Working At An Investment Bank: Work/Life Balance (Part 2)

Hey, welcome back, John, and excited to have our second conversation as part of this 3-part series. And just to give the listeners a bit of a heads up on what we're going to cover over the next 20-30 minutes: company quality versus job quality, work-life versus personal life— I think that's a really important one, um, which we'll, we'll delve into— and how to set goals and manage expectations. For success. So perhaps we could start with this idea of, of company quality versus job quality. And I, and I know a lot of this came from a really great slide pack you put together initially, and you had a matrix of this. So talk me through that.

Yeah, when I had written this slide pack when I was finishing London School of Economics, I'd gone back to LSE a year ago to do a second master's degree in philosophy. And when I, as part of that academic experience, I gave a number of talks to students at LSE and also King's College about careers in finance. And I think just having worked in finance for a long time, but also having taken time out from it to do something so different, like a degree in philosophy, I, my thoughts around this were a lot more developed and I think cogent than my thoughts around careers in finance when I was actually working in finance. So one of the points I wanted to communicate to students back then, and I still I think it's a message that's worth examining is this idea of hard choices that people face in their careers and particularly in finance. And a hard choice for me is a choice that involves you having to compromise on something you value in order to achieve this other value that you might have. And that's different obviously from a win-win. There's some choices in life which aren't choices at all, meaning no matter which way you go, it's all gonna be a lot better than it was before. So that's the win-win situation. We all hope for that. We don't always find those things in life or in work, but if you ever find it, course you go for it and you'd be thankful for it. The hard choice is where you have to sacrifice something you want in order to get something you, uh, also desire. And then there's kind of the despicable choice where not only do you have to sacrifice something temporarily, you might have to abandon it for the rest of your life in order to go after this other thing that you want. But if we stick just with the hard choices, I think sometimes a hard choice for, uh, young people is they get a good job offer at a really bad company. Meaning they get offered a place that pays something pretty nice, but they know from the press that that company is really struggling. And then the converse of that is the student who gets a bad job offer from a really great company, meaning they really wanted to be in this particular division and instead they got something that they consider less than their, their, their goal. So how should you think about those hard choices? What should you do? I think if the hardest case is where you've gotten a good job offer from a really bad company. And the reason that to me is quite problematic is that it's obviously every person who starts in finance or starts in any field wants to give it 110% every day. I mean, I think when you're starting out, if you're really keen on the content of the job, you want to work your socks off. The problem with getting a good job with a bad company is it could be that despite how hard you work, it doesn't really translate into compensation or advancement. And in fact, it might be completely futile because in 5 years that company might not exist. And you can think of some financial institutions that were around 5 years ago or even a month ago that don't really exist any longer. And you can see the problem with signing on with a bad company for what seems to be a good job. So for some students, they have no choice. That's the only offer they get. If that's the only thing that's offered to you, you take it because you're young, you have debts, you need income. But you keep searching from the day you get in the door. For something better outside. I, I think it's slightly less problematic if you get a bad job at a good company, meaning you were aiming to be in this part of the bank. Instead, you got an offer in that part of the bank and you feel like it doesn't really leverage all your skills, all your talents, doesn't develop all your interests, but it's a really rock-solid institution. You hear nothing but good things about the culture. You know that it's an enormously profitable place. You think it's gonna be around for the next 5, 10, 20 years of your career. I would say, That's a good place to start, even though it may be a bad position initially. The reason is that, first of all, you, you can look for another job internally within that organization without having to worry that the place is going to exist in 5 years' time. And that should take an enormous weight off you. You know that the institution you're with is going to be kind of the endgame winner. You're in a position that isn't, uh, 100% desirable, but you spend a year or two doing it. You check the internal bulletin boards about mobility. Mobility is a much bigger thing in large financial institutions now than it was when I of my career 25 years ago. And I'm pretty sure that if you are a really good worker, if you are patient and you wait 1, 2, 3 years for the right opportunity to come along, you will get that opportunity and, and you end up on that path that you wanted to be on. It may be a later start to getting on that path, but it's much better to be on the right path at the right company that's going to be around for the long haul than to perceive that you're on the right path, but you're at an institution that's going nowhere. So that's how I would resolve those two.

I mean, for you, I guess it, would it be a unique case? I mean, you were at one institution for 25 years. Is that, did you see many of your fellow colleagues early in your career? Was it similar? Did they stick at a single place? And, and what, what was there ever a point where you thought, wow, 25 years in one place, should I move myself into a new environment to see if I can learn new things? Or was it that that environment just provided you what you needed.

