“My MD just promoted his secretary to director”

I work for a US investment bank, and I am disappointed by its standards. This has become a place where the CEO is awarded a huge pay rise and where a handful of senior managing directors run the bank and exploit juniors with an unusual degree of high-handedness.

This year, most of us junior employees received a bonus that was either flat or very negligibly up. We are being squeezed by the CEO and the managing directors (MDs) who received pay increases, not because they increased revenues, but because they cut costs. 

In this mileu, one of the heads of the business has taken the opportunity of giving his secretary a promotion to director, even though no one else in his entire team was promoted to director this year. We are flabbergasted.

It’s not the blatant favouritism from the MD, but the fact that somehow all the other MDs across the business signed this off. The MD has long favoured his secretary and the other MDs in the business somehow ignored this and supported the promotion with their own positive feedback.

In doing so, they have seriously underlined standards in the bank, and with them, morale. The secretary in question was not senior and had no line management reporting, both of which are essentially the two parameters for promotion in our team.

It’s unbelievable that this has happened, especially after the bonus round. Morale here is very badly damaged as is trust in senior management and their talk of talent retention.

Nia Khan is a pseudonym

Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash

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