Internal Politics in Investment Banking New York — The Game You Cannot Avoid, So You Had Better Learn to Play It

At some point in your career as a VP, Director, ED, or MD at a major New York investment bank, you will have a version of this thought.

I just want to do good work and let the results speak for themselves. I am not interested in the politics. I am not built for it. The people who are good at it make me uncomfortable. I would rather spend my energy on the deals than on the game that runs alongside them.

This thought is understandable. It is also, at the senior level, a career-limiting position.

Internal politics in investment banking is not optional. It is not a feature of certain firms or certain cultures that you can select away from by choosing the right institution. It is structural. It is a function of how large organisations with scarce resources, competitive people, and high stakes actually operate. It exists at every bank, in every division, at every level above analyst. The only thing that changes as you move up is the scale and the consequence.

By the time you are an MD, the politics is not a distraction from the work. It is the work.

And the sooner you stop resenting it and start learning to play it, the better.

There Is No Neutral Ground

You are already in the game. Every conversation you have with a colleague, every meeting you attend, every piece of credit you take or decline, every relationship you invest in or neglect — all of it is political in the specific sense that it shapes how you are perceived, what you are offered, and what is withheld. You are in the game whether you have decided to play it or not. The only choice is whether you play it consciously or by default.

The bankers who tell themselves they are above the politics are not above it. They are simply losing it without realising. The narrative about them — who they are in the institution, what they are capable of, whose judgment they are trusted with, what opportunities they are considered for — is being written continuously. In every conversation about them that happens when they are not in the room. In every year-end evaluation where their name is discussed by people whose direct experience of them is limited. In every informal conversation between a senior MD and a client where their name does or does not come up as someone to involve.

You do not control that narrative by being good at your job. You control it by being present in the relationships that shape it.

Think about what actually happens in a year-end compensation discussion. The people in that room are not reviewing your deal log in isolation. They are forming a view of you — your trajectory, your institutional value, your potential — based on a combination of your track record and the impressions that have accumulated through the year. The MD who has been visible, who has been useful to the right people, who has built the kind of internal presence that makes their name come up naturally in the right conversations — that person is not just being rewarded for their deals. They are being rewarded for the totality of their institutional presence. The MD who has been heads-down on execution, who has avoided the internal dynamics, who has let their work speak for itself — their work is speaking into a vacuum. Nobody is amplifying it. Nobody is contextualising it. Nobody is making the case for them in the room where the case needs to be made.

This is not unfair. This is how institutions work. And understanding it is the first step toward operating within it effectively.

The question is not whether you will engage with internal politics. You already are. The question is whether you will engage with it deliberately or whether you will let it happen to you.

The Athlete Who Cannot Avoid the Press

In professional sport, there is a version of this that every elite athlete has to navigate.

You cannot choose whether the media writes about you. Once you are competing at a high enough level, the coverage exists. What you can choose is your relationship with it — whether you engage with it strategically, manage your narrative, build the relationships with journalists and commentators that serve your career over time, or ignore it entirely and let others define the story.

The athletes who ignore it do not avoid the coverage. They simply lose control of it. They become the story that other people tell — the one that serves the journalist's angle rather than their own. The media presence happens to them rather than for them. And at a certain level of performance, the narrative around you is not separate from your career. It is part of it.

I spent years on the WTA tour. I know what it is to be in a world where your performance is public, where the narrative around you is being shaped by people who have never spoken to you, where the story that gets told about who you are and what you are capable of has real consequences for your career. The athletes who navigate this well are not the ones who are most naturally comfortable with media attention. They are the ones who understand that the relationship with the institutional structures around their sport — the media, the sponsors, the governing bodies, the public — is part of the performance. It has to be managed, cultivated, and invested in, even when it feels unnatural, even when the preference would be to go straight back to the training ground.