I mean, that environment, working at an investment bank that ended up being an endgame winner, provided new opportunities every several years for me such that I very seldom thought about leaving. And I would frame that as an incredible instance of luck, meaning lots of people when they look back on their career, especially if they think that by any objective standard they've accomplished a lot, they've had a lot of promotions, they've had big titles, they've run big groups, they've earned a lot of income. They think that that's 100% a function of their effort or their grit or their merit. And, you know, certainly those things are all very important in determining success, but there's an awful lot of it which is just about pure dumb luck. You were incredibly hardworking, you were extremely collaborative, you were a great partner with the people sitting to the front, back, left, and right of you, as well as the people above you and the people below you. And when something happened where they needed someone to do some bigger thing, they turned to you. But the fact that that opportunity opened up to begin with is nothing you ever could have anticipated or controlled. So, and that's the luck element. And that's why I think, you know, when you're a young person and you look for these kind of role models in finance and you think, gosh, the person really has had this ever-expanding career for the past couple of decades, they must have mapped it out in some way that allowed them to achieve these things. I would say, Someone with no sense of perspective, no self-awareness, will speak to an audience and present it as if this was a complete, you know, deliberate plan to achieve certain things on a certain schedule. I think someone who's much more honest about the way things evolved would certainly credit themselves for having worked hard, for having gotten all the required academic or professional credentials that they needed to succeed in a certain job. They would credit themselves for how collaborative they were, within that work environment, but they would also admit to all the luck that came up along the way. And I could think of many examples of that in my career. You know, when I started at an investment bank, I was just kind of the FX analyst on the desk, and I did that every day for years and did it very well and didn't, you know, pio anyone, and I was very well regarded. But above me, there was just this constant turnover on the management side. You know, the team had a new boss every year for 3 years. And at one point they said, you know, let's stop looking for a new boss externally. Let's just look at someone on the team and they offered me that and my first kind of management job. 2 or 3 years later, the team kind of neighboring to my team had a manager who relocated to the States. So there was an opportunity to run that team. They just looked at me and said, you know, the stuff you're doing kind of overlaps with that and you seem to know some of those people and you get along with that business, so why don't you run that? And that same process happened 2 or 3 times, but you know, none of that was planned. I didn't have a wall chart up that said by X age I want, you know, this title and I want, you know, this place on the org chart. I did my job and did it well. Things happened to me randomly, you know, in a positive way over a number of instances. And that's why I stayed. And I was very happy with that. Yeah.

Was there ever any point when you start getting designated teams and they're your responsibility when you actually get pulled away a little bit and you're thinking, right now I'm a manager of people and a team and responsible for them and their output and their improvement and development. Is there ever like a bit of a conflict there between you just wanting to do your specialist kind of area to then actually investing your time in other people? Was that ever a—

It was a conflict, but I was, I was aware of the different types of responsibilities being a producer and a manager, and I was pretty deliberate about making sure that the amount of time I dedicated to the management side of it was going to be the minority share of my time. Meaning I sort of worked out in my head, I knew always that I love being a producer. I love doing research. I love talking to clients and salespeople and traders about the research that I generated. I was happy to manage because I like people and I liked having some role in shaping the direction of the product and deciding, or in collaboration with sales and trading, how that product should look. But I didn't want to spend the majority of my time on producing. And so I figured out, you know, a reporting line under me. I, I had kind of my limits on how much time I'd spend coaching people, listening to problems, resolving fights, conflicts, these sorts of things. And, and I sort of ring-fenced the management side of it in a way that I thought did justice to the role, but also allowed me to do all the things I, I wanted to do. And that worked fine. Um, there was a bit of a greater conflict, you know, later in my career where I decided I wanted to be a dad. And I was in my early 40s and I was single. And if you wanna be a dad in your early 40s as a single person, you know, there's one way to do it and there's probably more than one, but the route I chose was surrogacy. And I thought, you know, doing that as a single man in my 40s, I kind of wanted to free up some headspace to focus on my child. Meaning I thought a child could be a lot of drama. Like I looked at my own family experience with my siblings and thought, you know, this could be really time-consuming, really stressful. I wanna free up space for that. And actually, I don't wanna dedicate so much space to managing my colleagues. So I made a very deliberate decision in my early to mid-40s to move to a role that would allow me to be almost exclusively a producer and not manage. But it was basically because I thought, you know, if I'm gonna put up with a lot of drama and do a lot of coaching, I want it to be for my flesh and blood. And I'm happy to give, listen to that person all day long in terms of all their stuff, but to clear my head for that, you know, I want to move out of the management side and do something else. And, you know, maybe that cost me in the end, because in big organizations, one of the ways you kind of measure the value of someone is by the number of people that report to them. And when you move out that, you know, part of your chart that has a bunch of blocks under you and a bunch of people under you, people might kind of dismiss you as someone who's not as committed to the firm. That wasn't, you know, a reflection of my commitment, but it was just a reflection of a different set of priorities. I wanted a different kind of work-life balance, and I wanted to dedicate much more to the home part, which would be tougher to forecast because I didn't know what my child would be like. He ended up being great. He's very low maintenance. I can handle a lot of things right now with a low-maintenance child. But ex-Aunty, you know, this is kind of the way I wanted to structure things, and that's why I made that change.

