Making MD — The Anticlimactic Arrival — Why the Promotion You Worked a Decade For Feels Nothing Like You Expected

You got the call. The one you have been working toward for the better part of a decade. Managing Director.

And then — nothing. Or worse than nothing.

Not the relief you expected. Not the satisfaction. Not the sense of arrival that all those years of grinding were supposed to produce. What arrived instead was a quiet, unsettling anxiety that you did not have a name for and that you were absolutely certain you were not supposed to be feeling. Because you made it. You are there. This is the destination. And the destination feels nothing like what the journey suggested it would.

This is the anticlimactic arrival. And it is one of the most common, least discussed experiences in investment banking.

I work with a significant number of newly promoted MDs — people who have just received the promotion they have been working toward for years, sometimes for more than a decade, and who find themselves, in the weeks and months that follow, more anxious than they were before. More uncertain. More exposed. Carrying a weight that is qualitatively different from anything they carried on the way up, and without the roadmap that the journey up always provided.

If this is where you are, I want to say something clearly: this is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is not evidence that you do not deserve the promotion. It is not a warning that you are about to fail. It is the predictable psychological experience of someone who has just stepped into a fundamentally different kind of role — one where the rules have changed, the exposure has increased, and the identity that carried you here needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

The question is not whether you feel this. The question is what you do with it.

The Destination That Keeps Moving

For most of the journey to MD, the goal is clear. It is the next level. The next promotion. The next milestone. The career has a structure — analyst, associate, VP, Director, ED, MD — and that structure provides orientation. You know where you are. You know where you are going. You know, broadly, what success looks like at each stage and what you need to do to move to the next one.

This structure is, in a strange way, a comfort. Even when the work is brutal, even when the hours are unsustainable, even when the sacrifice is real and the recognition is slow in coming — the structure gives you something to orient toward. The drive has a direction. The ambition has a target. And the target, however distant it sometimes feels, is always there.

And then you reach it. And the structure that provided the orientation is suddenly gone. There is no next level in the same sense. There is no promotion waiting on the other side of the next two years of performance. There is no clear, defined milestone that you can orient toward in the way you have oriented toward milestones your entire career.

What there is instead is the P&L. Your P&L. The number that resets every year. The number that grows in expectation with every year that passes. The number that is, in a very direct sense, the measure of whether you are doing the job — not the job of being an MD in general, but the job of being this MD, at this firm, in this market, with this franchise.

The P&L is a different kind of accountability from anything you have experienced before. It is not the accountability of delivering good work on a deal someone else originated. It is not the accountability of supporting a senior banker's franchise. It is your franchise. Your relationships. Your origination. Your judgment about which deals to pursue and which to pass on, which clients to invest in and which to let go, which bets to make and which to avoid.

And the exposure that comes with that accountability is real. You are no longer operating under the cover of a more senior person's judgment. The decisions are yours. The consequences are yours. The year is yours to build — or to lose.

Now You Have to Prove You Deserve It

There is a specific anxiety that arrives with the MD promotion that is worth naming precisely, because it is different from the imposter syndrome that most bankers carry at some level throughout their careers.

It is not the fear that you do not belong here. It is the fear that you have been given something you now have to earn — that the promotion was a bet the institution made on you, and that the next few years are the period in which you either justify the bet or fail to.

This is not irrational. It is an accurate description of what the MD promotion actually is. The institution has made a significant investment in your advancement. The expectation is that you will generate the returns that justify it. And the first year or two as an MD is the period in which that expectation is most acute — where the scrutiny is highest, where the margin for a slow start is smallest, where the pressure to demonstrate that the promotion was deserved is most intense.

The anxiety of this period is the anxiety of someone who has been given a new kind of exposure and who has not yet built the track record that would make that exposure feel manageable. The VP who was performing well had the protection of a more senior banker's franchise. The new MD does not have that protection. They are out in the open. And being out in the open, before you have established your own franchise, before your own track record as an MD has accumulated, before the relationships that will sustain the P&L have been deepened and expanded — that exposure is genuinely uncomfortable.

What makes it more difficult is the culture's expectation that you should not feel it. You made MD. You are supposed to have it together. The people below you need to believe that you do. The clients need to feel that you do. The institution needs to project that you do. And so the anxiety — which is real, which is normal, which is the predictable experience of someone who has just stepped into a fundamentally more exposed position — goes underground. It has nowhere to go. And the pressure of carrying it alone, in a role that requires the performance of confidence and certainty, is significant.

