Counterparty going above you (to your boss)
Curious if anyone else has had an experience like this.
This was quite a few years ago. I was a VP at a lower-tier Secondary Fund. We struck a large deal with a much bigger secondary fund for them to sell us their assets.
I was a VP at the time and I had sourced the deal and was the sole party executing it - my boss, a partner, had zero involvement.
We were negotiating the docs and the seller had some extremely unreasonable requests - it took about 4 months of legal back and forth for us to get to a place that worked. My counterparty at the seller was a guy about 10 years older than me that was just promoted from Director to MD and he clearly didn't like that he was having to interface with a junior on the other end. Each interaction we had was sour - he was rude, disrespectful, and consistently trying to be a jerk and unprofessional. At times I would escalate to my boss, but he wanted no part of it.
In the end we got the deal done but this prick on the other end decided to call my boss and bad mouth me. My boss, who was a giant pussy, started reaming me out for being "difficult". I was like dude, you gave me zero support and didn't want to get involved and I did nothing but try and be decent to the guy on the other end.
Curious if people have had to work with: (a) a weak pussy boss and (b) a major power/title imbalance with a counterparty.
Happens and there are two ways to go about it; 1. have a grown up convo with your boss about his attitude but with the character you described it could backfire, 2. document all interactions and keep your boss in the loop to face him later.
All in all this is likely to happen more often than be a one off unfortunately. The world is full of insecure idiots, especially this industry. Just make it a point when you're senior to stand up for your team like you'd have liked your boss to do for you and to put incels like this MD counterpart in their place.
Seen it happen at multiple levels. Won’t go into detail, but normally it’s only a problem if your counterparty has leverage over you - your client, sell side advisor vs. you’re one of many buy side advisors on one of many interested parties, a major LP, etc. Under this power dynamic being a pussy just to close the deal might have been a necessity, but your boss should have given you an opportunity to rant and pat you on the back for getting the deal across the line. Certainly no room for reaming at you. I’d put that one into the karma book for one day.
I had an experience very similiar to this a few years ago, and funnily enough, it was also over a secondary trade.
One should be professional regardless if you're talking to an intern or partner.
It happened to me once but luckily my boss wasn't a little bitch. I was working in construction and the electrician had a question about the drawings. Now in construction there is a pretty clear pathway for answering questions about the drawings, mainly because once they e been officially submitted there are contractual obligations by the architects and engineers to answer in a timely manner. The subs submit the questions to the GC (me), I read it over and make sure the question makes sense/doesn't have an obvious answer, if it's valid I'll formally submit to the architect, they coordinate and send back a response.
Now this electrician was probably good at the field part of his job, but the dude couldn't write an email to save his life, so he emails me one day asking me to ask the electrical engineer "elevator panel, switch 16?". My response was, bro, that's not a question. He was like the engineer will understand just send it along. I responded saying, no, you need to write a full sentence so I know what you're asking. Now at this point in my career I was 22 and not a year out of college, arguing with some electrician of 25 years. And he responds with "well why don't you spend 6 years and become a journeyman electrician and maybe you'll understand what I'm saying". When my boss saw that he was pissed and reamed him out. The dude was fired from his job a few months later for trying to scam the developer out of $500k. I was trying to be diplomatic and calm the entire time but he was being so weirdly obstinate and refused to engage in any way with me, so I was very thankful my boss stepped in.
I definitely had other experiences in construction like that, I think a lot of people, especially those in the trades who didn't go to college, are upset they have some 20-something in the office dictate to them.
Happens all the time. Happened to me recently. Guy went to the president of the entire firm. Thankfully, the president, my partner and our team all had my back. Someone said it above but ensure everything is documented. That was my saving grace.
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