Yeah. Well, you've just touched on the kind of work-life balance, personal life. When you were early in your career, I mean, I can, I can only speak for myself, but I know when I was in my 20s, it was like I can fully 110% dedicate myself without any distraction because there was no other things going on with real commitments in my life. So work was that kind of ultimate commitment. Um, but as you get older, as you said, and your priorities change, but with the the kind of analysts and associates that you interacted with in terms of that, I guess, finding a healthy balance between wanting to be visible within the organization, wanting to do a good job, but then also managing yourself so that you can have longevity and be able to progress.

Yes. So the way I would frame this issue of work-life balance is that the same features that draw people to finance. Intensity of the work, the unpredictability of it in a good way, meaning your features that are gonna compromise your ability to have work-life balance. Because, you know, that job, if it involve, if you're sitting in markets, a lot of those markets are 24 hours a day. You know, these products are traded around the world. So there's no such thing as going home and turning off. There's such thing as going home and checking the BlackBerry or checking the iPhone or however it is you get the streaming prices and newsfeed, but there's no such thing as turning this off. And it goes for whether you're a trader, if you're a salesperson, it applies. And it also applies often if you're a markets analyst or a researcher, if you cover something which is traded globally. So there is that conflict there. And how do you resolve it? I'd say if you're a single person, you're just starting out in the business, generally the way people resolve this is they hang out with other people in finance. That means that, you know, whatever you're experiencing in terms of the stress, the the inability to kind of plan your personal life, the number of plans that are kind of cut short unexpectedly because of some market development. At least when you explain that to your friendship circle, like they all get it, you know, they're all kind of doing the same thing. And so I think there's this tendency to feel like it's all fine as long as we're going through this together, we kind of share the same upside and we moan about the same downside. The problem, of course, is that if you spend all your time with finance people, or if you're a lawyer and spend all your time with young associates at a law firm, you are in that ecosystem, which itself is not really representative of the rest of the world, the rest of society. And this can kind of generate a lot of attitudes, which I don't think are very attractive in people. The other part of it is you do need a certain amount of personal life to eventually pursue the thing a lot of people want, which is a family. And if you end up with a partner who just doesn't happen to work in finance, you know, that whole tension you thought you had resolved by hanging out with these finance people, it's just gonna bubble up at home because the partner feels like either you're not there physically because you're always at the office, or when you are there physically, you're not there mentally because you're always checking the phone to see what's going on. And so what are you gonna do? Look, I think the first thing you got to do if you're going to resolve this in a family context, either because you have the family or you're going to start a family, is recognize that, uh, there is a trade-off, you know, between what you're doing at work and how much you allow yourself to have at home for your personal life. It is an absolute fiction, I believe, to think that you could have it all. You can have the big job in finance, uh, be so responsive to the clients all the time, and also have all this bandwidth for your partner and your, and your family. And you've only got 24 hours in a day. And the work demands are always going to encroach because there's always a deadline, there's always a new client, there's always an emergency. So the first thing you have to do is just own up to the fact that this is a trade-off. There's no having it all that some other people managed. And if you just knew their secret, you could kind of have it all too. You got to choose. But the choices you have to make actually go along several dimensions, which are open to you in finance, meaning you can choose over time, uh, the, the position you're in— is it going to be sell side or is it going to be buy side? And the type of schedule you're going to have on each side of that market is, is different. You can choose your particular function within markets. You could be, you know, a researcher covering a certain thing, or a salesperson covering certain types of clients, or a trader covering certain types of products. That might give you slightly more time on the margin for these other things that you want. And you also have a variable around just the amount of time you're going to put into this. You know, you might say, I'm going to go full on with this intense job that gives me no personal time for 5 years, but I'm gonna do it for 10 years because I want to achieve this other objective, which is saving this much money, having enough for school for the kids, buying a property, whatever it is. And then once I get that or enough of that, I'm gonna look for the off-ramp. And that off-ramp could be a different role, different side of the market, whatever it is. So I think it's kind of a, a multi-stage process realizing, you know, there are trade-offs, there are a bunch of variables that you can flex on over time to give you a bit more personal life. And, you know, when you decide how to flex those variables, you got to do it in conjunction with your partner. It really has to be a shared decision rather than a unilateral one.