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The P&L That Resets Every Year

One of the most psychologically demanding aspects of the MD role — and one that is rarely discussed honestly — is the annual reset of the P&L.

When you were a VP or a Director, your performance was evaluated over time. The good year could offset the difficult one. The track record accumulated. The reputation built. There was a degree of continuity in how you were assessed — a sense that the institution was evaluating the whole picture, not just the most recent quarter.

As an MD, the P&L resets every year. January 1st, the number goes back to zero. Whatever you did last year — however strong the year was, however many deals you closed, however much you built the franchise — it is the baseline, not the cushion. The expectation for this year is at least as high as last year. Often higher. The strong year raises the bar. The exceptional year raises it further.

This is a specific kind of pressure that has no real equivalent in the earlier stages of the career. It is the pressure of a system where the floor keeps rising — where every year of strong performance increases the expectation for the next one, and where the year that does not meet the elevated expectation is experienced not as a regression to the mean but as a failure to sustain.

The MD who has had two strong years and then a difficult third year is not being evaluated against the baseline of their pre-MD performance. They are being evaluated against the elevated expectation that their strong years created. And the gap between that expectation and the difficult year's reality is experienced — by the institution, by the MD themselves — as a significant shortfall, even if the absolute performance would have been considered excellent at an earlier stage of the career.

This is the treadmill of the MD role. And managing the psychology of it — the ability to sustain performance across the full cycle, to not be destabilised by the difficult year, to maintain the long-term perspective when the short-term pressure is acute — is one of the most important capabilities a new MD needs to develop.

The Identity That Needs to Be Rebuilt

Here is something that is almost never discussed in the context of the MD promotion, and that I think is one of the most important things to understand about this moment.

The identity that carried you here — the identity of the person who is working toward MD, who is proving themselves, who is building toward the destination — that identity is no longer accurate. You are MD. The journey is over. And the identity that was organised around the journey needs to be rebuilt around something else.

This sounds straightforward. It is not.

The identity of the person who is working toward something is a powerful and sustaining identity. It provides direction, motivation, and a clear sense of what success looks like. It organises the energy and the effort. It gives the sacrifice a purpose. And it has been your identity, in one form or another, for the better part of a decade.

The identity of the person who has arrived — who is now building a long-term career at the top rather than climbing toward it — is a different identity entirely. It requires a different relationship with the work, a different source of motivation, a different definition of success. It requires the shift from the question how do I get there? to the question who do I want to be here, and for how long?

This is not a question that the journey up prepares you to answer. The journey up is about performance — about demonstrating capability, delivering results, building the track record that justifies the next promotion. The question of identity — of who you are beyond the title, of what you are building and why, of what you want the next twenty years to look like — is a question that the structure of the career actively defers. There is always a more immediate goal. There is always a more pressing performance question. The identity question can wait.

At MD, it can no longer wait. Because the identity that was organised around the journey is no longer fit for purpose. And without a new identity to replace it — without a clear sense of who you are as an MD, not just what you do — the anxiety of the anticlimactic arrival has nothing to anchor itself to.

The Athlete Who Made It Earlier Than Expected

In professional sport, there is a specific experience that maps closely onto the anticlimactic arrival of the new MD. It is the experience of the athlete who reaches the top earlier than expected — who breaks into the top ten, or wins their first major, or makes the national team — before they have fully developed the psychological infrastructure to sustain the position.

The talent got them there. The talent was always going to get them there. But the talent, on its own, is not sufficient to stay there. Staying there requires something different — a different relationship with the pressure, a different source of motivation, a different ability to manage the scrutiny and the expectation and the specific anxiety of being the person who has to defend a position rather than the person who is trying to reach one.

Some athletes make this transition smoothly. Others struggle with it in ways that their talent and their track record gave no indication of. The player who was unstoppable on the way up and who, once they arrived, found that the arrival had changed the psychological landscape of the competition in ways they were not prepared for. Who had been motivated, for their entire career, by the goal of reaching the top — and who found, when they arrived, that the goal had been replaced by a target, and that being a target felt nothing like being a contender.

The anxiety of the new MD is structurally similar. You have been the person working toward the destination. Now you are the destination. The people below you are working toward where you are. The institution has invested in your success. The clients have a relationship with the title as much as with the person. And the pressure of being the person who has to justify all of that — the investment, the relationship, the expectation — is qualitatively different from the pressure of being the person who was trying to earn it.

When Others Are Having a Great Year and You Are Not

One of the most specific and least discussed challenges of the early MD years is the experience of watching peers have strong years while you are navigating a difficult one.