After every significant match, elite athletes do their post-match interviews. Not because they enjoy it. Not because it is their natural mode. Because they understand that showing up in those moments — being present, being articulate, being visible in the ways that the institutional structure of their sport requires — is part of what it means to compete at the highest level. The ones who understand this early build careers that compound. The ones who understand it late spend years catching up on ground they did not need to lose.

Internal politics in investment banking works exactly the same way. The narrative about you is being written continuously. You do not control it by being good at your job. You control it by being present in the relationships that shape it. By being visible to the people whose perception of you matters. By doing the work of the institution that happens in the conversations and the dinners and the lateral relationships — not just in the deals.

You cannot run from it. You have to run toward it.

Investment Banking Is a Sales Job

Let me say something directly that the culture of investment banking rarely says out loud.

This is a sales job.

At every level above analyst, your value is not primarily in your technical execution. It is in your relationships — internal and external. The deals come from relationships. The mandates come from relationships. The promotions come from relationships. The protection when things go wrong comes from relationships. The platform from which you build the next decade of your career comes from relationships.

This is not a criticism. It is a description of how the business actually works.

The technical work — the models, the memos, the analyses — is the foundation that makes you credible in the relationships. It is not the end in itself. The end is the relationship, the trust, the network of people inside and outside the institution who have decided that you are someone worth backing, worth involving, worth calling when something significant is happening.

The senior bankers who have built the most durable franchises on Wall Street are not always the most technically brilliant people in the room. They are consistently the people who built the deepest and most extensive relationships — who invested in those relationships over years, sometimes decades, before the return was visible. Who understood that the internal political capital they accumulated by supporting colleagues, by being present in the institutional dynamics, by being known and trusted by the people who made the decisions — this was not separate from the work. It was the work, at the level where the work actually matters commercially.

This is the shift that most technically excellent bankers resist making, and it is the shift that separates the people who build significant franchises from the people who plateau. At analyst level, the model is the product. At VP level, the model is the foundation for the relationship. At MD level, the relationship is the product. The model is just the thing that makes you credible enough to be in the room.

If you are uncomfortable with this framing, the discomfort is worth examining rather than avoiding. Because the discomfort does not mean you cannot do it. It means you have not yet developed the skill in the way you developed your technical skills — through deliberate practice, through iteration, through getting it wrong and adjusting, through the slow accumulation of what works and what does not.

The technical skills you have now did not arrive fully formed. You built them through years of repetition. The relational and political skills work exactly the same way. The only difference is that nobody in investment banking tells you this explicitly, so most people either never start building them or start building them ten years later than they should have.

If you want to talk about what that development specifically looks like in your situation, a consultation is the right place to start.

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You Cannot Do It Alone

One of the persistent myths of the Wall Street success narrative is the self-made MD — the person who got there through pure performance, without sponsors, without advocates, without the institutional backing that comes from having invested in relationships at every level.

This narrative is almost entirely false.

Behind every significant senior banking career is a network of people — internal sponsors who pushed for the promotion, senior colleagues who shared credit, institutional leaders who included them in the conversations where the real direction was being set. The self-made MD is a story that people tell about themselves in retrospect, after the relationships that made them have faded from the foreground of the narrative. It is not an accurate account of how the career was actually built.

You need your people inside the institution. Not a broad network of superficial relationships that will not survive a regime change or a difficult quarter. The specific people — the ones who will speak for you when you are not in the room, who will tell the global head that you were the one who made the deal work when the credit is being distributed, who will flag your name for the opportunity before it is widely known. These relationships do not happen by accident. They are built through the specific, consistent work of investing in the people who matter — not transactionally, but genuinely. Through understanding what they need, through being useful to them before you need anything from them, through showing up in the ways that the institutional culture rewards.

And by not building it, you are not hurting anyone but yourself.

The higher you go, the more this becomes the primary variable. At analyst level, performance is measured by the quality of the execution. At MD level, performance is measured by the quality of the franchise — the clients, the deals, the institutional influence — and all of those things are functions of relationships. The technical foundation matters. Without it you are not credible. But the technical foundation without the relationship network above it is a career that plateaus.

