A senior colleague has told me more than once that he wishes he knew what Citi teaches its MDs in “MD school.” Because they all become a$$holes once they get the title.
I was skeptical. I don’t think character changes that much when someone gets promoted — I think what changes is that they stop having to conceal it.
And if someone has to bully people to get their title respected, it’s a confession that they have no authority at all. Real leadership earns credibility on the ground; you don’t have to intimidate people into deferring to you if they already do. Needing to bully to assert the title is a pretty reliable sign someone doesn’t belong in the seat.
But the more I watch, the more I think he’s onto something adjacent to that, even if “MD school” is the wrong frame. Citi is saturated with incompetence at the MD level in a way that’s hard to explain as bad luck. It’s a hiring and promotion pattern, and the company is at least as consistent about protecting it as it is about anything else.
I do think they are taught — through what gets rewarded, modeled, and quietly ignored. MDs learn to avoid a paper trail of accountability. They learn not to resolve personnel issues themselves — that’s what HR is for. Because if MDs are regarded as company assets, any dissenting voice about them or their record becomes a risk. And risk gets contained, not addressed.
A friend spent 15 years there before she resigned. For a long stretch of that, she was harassed by a manager everyone above her already knew was toxic. She documented everything — extensively. HR’s conclusion was that this was just “the team’s culture” and that she should get used to it or leave. She left. A year later, HR called her. Asked if she wanted to come back. The manager had finally been fired — after enough other people complained that the pattern became undeniable.
No acknowledgment that her complaint, on its own, should have been enough. No compensation for the year of income, the job search, the toll it took on her health. Just: come back, as if nothing happened.
That’s the pattern, and it’s worse than “MDs are trained to be jerks.” It’s that the institution doesn’t move until the damage is impossible to spin — and even then, it doesn’t make anyone whole. It just quietly reopens the door and expects gratitude. My friend didn’t take the job of course.
Documentation matters even when nobody acts on it in the moment. It’s what eventually ends someone’s run. But nobody should have to leave a 15-year career and wait a year for the system to catch up to what they already knew.
Not much has changed since then. It’s the same old Citi.