This is going to happen. Not every year will be strong. The market will not always cooperate. The deals that were in the pipeline will not all close on the timeline you expected. The client relationship that was supposed to anchor the year will move in a direction you did not anticipate. The year that looked strong in January will look different by September.

And when that happens — when your year is difficult and the MD in the office next to yours is having their best year — the internal experience is specific and significant. It is not just the professional disappointment of a difficult year. It is the comparison. The question of whether the difficult year is evidence of something — about your capability, your judgment, your fitness for the role. The awareness that the institution is making the same comparison you are making. The fear that the difficult year is the beginning of a narrative rather than an isolated data point.

The comparison is natural. It is also, if it is not managed, one of the most reliable ways to undermine your own performance. Because the banker who is spending significant cognitive and emotional energy on the comparison — on the gap between their year and their peer's year — is not spending that energy on the work that would actually improve their year.

The athlete parallel is instructive here. The tennis player who is ranked 30th and is watching the player ranked 15th have a strong season — the one who is spending their energy on the comparison is not spending it on the work that would close the gap. The one who is focused on their own game, their own development, their own trajectory — that is the one who closes the gap.

Your career is not a comparison. It is a trajectory. And the question that matters is not how this year compares to your peer's year. It is whether you are building the franchise, the relationships, and the capabilities that will sustain a long career at the top.

When You Are Having a Great Year and Others Are Not

The other side of this is equally important, and equally rarely discussed.

The year when you are performing well and the MDs around you are not is not a straightforward experience. It should be. By the logic of competition and performance, a strong year relative to peers should feel good. And it does, partly. But it also produces a specific discomfort that the culture of investment banking does not give you much language for.

The discomfort of being visible. Of being the one whose year is going well when others are not. Of the awareness that the strong year raises the expectation for next year in a way that the difficult year does not. Of the specific anxiety of having something to lose — of having built something that can now be lost, in a way that the person who has not yet built it cannot fully understand.

And sometimes — more often than is acknowledged — the strong year produces a form of self-sabotage. The banker who, when the year is going exceptionally well, starts to find reasons to slow down. Who becomes more cautious, more conservative, more reluctant to push the advantage. Who, at the moment when the momentum is strongest, pulls back — not consciously, not deliberately, but as the expression of a subconscious calculation that the higher you go, the further there is to fall.

This is the fear of success in its most specific form. And it is most acute, in my experience, in the early MD years — when the exposure is new, when the identity is still being rebuilt, when the anxiety of the position has not yet been metabolised into the confidence of someone who has been performing at this level for long enough to trust themselves in it.

Recognising this pattern — seeing it clearly, naming it honestly — is the first step to not being governed by it.

Showing Up Consistently When It Only Gets Harder

One of the things I tell newly promoted MDs — and that I think is important to say clearly — is this: it will get harder before it gets easier.

Not because the role is designed to be punishing. But because the first years as an MD are the years in which you are building the franchise, the relationships, and the track record that will eventually make the role feel sustainable. You are building from a position of exposure, without the cushion of an established franchise, without the depth of client relationships that take years to develop, without the track record as an MD that would give the institution and the clients and yourself the confidence that comes from sustained performance.

The building is hard. It requires showing up consistently — not just in the strong moments, but in the difficult ones. Not just when the deals are flowing, but when the pipeline is thin and the year is uncertain and the comparison with peers is uncomfortable. The consistency of showing up — of doing the work, building the relationships, making the calls, having the conversations — in the difficult periods is what builds the franchise that makes the strong periods possible.

The athlete who makes it to the top and stays there is not the one who performs brilliantly in the easy matches. It is the one who shows up in the difficult ones — who finds a way when the conditions are against them, who maintains the discipline and the focus and the commitment to the process when the results are not yet reflecting the effort. The results follow the process. But the process has to come first, and it has to be sustained through the periods when the results are not yet there.

Building a System That Is Actually Sustainable

One of the most important things a new MD can do — and one of the things that is most consistently neglected in the urgency of the early years — is to build a system for the role that is sustainable over the long term.

The MD role, if it is approached the way the VP role was approached — with the same hours, the same intensity, the same willingness to sacrifice everything else in service of the work — will not be sustainable over the decade or two that a long MD career requires. The body and the mind that could absorb that approach in the analyst and associate years cannot absorb it indefinitely. The relationships that were deferred in service of the career will not wait indefinitely. The health that was managed around the work will eventually present the bill.

The sustainable system is one that is designed for the long term from the beginning. Not a system that sacrifices performance — the performance has to be there. But a system that is built around the recognition that the career is a marathon, not a sprint, and that the decisions you make about how you spend your energy in year one as an MD are decisions about the career you will have in year fifteen.