Yeah. Okay. And just gonna jump straight into the, the final question and talk about how to set goals and, and manage expectations for success. And it'll be really interesting to hear what your kind of process to goal creation and kind of management, um, is in order to, to facilitate and reach that success.

So first, it's, it's fine to have goals. It's normal to have goals. I mean, one of the, one of the things that, you know, kind of separates us from an animal is just the ability to think of ourselves on a, on a forward basis. It's natural to project into the future and think about what your life is going to be like over some other horizon. And it's also very normal to think that your life is going to be a bit better if you had a little more stuff rather than less of stuff. I mean, this is kind of the mindset that leads us to be goal setters. But because of this issue that I discussed around luck, because of this kind of illusion of control that I think, you know, very high-placed people often kind of give to the shape of their career, I think you need to frame your goal setting and pursue it in a, in a certain way. Meaning, I think something that is 100% appropriate to do is to set, you know, a rough plan over the next 1, 5, 10 years about the kind of things you might like to do. You know, am I interested solely in finance? Is the only thing that interests me, and therefore all my efforts are around kind of getting the best opportunity in finance? Or am I interested in finance and some other stuff? So maybe as I do the finance, I want to kind of always have in mind the side hustle that I'm pursuing too, as a, as an alternative. But you don't really want to be, you know, sticklers about doing specific things on a certain time schedule by certain dates. That again kind of mistakes the role of luck in your career for the, the role of kind of effort and, and merit. But the first thing is, fine, make that rough plan. Don't be a stickler. The second thing you can do is you can telegraph, you know, these goals to your manager at the appropriate time and with some self-awareness about how your goals, you know, align or might not align with that of the business. Meaning if you come in as a first-year analyst or associate and you're given a certain book to trade, or you're covering clients, you know, in a particular sales sleeve, it's perfectly fine to say in that initial conversation, maybe in a mid-year review, maybe at a year-end review, that, you know, you like your job, you're doing well at it, you're interested in doing A, B, and C as well because you think you have the aptitude for it and, and you think you could, uh grow that franchise for the benefit of the firm. So you'd like to be considered for those things as and when those opportunities come up. And chances are, if you're doing your work extremely well, when those opportunities arise, you will be tapped. Maybe not for every one of them, but for something along the way. By contrast, what I wouldn't do is say to the boss on day one, as well as every month, that I want to be doing A, B, and C by these dates. And I also wanna do a rotation to the New York office and the Singapore office. No, that's also part of my plan. And give the boss kind of no sense of how this benefits the team or the firm. Like, that is exactly the wrong way to go about mapping out the career, telegraphing your interest, and sort of framing it to the business. So, you know, be loosely prescriptive, telegraph these things to the boss, have some self-awareness about how this fits into the broader function. And then I think if you just kind of sit down, be patient, do the job, do it exceptionally well, collaborate well, you'll find that— and if you're patient, you'll find that these opportunities will come along. Not in the first year, maybe not in the first 2 years. I realize young people don't like to hear this. They don't like to hear that you might have to sit in that chair for 2 or 3 years before, like, the ball bounces your way. But sometimes in a big organization, you often have to sit in the chair that long. The one final point on that is that if you are going to be a stickler about something on your career path, have it be about stuff you can actually control. Uh, meaning you might feel like The amount of education you have now is appropriate for the jobs you could envision doing for the next 5 years. But if you really want to do this other thing, whether it's in finance or outside finance, you, you need to get more education. It needs to be, you know, postgraduate degree, MBA, whatever it is that you want to think about pretty carefully. Like, what's the right time to do it in your career? Should it be after 2 years of working or after 5? How does that decision to go back for more education, uh, uh, either complement or preclude whatever your, your ambitions are around starting a family or pursuing something else. That's the kind of stuff I think you can be a little more specific about. All this other stuff about wanting X job, X rotation, a certain placement in a certain city, certain income, all this, you know, you, you got to kind of acknowledge that a lot of this is out of your hands. Yeah, cool.

Well, look, that's really sound advice and, and always great to get, get your insights. And look, we'll, we'll end the conversation here on this episode just to remind people that this is the second of 3. So you've already done number 1, just scroll back on, on the list of podcast episodes, you'll be able to find it. And then remember to subscribe and put the notifications on for the next episode, which will come out the following week. But John, thank you very much for your— for sharing your time, your insights. Yeah, I'll catch you on the next one.

Great, see you next time. Thanks, everyone.