Guidelines at VP Level

Ignore title - VP3 at MM IB. See VPs getting shit on a lot in these forums and frankly have seen some live instances that validate the hate. Having said that, wanted to post some of my quick thoughts about what I think works. Feel free to add to and / or monkey shit on these but thought this was more productive then shit talking at least.

1. Deadlines - Artificial deadlines are annoying but basically a must to assure things are getting done. However, the late Saturday comments that you need before EOD are probably not necessary. Plan ahead to minimize weekend work and coordinate with MD on reasonable timing. Sometimes weekends are unavoidable but do your part to minimize. You will get so much more out of your juniors if you give a shit about protecting their Saturdays / sanity.

2. Presentations / Work Product - It used to drive me insane when my VPs would flesh out a secondary / tertiary topics with 10 new pages that all end up in the appendix when 1 or 2 thoughtful pages will do. Your MDs are not impressed with your random slides but will appreciate addressing secondary topics concisely yet effectively. It’s also less for juniors to do and you to review. Be efficient.

3. Pushing back on MDs Requests - To put this one simply, you are not adding value by being a yes man to every request. Real value add comes from new thoughts, modifying / streamlining their thoughts or cutting waste. A senior banker put it to me this way “If you want to demonstrate you are ready for D level, you’ll need to show the MDs an ability to sell them on your ideas / approach. That’s almost the same skillset required to source clients.”

4. Level of Involvement - You have to constantly re-calibrate when / to what degree you need to get into the weeds. The biggest factor is deal team competence. If your team is not good, guess what you need to roll up your sleeves as this deal falls squarely on your shoulders. On the flip side, let the star performers run and encourage them to take on more responsibility. In my experience, if you implement the first 3 items the deal team competence tends to take care of itself as the better performers will actually want to work with you.

Final thoughts (could keep going but this is getting to be too long of a read) - juniors are generally young and impressionable. They are constantly picking up on senior bankers’ work habits, thought process, social interactions, etc. and subconsciously mirroring some traits (some of you may not want to admit this but it’s human nature.) Further and Contrary to popular opinion about Gen Z, they actually crave feedback / direction (at least the IB sub-set of them anyway) because the alternative is anxiety driven by ambiguity of not knowing where they stand. In other words, if you want the juniors to operate at a certain baseline you should explain to them how you think about things, how you check things, why this analysis needs to be different, etc. and give them regular feedback along the lines of “Good job Y task and now I want you to work on X going forward.” To be clear, you cannot fix every issue and raw talent plays a role but always bear in mind that the juniors performance is somewhat a reflection of you…