You see it everywhere on Wall Street. The brilliant banker who is universally respected for their judgment and who has never quite reached the level their capability warrants, because they spent their career investing in the work and not enough in the people. The ED who is technically the strongest person in every room they enter and who has been passed over for MD twice, not because the committee does not respect their work, but because nobody in that room is making the case for them with genuine conviction. The VP who closes every deal they are given and who is never given the deals that would change their trajectory, because the MDs who originate those deals do not know them well enough to trust them with the relationship.

These are not stories about unfairness. They are stories about a game that was always being played, by people who chose not to play it.

Stop Comparing Yourself to the People Who Make It Look Easy

In every institution there are people for whom the internal politics appears to come naturally. They navigate the dynamics with an ease and fluency that can look, from the outside, like a character trait rather than a developed skill. They seem to know instinctively who to call, what to say, how to be in a room with senior leadership without the calculation that others find effortful. They accumulate sponsors without appearing to try. The credit finds them. The opportunities appear before the competition has even identified them as available.

Some of this is genuine fluency, built through years of practice in environments that taught this way of operating from an early age — the right schools, the right family backgrounds, the cultural apprenticeship in the codes of elite professional life that some people begin before they are teenagers. This is real. It is an advantage that some of your colleagues have and that you may not. Acknowledging it is not self-pity. It is accuracy.

But most of it is not natural. Most of it is the result of investment — years of deliberate relationship building, of getting it wrong and adjusting, of learning through observation and iteration what works and what does not in this specific institutional context. The person who looks fluent has usually been practising for longer than you have been watching. The ease is the product of reps, not of gifts.

The comparison that costs you is the one that produces the conclusion: they are good at this and I am not, therefore this is not my domain. That conclusion is almost always incorrect and always expensive. The correct conclusion is: they are further along a curve that I have not yet invested in properly. The curve exists. The investment is available. What is required is the decision to start making it.

There is a specific version of this comparison that I see regularly in my work with senior bankers, and it is worth naming directly. It is the comparison between yourself and the colleague who seems to have been born into the institutional culture — who went to the right schools, who has the right accent, who moves through the firm with an ease that feels, to you, like it was never earned. And the conclusion you draw from this comparison is that the game is rigged, that the political fluency you are watching is not a skill but a birthright, and that therefore the effort of developing it yourself is pointless.

This conclusion is seductive because it contains a grain of truth. Some people do start with advantages that others do not have. But the bankers who have built the most significant careers on Wall Street from backgrounds that did not come with those advantages — and there are many of them — did not do it by accepting the conclusion that the game was not available to them. They did it by deciding to learn the game more deliberately than the people who had been playing it since childhood. They did it by treating the political and relational work as a skill to be developed, not a talent to be born with. They did it by starting, imperfectly, and iterating.

You Have to Do Things That Do Not Feel Natural

Building internal political capital will, at various points in the process, require you to do things that do not feel natural. This is not a reason to avoid them. It is information about where the growth is.

It will require you to have conversations with people above you that feel, initially, like an imposition — calling a senior MD to share a perspective on a sector development, asking for time with the global head to discuss your direction, being visible to institutional leadership in ways that your instinct reads as self-promotion rather than as the legitimate professional presence it actually is.

The instinct that says this feels wrong is usually the instinct of someone who grew up in an environment where visibility was not safe, or where asking for things was culturally discouraged, or where the principle of keeping your head down and doing good work was the route to safety. That instinct served a purpose once. It does not serve this environment.

It will require you to invest time and energy in people who are not immediately useful to you. The colleague in a different coverage group who you have no current deal overlap with but whose relationship with the divisional head matters for your direction. The junior MD who is not yet influential but who will be in five years and who will remember how you treated them when the balance of power was reversed. The institutional committee that feels like a distraction from the deal work but that gives you visibility with the people who will decide your promotion. These investments feel inefficient because the return is not immediate. They are the most important investments you will make.

