Relational social capital

Successful candidates demonstrated a desire and an ability to build effective and enduring relationships with MDs:

“I personally think, you know, without going into too much detail I think there are things he told me which he was saying to me more as a kind of mentor type friend versus as my official boss” (Bradley, appointed).

Bradley suggests that his relationship with his LM was sufficiently close that he gained access to information (in this case about the formal promotion process) that he would ordinarily not have had access to had this relationship been more formal.

Some non-appointed candidates talked about the lack of an effective relationship with senior MDs, even if they had network connection to them:

“I knew him, but not… I wouldn’t say I knew him, you know, particularly well. There wasn’t that sort of relationship between us” (Freddy, not appointed).

Many of the non-appointed candidates explained what got in the way of developing a quality relationship with other MDs.

6.2.2.1 Knowing you, knowing me: why it matters

For some candidates their role gave them wide exposure to other areas of the bank. However, this did not necessarily provide them with the type of contact that enabled them to build close ties with others. Their roles meant they had little contact with MDs on a day-to-day basis meaning their main business contacts were other Directors or more junior staff. This meant they had fewer opportunities to deepen their relationships with MDs:

“I think the only real exposure I get to MDs is either when there are big pitches, which involve a variety of banking MDs or in some cases two or three or four or five MDs going to pitch an idea to an important client, as part of a realistic pitch” (Olivia, not appointed).

Olivia pointed out that her role did bring her into contact with other MDs from time to time but, because she did not have prolonged or frequent periods of time with them, she wasn’t able to develop the relationship. Although she had network connection with them (SSC) her ability to build RSC was compromised.

Some candidates had opportunities to build closer relationships with MDs but chose not to. Anna, Tim and James are good examples of choosing not to build closer, more informal relationships with senior colleagues; all three had been unsuccessful in their first year of nomination. Anna had been with the bank for many years, “knew everybody”, and was in a role that gave her broad based connectivity yet she was reluctant to spend time developing relationships with key seniors:

“I don’t need to meet anybody (laughs) so I didn’t go through that, you know, ‘I’m going to meet this so and so, and so and so’. [LM] was very keen for me to keep in touch with lots of senior people, but frankly I haven’t sort of [done this] with the [business leader name] class, I really don’t have time to do that; people either (laughingly) should think I’m an MD or not, and so on” (Anna, not appointed).

Anna appeared reluctant to play the promotion preparation game. She had been nominated for promotion again at the time I interviewed her and during the first nine months of the year had attended several ‘breakfast meetings’, which had been convened for potential MD candidates to meet key global business leaders on a more informal basis. She was still reluctant to admit that this was an important part of the process but she was willing to play the game, she said:

“So I turn up because I think, ‘I’m going to get fed, I’ll go.’” (laughs) (Anna, not appointed).

Both Tim and James were successful revenue generators (which helped create SSC) and had chosen to spend their time doing this rather than developing effective relationships with other MDs. Like Anna, they had been unsuccessful first time round, had taken steps to improve their RSC and had been successful the following year:

“I spent too much time on concentrating on how to make money as opposed to doing the internal schmoozing. But you have to find a balance; which I think I didn’t. [….] I struggle spending social time with people that I don’t really like spending social time with” (Tim, appointed +1).

James explained how his abrasive personality tended to cause problems with, and for, others:

“I’ve always thought that the revenue I produced was enough to make up for all the other shortcomings that the bank should overlook. I was making a lot of money but I was considered abrasive, confrontational, not a team player[…]. You know there were a lot of intangibles – none of them had anything to do with my production. I never built strong enough connections with other MDs in a way that wasn’t just trying to suck up to get a promotion” (James, appointed +1).

The first year he was nominated for promotion he had very few supporters and was not successful. In his opinion, building strong connections with others was obsequious behaviour. But after failing to get his promotion he sought feedback from others and worked hard to develop new ways of working with them. He said:

Then I took that feedback and went to my boss’ boss and said ‘I really want to have this promotion. Tell me what I need to do and how I need to change to do that’. I took all that on board and put it all into practice - it was never about clients, there were zero problems on the client side. It was all internal actions” (James, appointed +1).

In helping to create this change James referred to a colleague he used as a role model because “he has such strong bonds, such strong friendships and such a strong network within the firm. He does it on a social level but he makes it feel like he’s their best friend and he does this with everybody”.

In the quote below, Harry talked about the network exposure he got as a result of his current role; it gave him access to different MD networks both horizontally and vertically within the bank:

“It [wide network] gives me advantages in that I have the maximum breadth of exposure, but it gives me disadvantages in that I have less deep relations. I work with this guy for 10% of my time, whereas one other person he sponsors is part of his business and he works with him 15 hours a day, every day, so they have a very tight-knit bond. And this is the problem: I think getting the breadth of support is easy for me, but then when push comes to shove, people may side with the people that they have most affiliation with, so that’s always a problem” (Harry, not appointed).

Whilst he recognised the advantages his role provided in terms of his SSC, Harry recognised that it did not enable him to build ‘deep relations’, or close ties, with others. He saw that close ties with others resulted in a ‘tight-knit bond’

which created a sense of loyalty to one’s peers and made reference to the concept of ‘affiliation’ suggesting that people see each other as members of particular groups and they will be more likely to support ‘insiders’ rather than

‘outsiders’.

6.2.2.2 Disrupted relationships

Effective and trusting relationships often take many years to build. Candidates who were not appointed during their promotion year made reference to disrupted relationships from 2009 onward, as several MDs exited the company as a result of the financial crisis. For some this meant they lost the support of senior colleagues with whom they had worked over a number of years. New managers appointed into these vacated positions were often unfamiliar with the

work of the candidate and who were, in some cases, unfamiliar with the promotion process itself (as discussed in the previous section), which, they believed, put them at a disadvantage:

“…. it was a very peculiar year for me in the sense that the person that ran my team left; it was April 2010, [...] if you replace him with someone else that barely knows me or knows me in a much less intense way, I know that the feedback is not going to be the same. And; it’s as simple as that” (Paulo, not appointed).

We’ve had quite high staff turnover over the course of the last couple of years, which means that it's hard to build relationships when people are only there for a year or 18 months” (Olivia, not appointed +1).

The potential problem of losing long term working relationships with senior MDs, who would be available to comment on the quality of a candidate’s work, was not lost on some of those who were successfully appointed. One man who had built up a significant network of relationships over his years with Globank anticipated changes ahead and expedited his promotion before key figures left the firm:

“What happened in the course of 2009 is that a lot of these people had left actually and my feeling was if I don’t try [for MD promotion] this year it will be, you know, difficult to have the line-up of people who have actually had a very significant interaction with me” (Hugh, appointed).

Candidates needed to invest time if they were to develop something more than a formal working relationship with other MDs and were negatively affected if the relationships were disrupted. However, this does not explain why some candidates found it easier to develop more effective relationships; possible reasons for this will be covered in the next section.