Thinking about mistakes and lack of attention to detail (AN1)
I came into the job as an analyst 1 thinking I would be good at attention to detail as well as not making mistakes. At the beginning of the job, I decided to do my best not to make any mistakes. I was stressing about making little mistakes whether its in an email chain (sending it to the wrong person, punctuation/grammar errors etc...), PPT, or Excel. At a certain point, I think I was doing alright but then I realized I did not have the mental capacity to do it all the time and took some shortcuts. And I felt more and more comfortable sending out things without double-checking completely. Again, no egregious mistakes, but little ones came up that could be taken care of if I just took my time. I have developed a habit of rarely double-checking, and even If I do I do it pretty quickly and look over just a portion of things. If I just go at 50% of the speed and pore over everything, I can fix it but for some reason, I just go too quick.
As a result, making some mistakes that don't reflect that well on me, so I think my image in the office is on the balance. So that is a motivation for me to improve. I guess I have become a little too lax when thinking about mistakes, and while I haven't made any huge mistakes, I am wondering how any of you guys think about it.
When I started, I was terrified of making a mistake but one small one after another I just shrug it off and don't exactly use it as a good learning experience. So for the top bucket performers, how do you view mistakes and attention to detail lapses. How does your group see it? Maybe I am in a more lenient group, but do you guys work in groups that are a kind of "one mistake and we will brand you as a fuck-up" kinda place? Do places like that actually exist, whether in PE or IB? I know I have let my standards and self down by being slightly lazy on this front, but wondering if there are groups on the street that will actually bear down on analysts for even a single mistake. Because there can't possibly be analysts that are perfect all the time. That's just impossible.
Maybe a way to frame it is that mistakes are NOT ok, but they ARE understandable. Everyone is human and will make some mistakes. I read your post and tried to come up with an easy response, and there is none. The overall rating of an Analyst depends on many factors, and attention to detail is definitely one of them. If your attention to detail isn't good, then you REALLY need to make up for it in other ways - being able to trust the work of a junior is such a huge plus. And it's not a binary sort of thing. As you get more senior and experienced, you'll start to recognise where the typical mistakes crop up (forgetting to update links, certain inputs in a model, a particular page that has a footnote that references something else in the deck that needs to be updates, etc.) and become better and better at addressing them.
I think mistakes are tolerated less overall in IB because a bank's / MD's / group's reputation depends on this kind of thing, and client engagements are some of the most important corporate events of that client's life, where mistakes can cost (literally) huge amounts. The IB needs to be seen to take this kind of thing seriously. So if you need a way to rationalise to yourself why attention to detail is important, maybe that's it.
On your question of whether some groups are more / less tolerant towards mistakes, I'd make the comment that (1) you're dealing mostly with people, not groups. You can be in a chill group that has one nutty VP with zero tolerance for mistakes and will chew you out for the slightest thing (not saying it's right, but that's the way it is), and (2) you'll generally find more tolerance for mistakes when the team is less under pressure. When there are multiple live deals and everyone is stressed, tolerance will go down.
One final comment (this is my personal view so others might disagree). I value accuracy over speed. If you have a choice between delivering something 2 hours before the deadline without a proper review, or at the deadline after detailed review, do the latter. And there's no point sending something at 3am if the deadline is noon next day - get some sleep and look at something with fresh eyes.
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