It will require you to manage the credit more carefully than is comfortable. To be explicit about your contribution in situations where the culture rewards modesty. To ensure that the people who make the decisions about your career actually know what you did, rather than assuming that good work is self-evident. This feels like self-promotion to people who were raised to let results speak for themselves. At senior levels on Wall Street, results do not speak for themselves. They are interpreted by people with imperfect information, through the lens of their existing relationships and assumptions. The interpretation that serves your career requires your active participation. This is not dishonest. It is not manipulative. It is the recognition that in a large institution, the gap between what you have done and what the decision-makers know you have done is a gap that you are responsible for closing.

It will require you to show up in situations that feel low-value in the short term. The firm-wide event that you would rather skip. The cross-divisional working group that has no immediate relevance to your deals. The informal drinks with a team you do not work with directly. These are not wasted hours. They are the moments where the institutional relationships that will matter later are built — quietly, incrementally, in the way that all durable things are built.

The discomfort of doing these things is real. But it diminishes with practice, in the same way that the discomfort of any new skill diminishes with practice. The first time you call a senior MD with nothing specific on the table, it will feel awkward. The fifth time, it will feel normal. The twentieth time, it will feel like the natural rhythm of how you operate at this level. The skill is being built in the discomfort. That is the point.

The Earlier You Start, the Better

Internal political capital compounds. Like any investment, the earlier you start building it, the more it accumulates.

The senior MD who has spent fifteen years consistently investing in relationships — who has done small favours, shared credit generously, been present in the institutional dynamics, built genuine trust with the people who have risen alongside them — has accumulated a reserve that protects them when things go wrong and amplifies them when things go right. When the difficult quarter comes, when the regime changes, when the deal falls apart publicly, that reserve is what determines whether the institution closes around them or opens up. The ED who starts this work at 40 is not starting from zero, but they are starting from behind.

The mistake that many technically excellent junior bankers make is to defer the relationship work. They tell themselves they will start doing it properly once they have established their technical credibility. Once they are promoted. Once the current deal cycle is over. Once they have more time.

The current deal cycle is never over. The time never appears.

And the investment that should have been building for three years at VP has to be made in twelve months at ED, under more scrutiny, with less margin for error, in a context where the people above you have already formed views about who you are and what you are capable of — views that are harder to shift than they would have been if you had been building the relationships from the beginning.

The best time to build internal political capital is when you do not need it. When the quarter is going well and you have the bandwidth to be present with colleagues beyond the immediate deal requirements. When you are in a position to be useful to someone above you without anything obvious to gain from the interaction. When you can take the time to understand the institutional landscape — who is aligned with whom, where the power actually sits relative to where the org chart says it sits, which relationships are the ones that matter for your specific direction.

Building this knowledge and these relationships in a period of relative stability means they are available when you need them — when the quarter goes wrong, when the regime changes, when the opportunity arrives that you could not have predicted. The banker who has been building the relationships in the good times has options in the difficult times. The banker who has been heads-down on execution has only their track record, which is a much thinner form of protection.

There is also a compounding effect worth understanding. The relationships you build at VP level with people who are currently at your level or slightly above will, over the course of a fifteen-year career, become the relationships that define your institutional standing. The colleague who is a Director today will be a global head in ten years. The junior MD who you mentored when they were struggling will be the person who advocates for you in a room you cannot enter. The institutional capital you build now is not just useful now. It is the foundation of the career you will have in fifteen years. The earlier you start building it, the more compounded the return.

The Moment the Narrative Shifts Against You

There will be moments in your career when the internal narrative about you shifts — not because of anything you did wrong on a deal, but because of the relational and political work you did not do. A regime change brings in a new global head who does not know you and has no reason to invest in finding out. A peer who has been building relationships more deliberately than you gets the mandate that should have been yours, not because they are better at the work but because their name is more present in the right conversations. A difficult quarter produces a performance review that is harsher than your track record warrants, because the people writing it do not have the context to evaluate you accurately and nobody is providing it.

