There’s a systemic trend of mismanaged expectations between me and my Director.
Context: I’m a first year associate, but I’ve been working with this guy since the very first day. 90% of the work I do is with him. The reason why there isn’t a VP or anyone junior between is because we’re literally a three-person team. Director, VP, me.
He once said, “treat everything you give me as a client deliverable” which is good advice for quality management but bad advice for time management. Since he’ll ask for 3-4 deliverables a day (ranging from 15 minute thing to a few hours), day after day, it is REALLY HARD to treat everything as if it’s a client deliverable – vs actually expending effort on the client deliverables.
What’s worse is that some of his asks are in fact client deliverables. But he sometimes doesn’t say this in advance (because it’s enough to him that he asks). So what I interpret as an academic discussion of whether something is feasible becomes him dragging me on why something wasn’t done in a polished and methodical way – or specifically his way.
My argument is that given 20 things a week of deliverables it’s impossible as the sole junior banker to “treat everything as it is a client deliverable.” This isn’t an efficient way to work – and there’s not that much daylight to take something that should be straightforward and fast and prepare my own analysis and opinion in case he decides to ask for it. Where there’s a backlog of other things to get to.
I do not want to be an input-output machine. I want to be proactive, and anticipatory of his needs. But because of the variability of his asks and the randomness of when he decides to go into detail and when he doesn’t – anticipation can only go so far. What makes sense to me isn’t often the way he sees it.
Finally, the more vague his instructions, the more likelihood for misaligned expectations. He knows I like context – the more the better – but he has explicitly said that he doesn’t have time to always give it, which is fair.
Anybody have similar experience – and how did you work through these and improve your process?
Hi kaiserl1ch, check out these links:
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If those topics were completely useless, don't blame me, blame my programmers...
This is where I have a difference of opinion with some D/MDs on how to treat people. Analysts/Associates are resources to help you with your business. While they are there to make your life easier, they are still resources that you need to actively manage. It sounds like your Director is falling asleep at the switch, or isn't very effective at the management level. A good banker can take care of his business with clients, and also pay attention to whether his team is working well. If you've already had this conversation with him, and he just can't be bothered to at least help figure out ways to help you succeed then he isn't doing his job. It's like if you don't put the correct inputs into Excel, and it keeps giving you the wrong answer, is it Excel's fault or the user? I don't know every detail of your situation, but you are young and still have plenty of opportunities if you have done all you could and he still isn't willing to work with you.
Perfection is truly the enemy of progress and it is legit a poor management choice for your director to expect client level (ie perfect) quality deliverables for everything. You need to try and manage upwards and allocate your time and resources according to what can be less “perfect” so you get the core work done but it’s not immaculate vs what is actually being done for clients and not some internal analysis etc.
Great points.
if everything you send him is client ready he doesn’t really need to be there right…
except maybe to land clients
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