This means being deliberate about the deals you pursue and the ones you pass on — not just on the basis of the immediate revenue opportunity, but on the basis of whether the deal is the right use of your time and energy given the broader picture of what you are trying to build. It means being deliberate about the client relationships you invest in — not just the ones that are generating revenue now, but the ones that will generate it over the next decade. It means protecting the recovery time that allows you to perform at the level the role requires — not as a luxury, but as a professional necessity.

The Imposter Syndrome That Does Not Go Away

I want to address something directly, because it is one of the most consistent experiences I hear from newly promoted MDs and one of the most important to name honestly.

The imposter syndrome does not go away when you make MD.

This surprises people. The assumption — the hope, really — is that the promotion will resolve the doubt. That the institution's decision to promote you will be the external validation that finally quiets the internal voice that has been questioning whether you belong here. That making MD will feel like proof.

It does not work that way. The imposter syndrome is not a response to the absence of evidence that you belong. It is a response to the exposure of the position — to the awareness that the stakes are higher, the scrutiny is greater, and the margin for error is smaller. And the MD promotion increases all of those things. Which means, for many people, it increases the imposter syndrome rather than resolving it.

The newly promoted MD who is sitting with the imposter syndrome is not experiencing a failure of confidence. They are experiencing the predictable psychological response to a significant increase in exposure. The question is not how to eliminate the feeling — the feeling is not the problem. The question is how to not be governed by it. How to make the decisions the role requires, take the risks the role requires, show up in the way the role requires — while the imposter syndrome is running in the background.

The athletes who manage this well are not the ones who never feel it. They are the ones who have developed the ability to act in the presence of it — to step onto the court, or onto the floor, or into the room, with the doubt present and not let the doubt determine the outcome. The doubt is information. It is not instruction.

The Long Career at the Top

The question I want to end with is the one that I think matters most for the newly promoted MD, and that the urgency of the early years makes it very easy to defer.

What does a long career at the top actually look like? Not the first year. Not the first deal cycle. The career. The decade or two of sustained performance at the MD level that represents the full realisation of what the journey up was building toward.

Because that career — the long one, the one that is still going strong in year fifteen — is not built the way the first year is built. It is not built on the urgency and the intensity and the willingness to sacrifice everything that the early years require. It is built on something more durable: the franchise that has been developed over time, the client relationships that have deepened through cycles, the institutional presence that comes from sustained performance, the reputation that has been built through the difficult moments as well as the strong ones.

And it is built on the identity of someone who has made the shift — from the person who was working toward MD to the person who is building a career as an MD. From the question of whether they deserve the promotion to the question of what they want to build with it. From the anxiety of the anticlimactic arrival to the clarity of someone who has metabolised the exposure and found their footing in the role.

That shift does not happen automatically. It requires work — the deliberate, often uncomfortable work of rebuilding an identity that the journey up no longer fits. It requires the honest conversation about what the anxiety of the arrival is actually about and what it actually requires. It requires the support structure — the trusted circle, the coach, the honest feedback — that the environment at the top makes very difficult to find.

But it is possible. And the bankers who build the long career at the top — who are still performing with energy and purpose and genuine engagement in year fifteen — are the ones who did this work. Who did not defer the identity question. Who did not try to manage the anxiety of the arrival alone. Who built the system that was sustainable from the beginning rather than waiting for the burnout to force the redesign.

The Work That Changes This

I work with newly promoted MDs — and with senior bankers who are navigating the specific challenges of sustaining a long career at the top — in New York and London.

The work starts where you are. If you are in the anticlimactic arrival — if the promotion has landed and the anxiety has arrived and you do not yet have the language for what you are experiencing — the first step is naming it clearly. Understanding what the anxiety is actually about. Separating the imposter syndrome from the genuine challenges of the new role. Building the clarity that the urgency of the early years makes very difficult to find alone.

From there, we work on the identity — on the shift from the person who was working toward MD to the person who is building a career as one. On the source of motivation that will sustain the work over the long term, not just through the first deal cycle. On the system that is designed for the marathon rather than the sprint.

My background — professional tennis at the WTA level, investment banking, venture capital — means I understand the specific experience of arriving at a destination you have worked toward for years and finding that the arrival is the beginning of a different kind of challenge, not the end of the difficulty. I have navigated that experience in multiple domains. And I know what becomes available when you stop trying to manage it alone.

The consultation is direct and confidential. One conversation — 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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