Your job is to lay the right guidelines, make sure the right points are treated, and get the messaging right. Footnotes & getting the right numbers in the context of an agreed methodology is the associate job - they need to get there.
Have to agree with this. As a fellow VP who has experienced similar frustrations, you need to hold people accountable while not being a dick. This starts with setting clear expectations about quality of work product and what the “user experience” should feel like for seniors vis a vis the junior deal team l, and it continues with calling people out when they slip. Maintain a positive/helpful disposition but you have to make it clear what will and won’t be tolerated and you have to call people out when they slip. Finally, people have to be given real risk too. Make the team aware that there will be times that you cannot be their trapeze net, and that in these moments if they fail to be diligent and carry the team it is you, not them, who will pay the price in client scorn.
unfortunately I have tried other approaches over the years but this is the only one that works. If you find yourself constantly having to make excuses/exceptions for other people’s mistakes, and it cannot be chalked up to ordinary course learning curve, the sad truth is that this person is either not fit for the job and needs to go or is directly/indirectly expecting you to carry their water, which is a dysfunctional deal team dynamic.
wish you the best
Can I add that verbal comments is the worst possible way to give comments.
Look, it's not easy. There are really three things that you need to have in mind: A) teaching the analysts and associates, B) understanding the limits of their ability, and C) understanding what motivates them.
On A, the bargain for juniors in banking is that the analyst and associate have to grind at the most time consuming, painful work, and in exchange the VP has to teach them and elevate them. That means that you should be proactively providing them with context and helping them grow. If they do something wrong, your instinct should be to show them how to do it, not to "punish" them, but to help them see how you approach things. Because you are a VP, you should still be able to do the analyst and associate job better than they can, so when you have to step in, you should be showing them why you do things the way you do, explaining your thought process, and tying it into the bigger picture (for example, building dynamic functionality for this model change is an extra ten minutes now but will save us hours when we get asked to run fifteen cases in a week or two). You should also be explaining why taking a certain approach is ultimately in the service of avoiding weekend work and fire drills (which should always be part of your goal, where possible). And for the associate, you should be teaching them how you check things so that they can get more efficient and catch more errors before they rise up to you. Also, try to get approval for your analysts and associates to join meetings (when possible) - once they see that the work they do does actually get looked at, it can have a big impact on their attitude toward that work. Similarly, if they can't go to the meeting, you should catch up with them afterward to let them know how it went, what resonated with the client, and why their work ended up being useful or valuable (and don't lie to them - if the client ended up not even opening the book, don't make things up, just say the conversation was good and explain what was discussed).
On B, the reality is that not everyone is actually capable of outputting high quality work product in a time-efficient manner. And the other reality is that, while people on this forum may not like to hear it, the quality of the talent pool has substantially declined over the past several years. When I left banking a couple of years ago, the top analyst in our group would have been lower-middle bucket three years before. With that in mind, if you see that the juniors simply aren't capable, you have to be extremely explicit in your instructions (assume any ambiguity will get interpreted in the wrong direction), and you have to recalibrate timing of deliverables. If you know the work will come back imperfect, aim for faster turns, say you understand that it won't be 100% perfect, and target quick iteration so that you can more closely guide the development of the materials and still meet deadlines for sending things up the chain. Also make sure that you have a really clear understanding of what the MD actually wants from the materials so that you avoid last minute fire drills. Recognize that if someone is trying but just doesn't get it, being mean won't get you anywhere, and you'll ultimately just have to step in more - it's unfortunate, but it's the name of the game. When I was a senior VP, I had a weak analyst and associate, and a live execution with deliverables for a 9am meeting the next day, and they were not able to get the model done (it was sent to me at 9pm completely unusable with no solutions offered), so I ended up pulling an all nighter with them and running the model while they watched, then splitting up outputs among the three of us when it was ready to go. It's not what I should have "had" to do, but I had to, and I did it - they weren't being lazy, they just couldn't get it done.
On C, historically most analysts had the attitude that banking sucks in a lot of ways, but is a great learning experience and a fair bargain. Lately, I think a higher percentage of people are more cynical, less interested in learning, and more interested in trying to clip a paycheck with as little effort as possible. If you have someone with an attitude of wanting to gain as strong a skillset as possible from the job so that they can turbocharge their career and rule the universe one day, the tactics in A coupled with voicing disappointment at subpar work product will basically get the job done. If you have someone that is just trying to get out the door, you have to change your approach. Most people have at least enough integrity that they won't blatantly ignore work, so with these lower-motivation people, you just need to constantly frame things as trying to be efficient and get out the door on Friday and not have to worry again until Monday. If you have someone that is truly not willing to put the work in, then you have to just write them off, buckle down, delegate the most braindead / least critical workstreams to them and tell your staffer you don't want to work with them on anything of consequence again. Sometimes that really is the only solution (but it's not that often and it is a last resort).
"Garbage Work"
From kids working likely double the hours you are, with maybe a third of the experience and a fourth of the pay.
Blame yourself and go out of your way to teach them the technical skills that they will easily learn, as they simply come with a few reps and some instruction from the more-experienced.
Every VP in banking is going through the same problem. On average, quality of juniors is lowest its ever been and continuing to decline. Very senior bankers are also acutely aware of this as well, but have little motivation or incentive to fix the situation.
Op take responsibility. If your juniors are producing garbage work you are a garbage vp. Stop blaming people under you.
I was in the military before and if a commander EVER said his soldiers below him were garbage or blamed them for screwing something up he'd be fired on the spot. Leaders always take responsibility. If they are producing poor work you haven't properly trained them or have given them too much work on too short a timeline(that's YOUR issue).
Be a leader for once in your life and take responsibility vs blaming 22 year olds for your problems.
And the fact you think that the solution is to be an asshole to drive better work product shows me you have never been a true leader and probably never will(no offense).
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