These moments are not random. They are the predictable consequence of a specific kind of neglect — the neglect of the relational and political work that protects you when things are difficult and amplifies you when things are going well.

The banker who has built the internal political infrastructure has options in these moments. They have sponsors who will provide context. They have lateral relationships that create alternative pathways. They have the institutional presence that makes their name come up in the right conversations even when they are not actively managing it. The banker who has neglected this work has only their track record, which is a much thinner form of protection than they realise until the moment they need it.

This is not a counsel of fear. It is a counsel of preparation. The institutional landscape of investment banking is not stable. Regimes change. Strategies shift. The people who were powerful when you joined are not always the people who are powerful when you are being considered for MD. The relationships that protect you through those shifts are not built in the moment of the shift. They are built in the years before it.

The Favour That Is Never Handed to You

There is a moment in a well-constructed internal political career that feels, in the moment, like luck.

The conversation where the opportunity is offered before you knew it existed. The senior leader who advocates for you in a room you were not in, with a conviction that surprises you. The mandate that comes to you because someone in another part of the institution thought of your name first and suggested it before anyone else was considered. The protection that appears when the quarter goes wrong, in the form of a senior colleague who provides context and perspective that you did not ask for and could not have arranged.

It is never handed to you. You earned it.

It is the return on an investment you made years earlier, arriving in a form you could not have predicted at the time you made it. The conversation you had with that senior leader two years ago when there was nothing immediately on the table. The support you gave to the colleague when they were under pressure and you had the bandwidth to help. The consistent presence in the institutional dynamics that made your name familiar and trusted in rooms you were not in. The small acts of showing up — the follow-up after the meeting that did not need a follow-up, the introduction you made that cost you nothing but mattered to the person you made it for, the credit you shared when you could have kept it.

These are not lucky breaks. They are the specific, compounding return on the relational investment that the technically excellent banker who neglected the politics never made.

The illusion of luck in these moments is important to understand, because it is the same illusion that makes the politically fluent banker look naturally gifted. When you see the outcome — the opportunity that arrived, the sponsor who appeared, the protection that was offered — without seeing the years of relationship investment that produced it, the result looks like fortune. It is not fortune. It is a system. A system that can be understood, built, and operated by anyone who is willing to invest in it with the same rigour and consistency they invest in everything else.

The banker who looks like they are always in the right place at the right time has usually been building the infrastructure that puts them in the right place for years. The luck is the visible surface of an invisible architecture.

The One Thing AI Cannot Replicate

Here is what I want you to hold onto.

The soft skills of internal politics — the relationship building, the institutional presence, the trust accumulated through years of consistent showing up — are the one part of your career that cannot be automated, cannot be replicated by AI, and cannot be substituted by technical excellence.

The deal can be replicated. The model can be automated. The relationship cannot.

This is not a sentimental observation. It is a structural one. The capabilities that AI is developing rapidly — pattern recognition, data synthesis, analytical execution — are precisely the capabilities that have historically been the foundation of the analyst and associate value proposition in investment banking. The technical work that junior bankers have always done is increasingly being done faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors by machines.

What is not being replicated — what cannot be replicated — is the quality of your presence with another person. The genuine interest in their situation. The memory of what matters to them and the attention to it over time. The trust that accumulates through consistency. The loyalty that is built not through grand gestures but through small, repeated acts of showing up. The judgment that comes from having been in the room when the difficult decisions were being made and having earned the trust of the people who made them.

These are soft skills in the language of the banking industry. They are the hardest skills to develop and the most durable competitive advantages available. In an industry that is increasingly being reshaped by technology, the human skills are not becoming less important. They are becoming the primary differentiator. The bankers who understand this now — and who invest in these skills with the same rigour they invest in their technical development — are building careers that will compound in ways that the technically excellent banker who neglected the relational work will not.

This cannot be outsourced. It cannot be delegated. It is the work that only you can do. And it is the work that will carry you through the next twenty years of a career that is being transformed by forces that will make the technical work progressively less differentiated and the human work progressively more valuable.

