I'm an associate at a mega-fund currently managing high-stakes, time-sensitive deals. The workload is intense, leading to stressed-out MDs, which impacts the entire team. My MD frequently sends back multiple rounds of document revisions, and while I often catch items he missed, there are times when I don’t catch every single change he overlooked. Given the extremely tight timelines, missing one or two edits (to be clear, edits that were not included in the markup) —especially ones that neither the other MD, two senior associates, two principals nor the VP caught—can lead to frustration directed at me. Is it unreasonable to place the responsibility solely on me in a situation like this, where others on the team also missed the same edits? I feel like this frustration may be misguided.
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lol you know the answer, of course they’re being unreasonable
It is unreasonable, but also I would note that from their perspective, it's "your job" to do all the edits with a baseline assumption that everything is caught, and then the midlevels check over to make sure everything makes sense. Frustrating, but it's how it works.
One thing that could help is to try to get one of the Sr. Assoc or VPs to help you out to "collaborate" on making sure everything is fine. For example, rather than "please see attached incorporating all edits," you could try to frame it like, "here's the revised version - md had sent a bunch of stuff randomly / ad hoc, so it should be incorporated but do you mind taking a second look?" While this may feel uncomfortable and make you feel dumb, it also highlights upfront the "reason" why something might be missed, and then the mid-level will be forced to take a little more ownership rather than just being like "okay looks good send it through" without really scrutinizing, which I know for a fact happens all the time.
What are common edits from your team? The tight timelines sound unreasonable, but as someone coming from even a shop with good culture, the expectation is that work is error free. Small formatting problems aren’t punished but incorrect numbers or analysis would reflect poorly on me and my work product. Your seniors have their own priorities, and while they may catch some things, aren’t combing over every number and page to catch your mistakes. Right or wrong, you move up by gaining the trust of your team so that they are willing to give you more responsibility.
Sorry I feel like you misread my post - or maybe not. To clarify - MDs are making edits. I'm making all of those edits. But say there's an edit they make that affects another page that they forgot to mark up - I get the blame for that. Example: term sheet says 60 bps, and another page says 60 bps. MD marks up term Sheet to say 90 bps but forgets to mark the other page that says 60 bps. Error is on me, or error is on MD?
Ah, sorry I misread your post. That makes sense and is difficult but have had that happen before. Still, that sounds like your team is just full of hardasses. My only piece of advice would be to triple check that all numbers align before sending out because you’ll ultimately be responsible for the final output no matter what. Tracking changes in files can help with this so you can follow exactly what gets changed but sadly this is a reality of the industry. Mistakes are one thing but I’ve always hated the lack of understanding that some people have, especially when the mistake is not yours.
In the situation you described, I would definitely say that mistake is on you. I’d expect an analyst six months into banking to know that if there is a change on one slide, they should be ticking and tying to make sure everything is consistent across the deck. Thats honestly, like, the first thing that people get drilled into them as a junior.
In this scenario, not to be an hardass, but they typically WILL have the assumption that whatever change they make on one page of a deck will be correctly reflected in the rest. If an MD changes pricing on debt or bps or whatever, they would probably expect those changes to be reflected across everything…
then the error is 100% on you....
That’s definitely on you unfortunately. You’re no longer just a pair of hands like a banking analyst and need to step up
Also chiming in to say that's on you
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