"I was an executive director at a US investment bank. One bad MD destroyed my career"
I am not working nor have I worked for the past two years. This situation is not my own doing. A managing director wilfully destroyed my 15 year banking career.
I spent over a decade working for the same leading US investment bank in the US. I was not in a front office role but the sort of support position that means you get moved around. I was moved often and I was ok with that. I am a very change-oriented person. I had 13 managers in 15 years because managers would compete to have me on their team. I'm not a mediocre employee. I'm good at what I do; this is why I was promoted to executive director (ED).
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Making ED is not easy. It's a strict process that takes years and shows that you are a high quality person.
Despite this, within a year of being promoted I was let go.
The man who let me go was my 13th manager at the bank. He was a newly promoted managing director (MD) and I was moved onto his team. Within a year, I was out.
I have never had a problem with a manager or an MD in the past. From the outset, though, this man was different. Every two months, he would change my responsibilities. Initially he told me that I was to be responsible for one thing, then he said I was responsible for another. I reached out to people he said I would be working with, and he asked why had done that. This happened multiple times.
Eventually, he settled on a role and set of objectives, but this was seven months after I joined his team. Six weeks later, he evaluated me on those objectives and told me my work was rubbish that he was going to let me go. I asked to be offered redundancy.
Nothing happened. A month later, I questioned whether I would receive the offer of redundancy and he denied that he'd said he was going to let me go, or that he'd said my work was bad.
This began a period of intense personal stress. I reached out to mentors and sponsors within the organisation trying to get moved away from this man. There were no immediate roles available and one of them suggested I go to HR. I eventually did this. HR promised to investigate and I began a period of medical leave relating to my mental health.
After six months, HR hadn't even begun the investigation. After around eight months, they came back to me and said they had discovered nothing. It then became apparent that their investigation had involved asking the MD himself what had happened. He denied everything. There was no paper trail for his comments about letting me go, or disparaging my work. His failure to assign me any long term tasks didn't seem an issue.
As my mental health leave came to an end, I had to contemplate returning to work for the same MD. I'd spent the past months having intense therapy and suffering from stress. As I was about to return to work, I was informed that my team was being restructured. I was let go.
I didn't raise a discrimination claim because I didn't have the money. I took the settlement and signed an agreement that I would not sue the bank and this meant that I walked away with enough money to retrain in AI. Even so, I am now faced with relocating and starting again at the bottom of the ladder.
None of this was my doing. It could happen to anyone. All it took was one manipulative MD to destroy my 15 year career. HR were useless at defending me.
My situation is a warning. The system is stacked against you. When you are going up against a newly promoted MD, no one will listen That MD needed 20 senior internal sponsors to get promoted and must have been consistently highly ranked over a three year period. When you say a new MD is malicious and inept, you are effectively saying that those 20 people were duped. No one wants to hear that. Not least HR.
Lena Ragsdale is a pseudonym
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