If Mary has three apples…

“Once you reach a certain level of seniority inside a bank, you sort of stop working,” said a colleague the other day.

What are you not doing while you are doing what you are doing? 

“You show up, you put in long hours, but you don’t actually do any work anymore.”

I was startled momentarily, and then I was like… actually… truer words have not been spoken.

Sadly.

From a certain level upwards, you just go to meetings. Like how Ken in the Barbie movie always goes to the beach.

Mostly internal meetings, at that. With a lot of other people.

The meetings are terribly important and the other people in them are also terribly important and the less important people who work for the important people prepare updates and presentations for you to frown over during the meetings.

Sometimes the less important people are your people, and you need to defend them from whatever unfair criticism or attack the other important people may level against them for sport or to make their less important people feel better.

Some of those less important people dream of the day they will be important enough to spend all day criticising other people’s work in endless meetings.

Some think they can be different when they get there.

It’s fair to say… the transition is not always smooth for people.

I know folks who were born to be in meetings. They just tread water until they get to that place and then they are in their element. They produce crises that they then solve. They have teams churning out reams of paperwork. They oversee projects nobody needed and create tensions, drama and intrigue everywhere they go so they can solve it.

I also know people who love the work.

They love the build. They love working with clients. They love doing the thing and seeing it work. And when they get promoted, they try so hard to continue doing. To continue nurturing those who do. Sure, they will go to meetings too, we all know the rituals. But they can prioritise, they can be selective. I mean… surely… sometimes the actual work is more important than the meetings, right?

Not to mention more interesting…

Do I need to tell you that the second type usually falls with a dagger in their back delivered deftly and seemingly innocently by the first type?

No, I don’t.

You know it.

You have seen it.

You have probably lived it.

You know it doesn’t have to be this way, right?

You know you can break the cycle.

Being a start-up or a scale-up or a tech company isn’t protection from all this, by the way.

You need to be intentional in not becoming this.

How?

So glad you asked.

Hire carefully and fire with intent and swift conviction.

The first time you see someone whose main job is to create meetings for other people to report on their usefulness, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Part of the work is to fire them.

The rest of the work is to destroy the habitat that nurtured that behaviour in the first place.

There is more.

Measure opportunity cost. What are you not doing while you are doing what you are doing?

Measure it always. Talk about it always. You may find it really creates a space for everyday sanity in your conversations.

I once asked a colleague if he wanted to spend some time going through some work together between the end of the workday and a client dinner.

He said he would rather spend that time in silence as it had been a long week and he needed to be on top form for our pitch the following day.

I respect him immensely for that.

Trade-offs.

Learn to speak of them. Because big or small, they are always there.

So what are you not doing while you and 32 of your closest colleagues are sitting in monthly business review meetings? And if you are not doing it, whatever it may be… is it not getting done at all or is someone else doing it? Because if it’s not getting done… does it not need to be getting done? And if someone else is doing it… why are they not here to tell us about it?

Slippery slope, that one.

So talk about trade-offs.

Because it’s not just opportunity cost.

It’s also, ‘If Mary has three apples and gives Josh one apple, how many apples does Mary have?’

Because let me tell you about those meetings and the magic that happens in them… you get to spend the same budget – hypothetically – about three times. And then Josh walks away with an apple because that’s what he heard you say in the meeting, but Mary goes into her next meeting and acts like she still has three apples.

You can see how quickly this becomes an issue.

But of course, Mary is in all the meetings talking about apples while Josh took his apple and went back to work. And now he’s summoned back to the Important Meeting to explain himself and return the apple. Because Mary promised it to four more people but also she had simultaneously assumed Josh would have planted the core of the apple she may or may not have given him and grown a tree and harvested the crop and, long story short, she is now in the awkward position of having promised folks a few more bushels of apples that Josh has failed to deliver.

I have seen this in banks and big FIs. And I have seen this in start-ups of all sizes and at all levels of solvency. I hear not all industries are like this. But in ours, it is everywhere.

But that is no excuse.

It’s a plague.

And we can choose to be the remedy.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.