Company: J-P-Morgan
Date: 2020-02-16
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former

Branch Manager to a CPC-High Potential Branch.
Pros: Decent vacation. Okay online training
Cons: This is a comment made by a Market Director (MD) of Wealth, “Branch Managers are a dime a dozen, we don’t need them, we need good bankers”. Prepare to feel extremely undervalued. Your bankers will be the rockstars and will get all the credit by almost doing the bare minimum. Too many times I heard how perceptions are made early on by leadership and if you are not perfect you will build a bad image to your regional director which kind of destroys any future opportunities, unless you make your life your job and prove to them how you are their property. You are expendable, remember that.  As managers, you will spend 70-80% of your time as a teller or a banker, you will hardly do any managerial tasks like coaching, observations or huddles, but are still expected to do those and when you are not doing them you better gave a good excuse, and when you explain your good excuse (low staffing, technical problems), it will not matter to them and will still label you as incapable. It seems like there is some high level executive, consultant or analyst that fears their job is becoming irrelevant or is just bored, so they create new initiatives/programs/titles on a weekly or monthly basis and expect you to follow them, even though you’re still trying to roll last weeks roll-out. Expect to be extremely overwhelmed. They expect to be this cool advanced bank but fail to recognize that they are too BIG and can’t do everything that a smaller bank can do. They expect their employees to be these creative geniuses but can’t define which kind or what they should do to be these geniuses, example: this one Branch Manager provided incredible results and was moved to a flagship branch but when a high-level executive visited the branch and got to meet her for 1 hour, she said she was not “innovative” but when asked to explain on that she couldn’t even define. There is ZERO accountability for bankers, associate bankers or lead associate operations when it comes to controls, everything will be your fault, even if you had no relation to the issue, or you took appropriate actions or you coached to the issue, you will still be blamed. There’s a popular saying, “you don’t become a manager for the salary”, that’s because you’re paid on the low end. Your bankers will make more than you, especially the PCB. Promotions are partly based on your likeness, the perception you had on others or if you pissed one off. Everyone talks smack about each other, even your MD will talk about you and your employees to other managers (peers) and other MDs, it’s like high school. MDs have zero confidence on your ability to lead the profit of your branch. They’ll tell you that you have to manage it as your own business and be creative, once you do and report positive results, you will be told to do it the other way and how they want. Technology SUCKS, your ATM will break down,  systems will too, prepare to be embarrassed with clients and to receive bad surveys for that, oh and your MD won’t care for that reason. Staffing is terrible, and this is done on purpose, you will always be short-staffed just not according to a report. You will work 50-60hrs per week, even though they’ll tell you how much work life balance matters. If you are a High Potential branch, you will be part of sessions that are used to report, share and help but are really a pressure cooker of tension meant to intimidate, embarrass, corner and insult. It will be extremely awkward and uncomfortable during these High Potential meetings. They bring clients for money not for the relationship, once they get the client, they move on to the next one. You are running around putting out fires when your bankers are making 80-120k and don’t even care about the success of the branch, this company builds the most selfish individuals. Bad salary for amount of stress. HR recruiting is useless, you are expected to recruit your own people. Face to face training and virtual training are horrible, everything is high level stuff and niceties, no substance or material that will actually help you in your daily activities. You will be put with this training mentor and are supposed to be coached by them, that’s not going to happen, expect to learn everything on your own. You will not be trained on reporting that is necessary for your branch, but you are expected to know all of it by the time you are placed, if you don’t, you will be looked at as a bad investment, therefore, get with your mentor or look for someone to teach that to you, not your MD because she will think you don’t know anything. Everything is perceptions!