At Some Point, You May Even Enjoy It

I want to say something that might surprise you.

At some point — and this is the thing that the people who play the game well will tell you, if they are being honest — you may even begin to enjoy it.

Not the calculation of it. Not the management of it. But the genuine pleasure of the relationships you have built and the institutional presence you have earned. The dinner with the client where the conversation has nothing to do with any deal currently on the table and everything to do with the trust that has been built over years. The conversation with the junior MD where you can see that something you did or said two years ago is still shaping how they think about their career. The moment where the colleague you supported when they were under pressure calls you first when something significant is happening — not because it is transactionally useful, but because the relationship has become real.

After a lot of missed attempts, a lot of crickets, a lot of investments that seemed to produce nothing — the return starts to arrive. And when it does, it does not feel like politics any more.

The real return is quieter and more pervasive than the dramatic version. It is the ease with which you move through the institution. The way that information comes to you before it is widely known, because the people who have it trust you with it. The way that problems get solved before they become crises, because the relationships you have built mean that the right person calls you when something is developing rather than after it has already gone wrong. The way that the year-end conversation feels different — not because you are lobbying for yourself, but because the people in the room already know what you have done and why it matters, because you have been building that understanding throughout the year rather than trying to construct it in a single conversation.

That is not politics any more. That is the career. The full version of it. The version that the technically excellent banker who neglected the relational work never quite gets to.

If You Do Not Like It, This Career May Not Be for You

I want to say this directly, because the softer version of it does not serve you.

If you have read this article and your response is sustained resistance — if the requirement to invest in internal relationships, to be visible to institutional leadership, to manage the political dynamics of a large organisation, to do the things that do not feel natural in service of the career you say you want — feels fundamentally incompatible with who you are and what you value, then investment banking at senior levels may not be the right environment for you.

This is not a failure. It is clarity.

There are careers that reward pure technical excellence with less requirement for the relational and political work that Wall Street demands. There are environments where the internal dynamics are less consequential, where the path is more directly from capability to outcome, where the work of managing relationships is less central to the results. If that environment is a better fit, the courage to recognise it and move toward it is worth more than the persistence in an environment that is a fundamental mismatch.

But if what you want is the senior banking career — the franchise, the influence, the platform, the commercial impact that MD level on Wall Street makes possible — then the political work is not optional. It is the price of admission to the level where those things are available. And that price, paid consistently over years, produces a return that makes it worth every moment of discomfort, every conversation that did not feel natural, every investment that seemed to have no immediate return.

You cannot run from it. You have to run toward it.

The people who are building the most significant careers on Wall Street right now are not necessarily the most technically brilliant people in their institutions. They are the people who understood, earlier than their peers, that the game was always about relationships — and who started building those relationships before they needed them, in the way that all serious investors build positions before the market moves.

The Work That Changes This

I work with VPs, EDs, and MDs in investment banking in New York and London who are navigating the internal political landscape of major institutions — some of them for the first time with genuine deliberateness, some of them rebuilding after a regime change, some of them recognising that the career they have built technically is not translating into the institutional standing it warrants.

The work is not about teaching you to be someone you are not. It is about helping you understand the game you are already in clearly enough to play it in a way that is both effective and consistent with your integrity. The political fluency I am describing is not manipulation. It is not the cynical accumulation of relationships for purely instrumental purposes. It is the genuine investment in the institutional and human dynamics that make the career possible at the level you are operating at. Done with honesty and with genuine interest in the people you are building with, it is not uncomfortable. It is the most human part of the work.

My background — professional tennis, investment banking, venture capital, the full arc of building and losing and building again — means I understand both the performance psychology and the specific institutional dynamics of the finance environment. I know what it costs to neglect the relational work. I also know what it produces when it is done well.

The consultation is direct and confidential. One conversation about your specific situation — no commitment, no package, no sales process. You leave with clarity whether we work together or not. Sessions are held in person at 67 Pall Mall in London or via Zoom for clients in New York and globally.

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