You spent twenty years earning the seat. Then you got it, and something went missing that you cannot put your finger on.
You still have the responsibility. More of it than ever. What you do not have is the thing you were good at, the part where you could see the work and touch it and know by Thursday whether the week had gone well. Now you sit in meetings about meetings. You read decks about work other people are doing. By every measure the firm keeps, you are more senior than you have ever been, and you have never felt further from anything real.
If that is you, I want to tell you about three years I do not talk about much.
The “40th floor”
I came back to New York after five years setting up and then running Morgan Stanley's business in India. I had been made Managing Director while I was out there. I had built the relationships I needed at headquarters. On paper, I was “arriving”.
What I found was that being a big fish in a small pond in India and being one Managing Director among many in the New York office are two different jobs, and nobody tells you that. There were many of me. All jockeying for equity, for position, for the next thing. I had never experienced anything like it in my years at the firm and I had no idea how to play it.
I sat in an office on a high floor as part of something called “management”, and I remember thinking, what are we managing? I had responsibility for a great deal. I had no on-the-ground sense of any of it. I had been happier talking directly to clients and to the people doing the work, and now there was a whole building - and may be oceans - between me and all of them.
Over those three years I put forward five business proposals. Each one I would have liked to build myself. Each one was turned down...
The one thing that worked
The bright spot, and there was only one, was Mumbai.
The firm wanted its first offshore center. I hand-picked four people. Nine months later it housed four hundred, the first wave of that kind of work the firm had ever done. I had spent years on outsourcing and offshoring by then, so they gave me the global strategy for it as well. That role lasted eighteen months and it was a happy one, the only happy stretch in the three years. The pattern in my life had been going into new setups, and that is what I loved.
Then I resigned. March 2005. I have worked for myself since the April after.
What I would say to you
Leave or stay is your call. I stayed three years and I am glad I did, because Mumbai happened inside them.
What I would say is that the feeling is real, and it is not a failure of yours. You were promoted for being good at the work. The promotion took the work away and gave you a floor. Nobody explains this. They assume you will enjoy the view.
What saved me was finding the one thing inside the role where I could still build with my own hands, and putting everything into that. Four people and nine months. The politics carried on around it. I had somewhere to stand while I worked out what came next.
If you are on your own 40th floor right now, look for your four people. The thing you were good at has not gone anywhere. It is waiting for you to find where it still fits.
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Raju Panjwani | Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc.
I was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. I now work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, on becoming the leader the business now needs.